If your organization is investing in events, and your role is dedicated to it, it’s crucial to prove that these programs are actually working and affecting the bottom line of the business. After all, how do you get buy-in to expand your event program? Receive more budget? Hire more resources? Get a promotion???
Unfortunately, when it comes to measuring the true impact of events, marketers are struggling. While 93% of global companies place a high priority on their event programs, 55% of enterprise marketers admit they don’t know how to calculate the ROI of an event.
You’re not alone and you’re not to blame (phew!). Until recently, event measurement was almost impossible without the appropriate tools to track event programs from end to end (processes were manual and technologies were siloed).
Today, with the maturation and advancement of event technology, it’s easier than ever to track, measure, and prove the impact of your events on the bottom line (whoo!). In this chapter, we’ll share common event ROI measurements and processes so you can figure out what’s best for your business.
Are you a B2B event marketer? We have a meaty e-book that will walk you through a holistic process of measuring the ROI and proving the business value of your entire events program.
In the simplest (and we mean, simplest) terms, ROI (Return on Investment) is a simple formula:
value of (business won - amount spent) / amount spent
But here’s the thing: every organization looks at event success differently. It’s more crucial to report on the impact that matters and focus on keeping your ROI calculations as consistent and relevant to expected outcomes as possible (rather than just following formulas).
Before you start measuring, the first step is alignment and technology (we go into more detail on ROI prep here). Follow these 5 important steps:
You can’t report on metrics if your data isn’t in the right place. Make sure you’re properly capturing data and syncing it with your systems of record (CRM, marketing automation platform, etc.). We go over this in detail in Chapter 9.
To accurately measure any revenue-driven metrics, you need to know how the rest of your company is measuring success (as well as know what metrics are important to your exec team or board).
ROI calculations become useless when the “I” isn’t consistent. Ensure your costs are consistent across events (i.e. you don’t want one event to include travel costs but another event to exclude it).
Determine a standard way to measure the investment and ROI. Agree on the approach that works for your business and is aligned with your company goals and sales leadership team.
Bonus step for B2B marketers (or B2C companies with sales teams): We mention the Sales team a lot, so you know it’s important. Get their help on capturing, collecting, and cleaning up event data.
While you can throw any type of event you want, you should know that each event type can provide different results (remember this in Chapter 1?). For example, sponsored events usually drive net-new names, while hosted events usually accelerate sales cycles.
We’ve put together this nifty chart to help you understand which event types drive which goals. Download it now.
Also: certain event types work best for certain industries. See the most popular event types for finance, tech, retail, and more.
As marketers, if we could, we’d track every single movement and action across the customer journey until purchase so we can calculate the ROI of our efforts (does that sound creepy? #marketing).
Since that’s pretty much impossible, we do our best to measure ROI by using attribution models. This allows us to determine how events (and the various activities, actions, and touchpoints associated with events) impacted a goal, such as driving opportunities and revenue.
While there are a lot of different attribution models you can use, it’s more important to figure out which attribution model works best for your event program, your event goals, and your marketing team’s overall approach to attribution.
Best for event types that acquire net-new leads (sponsorships, partner events) or for very short sales cycles.
Remember to not handle event measurement and attribution in a silo. Instead, approach it as you would any other marketing measurement that takes into account a holistic view of the sales cycle. If you’re going to measure events differently, know why and be ready to explain the reason.
Before you choose an attribution model, consider the length of your sales cycle. Since B2B companies tend to have longer sales cycles, more touchpoints, and several contacts at one account, it makes more sense for B2B companies to use multi-touch attribution.
For B2C companies (unless your company has a sales team), a single-touch attribution model should suffice.
What’s great about KPIs or metrics is that you can use them to predict event success, which is especially important if you have extra long sales cycles or your event hasn’t even happened yet.
But be extra careful: while KPIs or metrics can be indicators of event success, each one on its own does not tell the full ROI story. For example: 🚗 If ROI is a car, KPIs and metrics are its parts. Each part by itself, doesn’t make a car, but it can give you a small idea of what the car is going to look like.
We’ve listed out some of the top KPIs and metrics we’ve seen our top customers track.
Today, most companies are focusing on top-of-funnel event metrics. Here are the top 5 metrics tracked, according to 739 global companies:
However, for those who have adopted event technology, they've reported being able to measure further down the sales funnel, tracking things like sales leads, sales pipeline, prospects moved down the funnel, and customer loyalty. Which means = business metrics that C-suite will care about = get yourself a raise.
With more money going into events, the pressure is on to prove your impact. Get the report that digs into why event ROI is the biggest challenge for enterprise brands.
We make measuring and maximizing event ROI easier. Measure your events with real-time custom data dashboards in Splash or in your existing systems.
Using the bi-directional Salesforce integration and Splash's ROI Dashboard, GumGum is able to track event performance and investment, allowing them to prove the value of their events program and ultimately, make smarter business decisions on events. See their story.
One of our favorite KPIs is the Opportunity in the Room. Find out how to leverage and measure it (and rally your team around it!).
