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How do you judge the success of your marketing events? Irregardless of whether it’s a trade show, dinner, or workshop, which metrics can marketers use to understand how their events contributed to their overall marketing goals, and how they can optimize those events in the future?
In the following post, we’ll cover the pre, during and post-event metrics no Event Marketer’s dashboard should be without:
Why wait for the big event to start building up hype and reeling in leads? Pre-event marketing campaigns have the potential to transmit your message weeks or even months before the event even takes place, and have the ability to cause anticipation or encourage future engagement.
Imagine the case where you’ll be one of three hundred vendors at an upcoming tradeshow. Wouldn’t you rather spark interest prior to the event to attract the attendees’ attention or would you rather take your chances on the day of? Not only will intrigued attendees recognize you at the event, but they’ll be more likely to engage in a meaningful conversation with you.
If you’re not just sponsoring an existing event, but planning your own company event from zero, then pre-event campaigns will be crucial to build awareness, spread your desired message, and attract registration from the right audience.
Awareness: measure total reach across your marketing channels to see whether you are getting in front of the right audience, and reaching sufficient individuals to turn your event into a success. Go one step further to determine which of your multi-channel campaigns is reaching the most qualified prospects so that you can act on your lessons learnt to improve your event lead acquisition.
Click-through Rate (CTR): Don’t forget to invite or announce your presence to your mailing list. Measure the CTR for email announcements to see how many people are interested in joining you or learning more.
Registration Rate: is your landing page successfully converting viewers into registrants? Compare Visits to Registrations to get the overall picture of the Registration Rate. Similarly, if your event is invitation only, compare the number of recipients to those who have positively RSVP’d.
Attendance Rate: Compare the number of registrants to attendees to determine your attendance rate. Be sure to compare the attendance rate for multiple events to determine what factors might affect attendance throughout the year and encourage a higher rate at your next event.
Session Attendance: As a presenter, you’ll certainly want to know how many attendees viewed your presentation, but it is also helpful to compare this number to overall attendance to see how popular your topic was in the grand scheme of things. If you’re organizing the whole event, it is helpful to compare which sessions get the most traffic in order to distribute and plan popular topics for future events.
Booth Visitors: How many attendees engaged with your team at the event? Particularly at trade shows, where you may be one of many, you should take note of how many conversations you’ve had throughout the day as well as the value of those interactions. Not only will good notes help you curate your message following the event, but it will also help you to weed out unqualified leads.
Social Engagement: extend your reach beyond those at the event to share a play-by-play of the day’s happenings. To measure social engagement calculate the total weighted value of social engagements around the events. For tips on creating a custom social engagement rate, see our how-to post.
Attendee Satisfaction: how did event attendees feel about their experience? Craft a short and sweet survey with your objectives in mind in order to tune into attendee sentiment and to get excellent insights into where the event could have been improved.
Qualified Leads (or MQLs): how many of your initial leads fit your Marketing Qualified Lead standards? For example, is there a good product/service fit and do they have sufficient decision-making power to warrant the continuation of conversations?
Cost per lead or qualified lead: Determine the average spend per lead to determine overall investment and provide a benchmark for the success of this event compared to other lead generation initiatives. If you had a previous estimate before the event, compare the values to determine if you met your lead generation goals on budget.
Conversion Rate: How many leads from the event turned into customers? Events can be major investments compared to other channels, so while CPL may be higher than for other initiatives, conversion rates can also be favorable. It is essential to compare the conversion rate from event marketing to that of your day-to-day efforts to understand whether this channel is effective for your company.
Average Sales Price: What was the average sales price per converted customer? How does this compare to the average client value of leads coming through your website or other channels? Do in-person demos and first hand interactions lead to customers purchasing higher valued, or more products?
Total Revenue: how did hosting or sponsoring this event affect your bottom line? This value will be a strong indicator of whether or not your event was successful and if it should be repeated, modified or swapped out in the future.
Event Marketers, we’d love to hear from you! Which metrics do you use to get the most insight into event success?
Sweetspot Marketing Director. Wakeboarder & travel enthusiast. Communication Studies graduate of Texas State University, San Marcos.
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