How To Measure Event Marketing Success [A Beginner’s Guide]

Have you ever stopped to think about the effectiveness of your marketing efforts? It's a crucial question for any marketer, especially when it comes to events. Events are a powerful tool for gaining exposure and promoting your products and services. But without measuring the results and analyzing the benefits, your marketing efforts are simply a drain on your organization's budget. In this article, we're going to show you how to measure the success of your event marketing, so you can evaluate your return on investment and make informed decisions for future campaigns. Get ready, because we're about to give you the inside scoop on measuring your event's marketing success.

Introduction To Measuring Event Marketing Success

It's incredible how we currently live in an era where customers' preferences change so quickly.

Customers can be in love with a particular trend today and be on an entirely different hype the next day.

With this reality, companies have begun to use various methods in advertising, to make sure they stay relevant throughout different markets.

This includes exploring event marketing as a potential source for new leads.

Recent studies have shown that 93% of large enterprises allot about 57% of their budget to events.

Though many events are now virtual, it's clear that event marketing can be a significant opportunity for businesses of all sizes.

Although events take a huge chunk of marketing expenses, it offers promising and impactful results.

But, how do you measure these results anyway?

Well, this is where the evaluation of event marketing comes into the picture.

Why Should You Measure Your Event Marketing Success?

Was it worth it?

This is probably the first question you would like to answer with every event your organization initiates, explaining why the need to exert efforts into measuring an event's marketing success is essential.

First thing's first.

Evaluating your event marketing success is essential, as it allows you to analyze data from your initiatives which can help you measure the achievements of your future events.

With this, you can gauge the need to either:

• Change your marketing mix
• Reallocate your budget to something else
• Utilize other channels for a more effective marketing campaign

With this, you can guarantee that your organization can see what works and what doesn't.

When looking at the participants or sponsors of your event marketing, evaluating your event can mean:

• Securing better sponsors in the future
• Getting more insights on how to ensure a better return
• Attracting more attendees, exhibitors, or sponsors
• Gaining more support from your company's stakeholders

And lastly, looking at the aspect of your visitors, evaluating your event marketing success can help you identify which were the successful and unsuccessful elements of your event (agenda flow, menu, soundtrack, theme, etc.), allowing you to adjust your event in the future to guarantee the enjoyment of guests.

Here are some of the other reasons why evaluating your event marketing is a MUST:

• It helps you calculate your event's ROI and determine if it was successful or not
• It allows you to defend your budget spendings to key stakeholders
• It enables you to identify the effectiveness of your event
• It shows you the profit you accumulated from the event
• It helps you understand how your attendees received your message

Event management software can help you and your business track your event's data, such as the number of your attendees, engagement, and key performance indicators.

Remember that tracking your event's marketing success, especially its ROI is very crucial as it helps you decide if your event has contributed to achieving your company's goals!

How To Measure Your Event Marketing Success

It would help if you understood that the process of identifying your event's performance must be well planned.

We've created a simple step-by-step guide just for you.

Step 1: Identify The Goals And Objectives Of Your Event Marketing

Before anything else, the very first thing you need to do is to define your marketing goals.

Why so?

Identifying your event marketing objectives will be the basis of measuring success and knowing if you succeeded (or not) at the end of your marketing launch.

In this step, you must map out what you want to achieve with your event marketing strategy by defining your targets.

At this stage, clearly defining your goal should be your top priority.

One way to help you and your organization run a successful event evaluation is by following the SMART acronym.

Here's what the acronym stands for:

• Specific: What do you want to achieve?
• Measurable: What is the target of your event? How will you measure it?
• Achievable: Will your plan help you achieve your goal?
• Relevant: What will contribute to the success of your organization?
• Timeline: What are the start date and the end date for achieving your organization's goals?

Using this concept will give you a better direction when evaluating your event marketing goals.

Step 2: Decide On Your General Marketing Strategy

When in the middle of event marketing, you should sort out the possible strategies you want to take to increase the awareness and sales of your product or service.

Here are some questions to consider:

• What will your strategy be?
• Are you going to launch a contest?
• Are you going to put out raffles?
• What's the best way for you to generate leads and capture the interests of your target participants?

Having a clear marketing strategy will help you and your organization stay on the right path to achieving your marketing goals.

Step 3: Understand Your Qualitative And Quantitative Measures

When measuring your event success, there are two data types you can look into:

• Your qualitative data: the result of your event from the perception of your attendees, brand position, and awareness.
• Your quantitative data: the outcome of your event in numbers such as your number of event registrations, date and time of your email blasts, times of the day where your enrollment peaked.

With these two types of data, you set better metrics to track the commencement of your event marketing.

💡 Pro Tip: Take note that you should track as much information as possible, even before the beginning of your marketing campaign, so you have the necessary data points to analyze your event.

Common Metrics You Must Consider

With event marketing, there are various categories of data you need to consider to help you measure the success of your event, such as:

• Number of your online registrations that participated in your event
• Number of onsite registrations
• Reach of your event on social media
• Social media engagement
• Mentions in online media
• Website visits

Step 4: Identify Your Key Performance Indicator To Measure Your Event's Success

Your KPI will help control your event's progress, as it contains the specific metrics and benchmarks you will refer to when operating your event.

Key performance indicators will tell you what to measure during your event to determine if your efforts were successful.

Here are some of the standard success metrics for your event:

Financial and sales KPI:

Used to identify your sales profits. Using this is an excellent opportunity to boost your organization's sales. Some indicators for this KPI would be your:

• Event ROI
• Number of new clients/attendees
• Number of generated leads

Marketing KPI:

These are used to identify your marketing goals for your organization. While this may seem less substantive, there are many ways for you to measure your marketing KPI through numbers:

• Increase in website traffic
• Social media mentions
• Relevance of your audience with your target group

Step 5: Choose The RIGHT Tools To Help You Measure Your Marketing Event

Considering that you've set your Key Performance Indicators to help you gain insight on things you need to measure for your event marketing, you will also need to think about how you're going to measure them.

This is where choosing the right measuring tools and instruments comes into the picture.

Here are some of the simple ways you can measure the data from your event marketing:

• Counting the number of your generated leads and attendance
• Surveys (through emails or event apps)
• Content or web analysis

Step 6: Pay Attention To The Way You Present Your Data

One thing you shouldn't take for granted when measuring your event marketing success is the way you present your data.

Now that you finally have the essential aspects of your event all ready to be measured and evaluated, it's wise to sort your data in a clean and orderly manner. It will be much easier to analyze all the information you have gathered this way.

Always remember that the data you've gathered isn't only for you. Securing a clear and orderly event marketing report will also help other members of the organization see your strategy's results.

💡 Pro Tip: When preparing your report, highlight the most critical areas of your event to see the bigger picture of the results easily. No one wants to go searching for key findings.

Having a well-thought process of measuring your event marketing success is essential for determining if your marketing efforts have achieved their full potential.

Beyond just curating detailed approaches and strategies, your end goal is to back your event marketing results with solid data to show that your company's efforts were all worth it in the end and have helped you achieve your business goals.

Step 7: Get Help Where You Need It Most

If this all seems foreign to your organization, but you value the importance of measuring the success of your efforts, don't worry. At gardenpatch, we help companies track their sales and marketing efforts with little to no friction. We're happy to guide you through the process or do it all for you if you prefer. So reach out and let us know about your next big event. We'd love to help you solidify a great strategy to measure your results. Talk to one of our growth advisors, today!

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