The whole point of organizing an event is to get people to attend your event, have a good time, connect with you on a face-to-face platform and leave you with a bunch of new leads for your further marketing funnels. But, how about the Return on Investment (ROI) of your event? We know how to calculate the ROI for businesses, but what about an event? Here are a few ways that you can use to measure your event ROI, depending on the type and goals of your events.
☑ #1 Event Surveys
Of course, the most simple way to keep track of your leads and how your attendees felt about your event is to organize a survey, usually a hardcopy form that they can fill out after your event. But, with all these technological advancements in tracking event-related data, you can even create a simple event form on platforms like Google Forms and many other form building sites like it.
Once you have your surveys, you can crack down on the details to see how many of your attendees were satisfied with the event and where are the areas to improve. The quality of their response will also tell you which of them are really interested in your event niche and could possibly be a lead for your next event.
☑ #2 Targeted Messaging
You can begin targeting what kind of messaging it is that you send to your event attendees, based on the booths or areas that they gravitate to. This can be quite simply done with the help of RFID technology or a simple beacon. Aside from that, you can also get them to sign up for a personal account with your event company during the guest attendance, which can be easily set up on your website or a third-party platform.
All these methods will give you an open communication channel where you can send personalized and targeted marketing materials to your attendees. If they sign up for an account with you, even better. You’ll have a history of their behavior towards your events and marketing materials and this information will help you to better tailor to their needs and pinpoint where funds should be channeled or cut back, thus increasing your ROI significantly.
☑ #3 Social Listening
Of course, in this day and age, everything ends up on the Internet and social media channels. The same applies to your event. So, why not take advantage of it. Create event specific hashtags and track them closely on all of your social media channels. Set Google Alerts on your event keywords and track them as well.
You can usually use a third-party app or platform that is specializes in social listening. This way, you’ll get to view the actual content related to your event, and be able to assess the importance, the main topic as well as the sentiment that it presents towards your event.
☑ #4 Ticket Sales
And if you think ROI, most commonly ROI is measured to see if the amount of money spent actually brings a feasible return, relative to the amount spent.
Here’s a general formula on how to calculate ROI :
(Sales Growth – Marketing Cost) / Marketing Cost = ROI
The sales growth for an event is primarily generated by ticket sales, and any merchandise sales, if attributable. Subtract that from the total marketing cost of your entire event and divide the sum again by the marketing cost. That will be your basic ROI. Your ROI will then be able to tell you which types of your events are received well by your target audience and which ones you’ll have to better in order to get better sales and higher attendance.
☑ #5 Use an Integrated Platform
Most of the time, different ROI parameters are managed on separate platforms and as an event manager, it can be quite a dizzying feat to collect all the data from various platforms and fit them into each other, like an intricate formula puzzle. And if you need to draw up a Profit and Loss statement, you can be sure that it will take you loads of effort and time, just for a single sheet of a basic report for your event.
To save you the trouble, you can look for lots of third party event management software, for example like Dryfta, whereby all your data will be compiled into a single, easy-to-use platform. Not only that, you can both access segmented data, based on the criteria that you require and also combine different segments of data in order to give you a bigger picture of how everything looks like overall. The best part is that you can easily spit out a Profit and Loss report from such platforms, without having to get down to the numbers nitty-gritty yourself.
ROI is something that every event manager should keep a keen eye on. It is able to tell you a lot about how efficient spending is for your event as well as how much you are making, relative to your total spend. Aside from that, measuring ROI in the event business also tells you a lot about how your attendees perceive your event and how much of an impact it’s made on them, so much so they may have potential to be future lead magnets for you other events. Have fun determining your event ROI the right way!
