4 Ways to Evaluate Your Event Marketing Strategy
29 August 2022Data is vital for all forms of marketing since it gives you insights into customer needs and trends that may influence the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. If an individual is interested in attending your event, there’s a huge opportunity to convert them into brand advocates and loyal clients.
You might think that event marketing is an ‘old-school‘ marketing strategy, especially in industries driven by social media. That’s probably because 22% of businesses do not have a framework in place to measure event success.
So, you must have a strategy to evaluate your events to bridge the event impact gap (the gap between event organizers’ desire to offer interactive, and individualized client experiences and their existing ability to deliver them) and design events that give excellent guest interactions as well as incredible commercial results.
Here are 4 ways to evaluate your marketing strategy. However, before that, it is important that you know why event marketing has become so important.
Why is Event Marketing Important?
You need something that draws customers’ attention if you want to make your brand stand out from the competition and get noticed. Investing in a daring campaign that astounds the target audiences is now necessary because social media ads and web advertising are insufficient.
Take the typical shopper into account. Billboards, banners, TV commercials, social media ads, and even Spotify adverts in the middle of their favorite playlist are just a few of the up to 10,000 advertisements people are subjected to every day. It is understandable that the customer scrolls by or doesn’t even see the majority of commercials given the constant barrage they are subjected to. To increase the chances that they see your ads, implement customer referral programs encouraging your loyal customer to recommend their friends and family members.
The best solution for this is event marketing, which is also referred to as experiential marketing because it gives attendees a full brand experience. According to 83% of firms, event marketing has continuously boosted their revenue. People can take a break from their daily lives and focus solely on your business and the brand message you want to transmit by attending branded events.
4 Ways to Evaluate Your Content Marketing Strategy
Here are 4 ways to evaluate your content marketing strategy:
- Evaluate your goals
- Integrate qualitative and quantitative data
- Leverage the benefit of technology
- Assess your performance
- Evaluate your goals
Setting goals is the single most critical stage in evaluating your event approach. Many components of your event strategy will be determined by these goals, such as the KPIs that you will evaluate, the software you will use to organize your event, the location of the event, the advertising plan, and much more. At this stage, you can benefit from strategy consulting to ensure your goals are aligned with your overall business objectives and to maximise the event's success.
The most essential thing to remember is to develop your premise in advance. One approach is to know what the audience wants beforehand.
A job template is a great way to do so. It allows you to easily ask questions you want to be answered about why a person utilizes a service or product. The best thing about it is that you can share it with millions of people all around the world and receive quick results.
You may be producing a large amount of data, such as site analytics, live video interaction, on-demand inquiries, participation statistics, and so on. However, it should all be tied back to your final success metric.
Focusing on one ultimate success statistic might assist you in cutting through the data clutter. All data collected must be projected against the performance metric to determine whether variables have a correlation or causal influence on the metric. Finally, you need to scrape Google search pages to gather additional insights and refine your data analysis further.
2. Integrate qualitative and quantitative data
You may be surprised that we are suggesting you not depend solely on data. Yet, it is one of the most important components of surfacing impactful event marketing.
Why?
While marketers may and should collect as much data as possible, they cannot blindly believe and follow it. That is a perfect recipe for failure.
This is because apart from losing money by collecting tons of unstructured data, flying data blind limits your potential to create data-driven events. When you decide to collect data, you do so with the intention of making informed decisions for your event strategy. If the data is wrong or unstructured, you will create less effective strategies and may even lose out on prospects.
Furthermore, you won’t be able to figure out why an event is failing and make cost-cutting changes on the fly. Instead, you may combine quantitative and qualitative data and try to integrate every event KPI with a survey.
You can easily create a survey using an online form builder. There are hundreds of templates available on these platforms. This saves you a ton of time and energy while also giving actionable results. Data can tell you a lot of things, but it can’t tell you everything. So you may poll participants during events to gain feedback and suggestions.
3. Leverage the benefit of technology
Did you know that about 73.6 per cent of event planners have improved their digital skills as a result of the pandemic? As an event professional, you too must continue to make the most of existing and developing technologies in order to adapt to customer demands and accelerate the industry’s growth. The best SMS marketing examples demonstrate the power of direct messaging and how you can leverage that to diversify your event marketing strategy.
According to research conducted by Enterprise Event Marketing, the use of technology may boost event participation by 20%, enhance productivity by 27%, and cut related expenses by up to 30%.
As an example, you can easily track client attendance and purchasing behaviours at events through smartphone applications, NFC devices, and other location-based monitoring systems such as Google. The acquired data may be utilized to split-test your live marketing approaches in order to make data-backed judgments on where to allocate more resources to maximize your event ROI. Moreover, you can also consider working with an eCommerce PPC agency, hiring an SEO company such as Perth SEO Studio, and getting additional support from experts outside your company.
4. Assess your performance
Every other piece of advice up to this moment has been gradually building to event excellence in numerous ways. Goals are vital, as is the correct event software, and having a consistent event brand – but these don’t mean anything without proper measuring tactics.
The challenge now is to analyze the event outcome, depending on how you specified your targets and your sales strategy. If your aim was to raise brand recognition, you probably set a schedule for when you expected to see an increase in awareness. If the goal was lead generation, If the goal was lead generation, you'll want to record the number of leads generated by the event, but then reflect on just how many of these leads ended in sales and at what price, thereby determining the lead scoring points that contributed to your overall success. An efficient lead generation software can assist you in this task, consider using one.
The most common measurable metric to analyze the success rate of your event is the number of tickets sold. Yet, it is also essential to evaluate the number of check-ins. That’s because the ultimate goal of your event is to have maximum attendance rates in order to expand the reach of your business.
Sending out questionnaires to guests after the event is another excellent approach to determining success rates. However, keep your questionnaires brief and to the point, for optimal results. When you receive them, calculate the relationship NPS (Net Promoter Score) for the survey questionnaire to assess how your guests felt about the event. This is a fantastic approach to better prepare for future events. To streamline this process, consider using NPS Software to automate the analysis of your feedback.
The social media participation of event attendees is a near-real-time predictor of success. To make things easier to track, encourage the attendees to share a specific hashtag for the event and then see how many times it has been referenced and posted across social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also invest in building a social media campaign that could last prior to and after the event takes place. Partnering up with a digital marketing agency could be an option for greater success.
At the end of the day, income is always the most important sign of success. Examine the net revenue data after subtracting all overhead expenditures to determine whether or not your event met expectations.
Wrapping Up
That’s all for this article. Hopefully, the aforementioned tips will help you have an impactful event marketing strategy. Events are one of the best ways to really go out there and educate customers about who you really are. Every year, event marketing consumes a growing portion of brand spending. Brands may also employ digital analytics tools to gauge event performance with the correct strategy and implementation.
However, you can’t improve something if you can’t measure it. Using your intuition will only get you so far. Yet, backing informed intuition with data is a good idea because sometimes, it can tell you what data might miss on.
If you have any questions related to event marketing, don’t forget to reach out to us via comments.
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