Planning and running events comes with its surprises. You may not always achieve the outcome you set out to secure. But with effective measurement tools you are at least in a position to improve.
To understand why some events fail and some succeed you need reporting tools that accurately assess event results. As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure.” The odd thing is that this is the piece most people miss.
Countless sales events happen annually. And it’s impossible to accurately measure the return on invesment (ROI) for many of these because analytics is usually an afterthought.
Perhaps renovating a home is an easy example to relate to business. You have a purchase price and you invest more in the home over the years via maintenance and renovations. Your ROI cannot be determined if you don’t track every single expense you accrue over the years due to investments in your property. It’s nice and easy to see your original purchase price. Your sales price might even be contingent on what you’ve invested. But poor tracking means losing the ability to have real visibility into the numbers. If you flip houses for a living and you estimate losing $50,000 on your most recent sale, you need to at least learn from the experience.
Event marketing is similar. You will fall short of your targets sometimes, no matter how much of an expert you may be. This can happen because of unforeseen variables. (Variables can include anything from a high cost of food to a keynote speaker dropping out at last minute.) So, often the real measure of ROI is whether you apply the knowledge gained through solid event analytics into improvements and action. After every sales event, you must make it your best practice to examine the strengths and weaknesses of your planning and execution processes.
Measuring data enables you to uncover practical and actionable information. With this information you can run better events and ultimately achieve an accurate and impressive ROI.
To give you an idea of what to measure here is a list of some of the reports Starshot produces for its clients:
Originally posted on starshot.com.