When it comes to event planning, most of us know how to put on a great event. However, measuring the return on investment (ROI) for each event can be a challenge. And given the significant costs and time investment required to organize events, it’s crucial to know how your efforts are paying off.
In our most recent virtual event, “Crafting the Event Experience – Part 7,” Ryan Costello, co-founder of Event Farm and Chief Strategy Officer at MemberSuite, and Gizzella Diaz, Marketing Manager at Event Farm, explored how event planners can approach their events with a marketing lens that turns great experiences into great results. This blog is designed to ensure you are making the most of your event planning process, getting great results, and establishing a funnel of potential customers for your products or services. Here are five ways to prioritize pipeline and ROI in your event planning.
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1. Understand the Platforms You Need
Having the right systems in place is key to making sales and ROI a priority in your event planning. Because of this, you should look to integrate and connect technology platforms that make the entire sales pipeline run smoothly. At a minimum, your setup should include a CRM system, a marketing automation platform, and an event platform.
The CRM system (like HubSpot or Salesforce) helps you track campaign performance, leads, opportunities, sales, and pipeline generated plus keep all data related to past and current customers in one place. It allows your sales team to better manage communication with leads, customers, and partners throughout the sales process.
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The marketing automation platform (like Hubspot or Pardot) helps you segment and target contacts with relevant messaging and content. This will ensure that you reach the right people with the right message. It also helps you nurture leads through automated email campaigns, drip campaigns, landing pages, and other types of marketing strategies.
The event platform will help you promote, manage, measure, and drive engagement at your events. Moreover, it facilitates the creation of event websites, social media promotion, captures registrations, and generates reports on how events are performing.
These systems empower you with the engine and insights you need to keep sales as a top focus of your event planning process.
2. Select an Attribution Method
When it comes to prioritizing sales and ROI in your event planning process, understanding how to count and attribute your efforts is key. Marketing attribution is the practice of determining which marketing efforts are driving a sale or desired outcome. Here are a few examples:
- First touch – this represents the first action a prospect engaged in to become a lead.
- Last touch – similarly, this is the last action a prospect took before converting into a lead.
- Multi-touch – takes into account each touchpoint in the customer journey and the value of that touchpoint. While this method does tell a more complete story of the customer journey it is also more complex and choosing the right multi-touch (Linear, U-Shaped, and Time-Decay) modal to use depends on your current business and which efforts you’ve found to be most impactful at bringing in new clients/customers.
Attribution is necessary for identifying the impact of activities and where to invest resources to drive sales and ROI. It also reveals where customers are in the funnel. Without it, efforts may be wasted on strategies that don’t actually make a difference.
Ryan compares how email marketing is analyzed (every email’s effectiveness is measured by responses, clicks, and conversions), and urges event planners to do the same with their events.
As Gizzella noted, each event can be seen as its own marketing channel, and there are many touchpoints within each event that must be understood to optimize performance.
3. Create a Replicable Event Process
Creating a replicable pre-event process that includes campaigns and a marketing focus will help you get in the habit of focusing on results. When you have a step-by-step process that you can use for each event, you can easily track the success of your event and make sure you’re doing everything you can to increase your sales and return on investment. For best results, your event process should include the following flow:
- Define your event goals and marketing plan, including features, special offers, promotion channels, and follow-up processes
- Create the event as a campaign (in your CRM)
- Create event registration (in your event software)
- Segment your audience lists, and build detail if you have multiple products or services
- Design and send promotional emails to target your audience
- Allow the sales team to review and compare to their own account lists
- Lead outreach efforts to engage or invite leads that may be attending
- Create automated attendee arrival alerts and notifications to let your sales team know an attendee has arrived
“We as event organizers don’t spend enough time doing this,” said Ryan. “We don’t spend time nerding out and wiring up the systems to prove it —but when we do, it just makes it self-serving because we get to do more experiences. The thing is, we know it drives business outcomes.”
4. Track Your Metrics
Measuring the success of your events is critical to understanding the returns your efforts are generating, That means that you’ll have to generate data to look at it objectively. To do so, you’ll want to track a few metrics for every event you produce.
- How many (new) leads have you added to the company database or CRM
- Total event revenue
- Total social media reach/impressions/ hashtag usage
- Relevant press or media mentions
- Interactions with prospects or clients
- The overall pipeline, from leads to MQLs to opportunities
- How the existing pipeline was influenced, if at all
- Any relevant survey or event ratings
- The number of deals won during or as a direct impact of the event itself
Tracking these metrics will give you valuable insights into how successful your events are and where you should focus your efforts in the future.
5. Turn Leads into Customers
When it comes to event planning, turning leads into customers is an important factor in achieving the desired ROI, and it all comes down to the touchpoints you have along the way. In fact, you have to “touch” a prospect 15 times before they are likely to recall your brand and take decisive action. To ensure that your event planning process is successful, you need to understand how a sales pipeline looks and how to turn leads into customers/clients.
You need to understand your sales cycle, which is how long it takes to turn a random person into a prospect, and then into a customer. What touches do they respond to? Do you score actions they take based on certain activities (i.e. lead-scoring)? For example, someone who shows up at your event obviously is more interested than the person who just clicked on the link in your event email.
In that process once they’ve expressed interest, you may score them up to a Marketing Qualified Lead—someone that the sales team can follow up with because you know they are interested. Eventually, the hope is that person will purchase from you—effectively becoming a customer or client.
All this may seem overwhelming—especially to those not used to following the data consistently—but keep in mind that part of our roles as event planners is also to be marketers. It’s our job to drive business results and outcomes. Creating a system that not only watches the numbers—but plans for them—can make a huge difference in the bottom line of your future event.
Event Farm’s event management platform allows numerous ways to market, engage, and reach your attendees and prospects. For more information on how Event Farm’s suite of tools can help you, download the brochure or request a demo now.