Our definition of event return on investment:
Event Return On Investment (or ‘Event ROI’) refers to the calculation made by marketers to determine the relative success of their live events in achieving their marketing objectives, or ‘returns’, given the cost of the event.
Live events are a big part of your budget but their effectiveness is hard to measure
Businesses, especially those selling to other businesses, get the importance of live events. It’s still about people meeting people, breaking bread. Face-to-face beats a call every time. A big part of your marketing budget goes into events and conferences, but do you know whether you’re spending the right amount, in the right places, at the right times, to get results?
Just as with any form of marketing, one of the best ways is simply to ask your audience.
The Event Return on Investment Toolkit
Build up a consistent set of metrics across your events and presentations, and plug the insights into your CRM system.
Audience
Engagement
The starting point for event analytics is the question ‘Who was there?’ A basic register of attendees. Easy at your own event, but with Glisser you get full audience email capture every time you present at anyone’s event.
Next, ask ‘What did your audience do?’ Want to know what slides they looked at? For how long? Whether they liked a slide? Whether they took notes? Whether they downloaded your content?
Everything is possible.
Active
Participation
‘Participation’ represents a step beyond ‘engagement’. Participants are active, willing to get involved, and open to sharing information and opinions with you.
Just like online, these are your most valuable audience members and a powerful source of feedback to help measure the impact of your event.
Events using Glisser typically see over 75% participation, meaning vastly more information on which to base your event ROI decisions.
CRM
Integration
Once you’ve captured a wealth of data from your delegates, the next step is to combine this with other key data sources – event costs, CRM contacts, sales pipelines – to measure a true event ROI.
Alongside simple infographics, Glisser makes it easy to export your event data and get it into your marketing analytics stack, so you can start crunching the numbers immediately.
Connect live events into your marketing technology stack
Gather live insights and make informed decisions about your marketing budget allocation.
Individual Insights
Glisser takes your entire events portfolio and enables data to be collected down to the individual – whether that’s a customer, a prospect, an influencer, or an employee.
Understand their engagement, but also their opinions, thoughts, challenges, preferences and needs.
You’ve spent the money getting them into a room – so take advantage of the opportunity to listen to them, capture that information, and use it to drive your business forward.
Actionable Analytics
Event data often falls into two camps: you’ve not got any, or you’ve got way too much. Both situations are not helpful.
Data is only useful if it tells you something interesting – happiness of delegates, effectiveness of sessions, impact of the event – that allows you to take more informed actions.
Use Glisser to focus on getting the information you want from your audience, so it is truly actionable, rather than just extra ‘noise’.
Part of the Big Picture
Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, MailChimp, Buffer, Unbounce, Criteo – modern marketers are building sophisticated marketing technology stacks to give them unrivalled information upon which to act.
Customer relationships, email, social, websites, SEO, display are all covered, but live events are often the poor relation.
If you spend part of your marketing budget on events, use Glisser to connect them into the grid.