How do you measure the success of an event? How do you measure your ROI (Return on Investment). How do you understand your customers?
When running an event, the best measure of success is within your data capture. Data capture can help companies make important methodical decisions, as the information gathered allows for the understanding of trends, provides solutions to customer problems, and helps to create new ideas for the business. No matter how big or small your database, the important part is how you use the data to enhance and grow your business following an event.
There are multiple ways of capturing data to help improve the customer experience you offer and to gain valuable insights for use in future marketing promotions.
What Can Data Do For You?
• Profile Your Customers: The better you know your customers, the better your marketing is going to be.
• Measure ROI: Prove the impact of your efforts and understand how events impact overall business goals.
• Improve Your Events: Data can help you understand how your events are performing, how to optimise events, and how to make future decisions.
Gathering Your Data
Before the event even begins, you can capture data from the registration process. Set up a registration form to collect customers email addresses above everything else. Email addresses are ideal for future marketing communications, allowing you to build a consented organic database.
You can also use the registration process to capture data such as job titles, company names, industries, reference (how did they hear about your event?), and consent data.
On the day of your event, you can get data from check-in data (attendees, no-shows, time spent at event), on-site surveys, social/press mentions, and meetings (e.g. sales conversations).
Post-event you can send out surveys to get event feedback such as favourite parts of the event, favourite speakers, what they would have changed, if they liked/enjoyed the event overall.
Tools To Collect Your Data
You now know what you want to collect, but how do you go about doing it? There’s a whole host of methods out there, but all the best methods involve technologies that have been seamlessly integrated into the event:
• Event registration or management software
• On-site systems
• Web analytics
• Marketing automation software
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• RFID/NFC tools
• Chatbots
• Social media
• Communication tools
Measuring Your ROI
In its most basic form, ROI can be calculated by the following formular:
Value of (business won – amount spent) / amount spent
A great way to track your ROI is by looking at KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and metrics. Keep in mind that KPI and/or metrics do not tell the full ROI story.
The top 5 metrics tracked by global companies are:
• Number of attendees
• Number of qualified sales leads
• Brand awareness
• Social press mentions
• Amount of sales pipeline generated
Events are not just about what happens at the event, but the data you capture and how you put it to use.
At Coalition our teams have worked with data capture on live events for over a decade with some of the worlds most renowned brands. For teams onsite capturing the right data and maximising the live moment it is important to have the right event staff who are engaging, confident and understand the importance and value of data capture.
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