Measuring Event Marketing Success: 5 Vital Metrics to Watch Out For

Running a large event is stressful. There are a lot of spinning plates that you need to manage to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Because you’re so busy during the day, collating valuable data is something that sometimes slips through the cracks. It’s vital you get your hands on this feedback because it can be used to improve future events.

Here’s how to measure event marketing success and the vital metrics you need to keep an eye out for.

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Event Success KPIs to Track

Visitor Arrivals

It’s an obvious place to start. You need to know exactly how many visitors have arrived and checked in at the event. It’s important you’re aware of the number of people at your event for a number of reasons, including health and safety.

It’s also useful to know how many of those that registered to come to your event didn’t actually turn up. If that figure is high, then why? What’s stopped people from attending between them initially saying yes and the day of the event.

How to Track Arrivals: All attendees should have to visit a registration point when they first arrive to get any passes they might need. It’s easy to track how many people have passed through here. Just check names off against the list of those who registered.

Social Media Engagement

It’s absolutely crucial that your event has a dedicated hashtag for attendees, exhibitors and special guests to use when they post on social media. Encourage people to use the hashtag when they post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram.

It’s fantastic publicity for your event and is a great way for you to reach all attendees with one post. You can see which businesses are networking with each other and quickly deal with any complaints that are raised using the hashtag.

How to Track Social Media Engagement: Each social media channel has its own way of monitoring the performance of a hashtag and third-party tools like Bizzabo are also great for reviewing the data after the event has finished.

Returning Visitors

The more returning visitors to your event the better. If you hold your event annually, then your aim should be for attendees to want to come to the next edition. It shows that they’ve had a good time and found the event to be useful.

If these figures are low, then it shows that attendees don’t feel like they need to visit again in the future – which is a worry. Your aim should be for guests to want to come back next year and have recommended it to others.

How to Track Returning Visitors: When guests apply for tickets, include a field on the form that asks if they’ve visited any previous events before. It’s as simple as that but it lets you know how many loyal attendees your event has.

Attendee Happiness

Visitor happiness and satisfaction is arguably the most important metric to track. First and foremost, you want your guests to be enjoying themselves at your event. Unhappy attendees might leave early and post bad reviews online.

There are different ways you can measure happiness and each attendee will have their own thoughts and opinions on what a good event is. Ask visitors as they leave for feedback to get a good idea of their immediate thoughts and feelings.

How to Track Visitor Happiness: There are a few different ways of collating this metric, both manually and digitally. Something as simple as a traffic light system at the exit door, like you’d find at the airport, is a good way of gauging overall opinion levels.

As well as the immediate check, send feedback surveys a couple of weeks after the event has finished. It gives attendees the opportunity to reflect on the exhibition and think about what went well and what didn’t. You can use these responses to shape events and improve them in the future.

Leads

If you’re an exhibitor at an event, then the key goal of attending might be to generate as many leads as possible. For the sales team, this metric is going to be the most important of the lot. Each business’ definition of a good lead will be slightly different, so you’ll need to determine beforehand what this is for your company.

For some businesses, a lead might be a booked phone call or a scheduled meeting. It could be something as simple as getting a prospect to take away print marketing you have available.

How to Track Leads: Decide before the event what you define a lead as. When you speak to leads, see how they came to your business and track to see if it was because of the event.

Ensure Your Trade Show Booth is Eye-Catching

To make sure you stand out from the competition, you need to make sure your trade show booth is as attention-grabbing as possible. Large format printing is a simple yet effective way of attracting customers to your booth.

To see these prints in action, download our Success Stories eBook now using the link below.

 

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