New technologies, collaborative tools, and integration opportunities with CRM and other platforms are creating new challenges for event planners. The below event planning resources can help planners address these challenges, ensure a memorable attendee experience, and realize desired ROI on their investment.
Capturing event ROI requires developing and following well-defined metrics that span the full event experience.
ROI Strategy Components
Brand Enhancement
Attendees who are actively interested and involved in an event increase their brand loyalty. They can also actually improve the value of your brand as measured through social media, post-event surveys and web metrics.Attendee Experience
A memorable event experience creates powerful word of mouth and helps attract returning attendees the following year. Actionable attendee feedback can be generated through post-event surveys, mobile metrics, lead capturing and attendee tracking. Use this information to tweak your event each year.Event Retention
Getting attendees to your event requires resources. Ensuring those attendees come back year over year gives you a leg up in your registration goals. Additionally, happy attendees are more likely to share their experiences to encourage their contacts to attend your events.Flooding the Pipeline
Beyond attendee and registration numbers, a more critical measure of an event’s success is how well it helps drive business by filling the sales pipeline. Integrating attendee data with your CRM and marketing automation systems gives sales and marketing the ability to track leads through the funnel down to sales dollars for attribution.Event Planning Resources Checklist
To achieve these goals and have a positive ROI, follow our event planning checklist to address pain points and keep your strategy on course.- Create a high-quality user experience: Was the event worth an attendee’s time? What did they learn? Did they walk away with business? These are important questions to get at the quality of the attendee experience.
- Produce memorable content: The event’s content needs to engage and resonate with attendees. Falling short of these goals can have negative repercussions in terms of pass-along to colleagues and others.
- Drive direct revenue: Sponsorship dollars for speakers, events and entertainment can help support planners beyond attendee revenue, to help recoup total event cost.
- Leverage latest event planning tools: It’s important to stay current with the latest event planning tools, especially in areas such as budget tracking and payment, managing creative, streamlining registration, sharing access to databases with real-time updating, and mobile app functionality.
