Event Marketing is at the core of any successful B2B strategy. Research has shown that the vast majority of marketers see event marketing as a key source of new leads, and as an excellent platform for promoting their brands. The B2B sales cycle often moves at a slower pace than B2C, and so aggressive and persistent customer acquisition tactics are essential to building a strong brand and client network.
If you analyze all the triumphant event marketing success stories, it all points to one direction — improvement on past performance. And so there must be some yardstick to measure your performance, which would help you to improve from the previous year. So, without further adieu, let’s discuss five of these critical KPIs that you should be measuring to skyrocket your ROI from your B2B event marketing.
Measuring Your Lead Conversions
It is important to measure your lead conversions after your event, which would help you to improve on past performance. It needs to be measured both online and offline. Review your pre-event campaigns and lead nurturing tactics post-event. It would be best if you tracked all the possible channels for lead generation like emails, PPC campaigns, social media, and attendee lists to measure your lead success. Pick the channels and strategies that lead to the highest conversions, you can then fine-tune your strategy for the next event.
Track the Number of Registrations
It is one of the best ways to measure the success of your event and plan for the future. Tracking the registration for events helps you to reorganize the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. You can use lead capture tools such as ScanBizCards business card scanner app for effective gathering, scoring and counting of the attendees and store your leads on your CRM or in the cloud for follow-up. This will help to evaluate your event’s success as you now have real data to measure it.
If it’s an invitation-based event, you can also track registration by the number of tickets or passes sold at the event. This will help you to plan better for your next event.
Net Promoter Score Surveys
This is a crucial tool for measuring the success of your event. You can organize gamified surveys to be distributed among your attendees. It can contain simple questions like how likely are you to recommend the game (representing your brand) to your colleagues. A high score indicates loyalists for your brand. Respondents with a mediocre score indicate neutral attendees who love your event but are unlikely to be willing to promote it. Attendees with a low score can disrepute your brand, if not just be indifferent. The score is achieved by subtracting the loyalists from the detractors. This scorecard helps to design effective strategies to improve your NPS score during the next event.
Media Promotion
It is an essential determinant for measuring your event’s success. If the media have positively covered your event, then it builds trust among your attendees about your brand. So, media coverage helps you to raise awareness about your event and creates better ROI in the future. Measure the performance of your media campaigns across digital and offline channels by defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) for each media steam – e.g, Social, print, journals, PR and so on.
Measure the Lift In Your Revenue After the Event
Of course, an increase in revenues ultimately measures every business’ success. So, you can set up conversion goals by assessing the leads generated during the event. If the attendees of your B2B event became your clients, then you’ve successfully added marketing’s contribution to overall revenues.
Summing It Up
It is important to measure the success of your event for more systematic planning in the future. There are tools to help you to do this successfully — whether it’s productivity tools such as marketing automation platforms and CRMs, lead capture tools such as business card scanner app or performance monitoring tools such as analytics platforms. The key is to track, measure and improve. This will enable you to make better decisions and pan out the right strategies.