Tips for maximizing your events ROI

What is ROI?

ROI (Re­turn-on-In­vest­ment) is sim­ply a key per­for­mance in­di­ca­tor that busi­nesses use to de­ter­mine the prof­itabil­ity of ex­pen­di­ture. The ROI cal­cu­la­tion in the events sec­tor in­cludes lots of dif­fer­ent fac­tors. The value is not only about the rev­enue gen­er­ated from reg­is­tra­tions, but also part­ner­ships, spon­sor­ships, the sat­is­fac­tion of at­ten­dees, leads added to the sales pipeline, among other fac­tors. There is no stan­dard­ized model to cal­cu­late the ROI in the event in­dus­try, as events vary in sizes, their pur­pose, and types. Ac­cord­ing to the Ho­tel Book­ing Agents As­so­ci­a­tion (HBAA), 59% of event plan­ners don’t use any par­tic­u­lar model to mea­sure events ROI. It is thus crit­i­cal that every spe­cial­ist knows how to cal­cu­late the ROI of his event.

How can ROI results help?

Increase awareness

By us­ing the analy­sis of traf­fic on your event por­tal and the feed­back on so­cial me­dia, you can gauge the per­for­mance of your mar­ket­ing event. Since the most en­gaged users make the high­est in­vest­ment into events, the ROI met­rics make it eas­ier to pri­or­i­tize whom to tar­get first.

Make lucrative sponsorship deals

Be­cause spon­sors love data, an ef­fi­cient ROI track­ing model comes in handy for plan­ners to cre­ate fa­vor­able spon­sor­ship deals. As an event plan­ner, you can col­lect data about part­ner page clicks, on­site leads gen­er­a­tion, and other use­ful num­bers and add them to their spon­sor­ship pack­age. For ex­am­ple, you can use Fanom­ena Events’ dig­i­tal spon­sor­ing so­lu­tion to pro­vide im­mer­sive re­ports on all in­ter­ac­tions with spon­sor’ con­tent and help them to de­ter­mine the Re­turn-on-In­vest­ment.

What to look at when measuring ROI goals

ROI is an im­por­tant fac­tor in busi­ness suc­cess. How­ever, it is not only about the mon­e­tary as­pect, as most peo­ple think. It can also in­clude the com­pa­ny’s im­age, the amount of leads gen­er­ated, in­creased brand aware­ness etc. The suc­cess of an event is measured ac­cord­ing to the goals iden­ti­fied be­fore. That is why it’s im­por­tant for an event or­ga­nizer to un­der­stand what he or she wants to achieve at the event. With­out clear goals there’s no cor­rect mea­sure­ment. Some examples include:

Monetary

This is the most com­mon rea­son why peo­ple mea­sure ROI. It helps to un­der­stand whether they reached their mon­e­tary goals or not and to es­tab­lish profit mar­gins. This in­cludes the analy­sis of nu­meric in­di­ca­tors used in the eval­u­a­tion of the money earned. The to­tal rev­enue is the money re­ceived af­ter an event, whereas the real profit refers to the ac­tual earn­ings that go to the com­pany af­ter sub­tract­ing all the costs in­volved in the pro­duc­tion and ex­e­cu­tion of ser­vices.

Leads

Some event or­ga­niz­ers mainly fo­cus on trans­mit­ting an idea. Other ed­u­ca­tion pro­fes­sion­als are keen on iden­ti­fy­ing pos­si­ble chal­lenges that they are likely to en­counter. No mat­ter what the idea of an event, every event pro­fes­sional strives to get more leads. When mea­sur­ing ROI, pay at­ten­tion to the num­ber of leads that you at­tracted, as well as the cus­tomer per­cent­age growth. It of­fers in­sights into the in­for­ma­tional im­pact that your event had on the par­tic­i­pants. This fig­ure is also im­por­tant to iden­tify how suc­cess­ful your cam­paign was.

How to increase your ROI

Before the event

Your en­gage­ment with the au­di­ence should start long be­fore the event it­self. It in­cludes the gen­eral prepa­ra­tion and op­er­a­tional plans as well as mar­ket­ing cam­paigns and so­cial shar­ing. These mar­ket­ing el­e­ments should be aligned with the cus­tomer jour­ney and make po­ten­tial vis­i­tors ex­cited al­ready be­fore the event. Things you should consider are email campaigns, social media and giveaways.

During the event

During your event, engagement and distribution are crucial for your success and ROI. Make it a priority to stay connected with your audience, share relevant content and use different technologies for that.

A nice example is the use of goodie bags. You can create digital goodie bags by using Fanomena Events. Our core technology, the EventKit, is a great way to stay in touch with your audience before, during and after the event. As an event organizer, you can share personalized content, inform participants about updates in real time and share new offers from your sponsors. The EventKit can be adjusted and shared any time. Your participants can easily and quickly access their EventKits with their personal content hub and receive all the relevant information. The opening rate of our EventKits is more than 75%. Its analyses help to see the performance in real time, surprise your sponsors and maximize your events ROI.

After the event

Af­ter-event com­mu­ni­ca­tion is cru­cial for the busi­ness ROI. It is used for nur­tur­ing you leads, cre­at­ing good cus­tomer re­la­tions and col­lect­ing feed­back. You can engage with your online community, run surveys and use follow-up emails.

Want to go more into detail?

Do you want more ideas, tips and case examples? Then check out our free e-book “How to maximize your events ROI”!