Are you making the most of your events?

Once upon a time, if an event ran smooth­ly and attract­ed enough atten­dees, it was con­sid­ered a suc­cess. But with more mar­ket­ing bud­get now being allo­cat­ed, busi­ness­es need a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the return on invest­ment deliv­ered post-event.

Accord­ing to Dami­an Fer­rar, inno­va­tion direc­tor at glob­al expe­ri­ence agency Jack Mor­ton World­wide, his clients increas­ing­ly want event invest­ment jus­ti­fied in the same way as dig­i­tal spend­ing.

“As event and expe­ri­ence bud­gets increase, there is def­i­nite­ly pres­sure to increase val­ue,” he says. “His­tor­i­cal­ly events and expe­ri­ences have been quite prac­ti­cal and they haven’t nec­es­sar­i­ly been tied to a brand strat­e­gy, but they are becom­ing more sophis­ti­cat­ed now.”

Why you must choose what to measure pre-event

Accord­ing to the IPA Bell­wether Report, event bud­gets across the UK grew 3.4 per cent dur­ing the first quar­ter of 2019, while in Amer­i­ca they are expect­ed to account for at least 20 per cent of total mar­ket­ing bud­gets this year, research from Biz­z­abo shows.

Cap­i­tal­is­ing on this invest­ment is cru­cial, but to prof­it post-event, busi­ness­es need to change the way they behave pre-event and this starts with set­ting mea­sur­able objec­tives. After all, if you don’t know what suc­cess looks like, you can’t know if you’ve been suc­cess­ful.

Jack Mor­ton World­wide is work­ing with clients, includ­ing Google, Reebok and Airbnb, to estab­lish base­line mea­sure­ments for things such as atten­dance, foot­fall, dwell time and even emo­tion­al response that it can bench­mark for future events. Mea­sure­ment also con­tin­ues after the event, look­ing at the con­tent atten­dees request post-event and how long they spend with it, for exam­ple.

“We’re build­ing a plat­form where we can feed in APIs [appli­ca­tion pro­gram­ming inter­faces] from dif­fer­ent part­ners that cre­ate a com­pre­hen­sive dash­board of results,” says Mr Fer­rar. “Before the event hap­pens, each depart­ment needs to be clear on what data is valu­able to them because it’s very dif­fi­cult to analyse a set of data if you don’t know what you’re look­ing for. Clar­i­ty about the suc­cess cri­te­ria is the most impor­tant thing.”

Companies must think about post-event audience actions

Giv­ing busi­ness­es the com­plete pic­ture in terms of the return on invest­ment their events have deliv­ered means some­times hav­ing to find ways to quan­ti­fy the intan­gi­ble, such as the impact an event had on atten­dees. Luke Flett, client rela­tion­ship direc­tor at events and com­mu­ni­ca­tions agency Spark Think­ing, believes defin­ing the behav­iour you want atten­dees to demon­strate post-event is inte­gral to this.

“Things are com­plex and organ­ic when you are deal­ing with a group of people’s intel­lec­tu­al and emo­tion­al response to what they are expe­ri­enc­ing,” he says. “Val­ue begins to appear when the com­mis­sioned agency can help the client to define what sort of out­comes are want­ed from a ses­sion, meet­ing or series of events. The com­mon phrase asked of clients is ‘what do you want your audi­ence to go away and do?’”

John Fish­er, man­ag­ing direc­tor of brand engage­ment agency FMI, agrees that busi­ness­es must think beyond the event itself to real­ly cap­i­talise on it.

“We all know sto­ries of com­pa­nies who’ve had a big, flash prod­uct launch and then because they’ve spent so much mon­ey on it, don’t talk to the atten­dees for anoth­er three months,” he says. “The whole point is it’s a comms pro­gramme. It starts at the begin­ning of the process when you invite peo­ple to the event, through the event itself, then to the post-event sur­vey and a sales analy­sis three months down the line.

“Return on invest­ment of events is at least a six-month process, with the event being in the mid­dle. If you don’t do all the things around it, you risk los­ing out.”

Post-event communications is crucial

Mr Fish­er, who works with clients includ­ing LG, Sony and Hot­point, adds that all stake­hold­ers in a busi­ness need to co-oper­ate to max­imise val­ue from a live event. He says: “You have to talk to the mar­ket­ing peo­ple and the mar­ket research peo­ple. You need to estab­lish the expec­ta­tions for the event and then look at whether those expec­ta­tions were met. If they weren’t, you need to ask, what are we doing about it in terms of post-event comms?”

Accord­ing to Jack Morton’s Mr Fer­rar, input shouldn’t come from with­in the busi­ness alone. He advo­cates extend­ing the lifes­pan of an event by get­ting atten­dees involved at the very out­set.

“One of the things we’re try­ing to do is get events to last longer. Typ­i­cal­ly, it’s a finite num­ber of hours or a num­ber of days that your event lasts for, but you can extend the post-event expe­ri­ence by invest­ing more in the pre-event expe­ri­ence,” he says.

“We’re doing that by invit­ing atten­dees to par­tic­i­pate ear­li­er, ask­ing them what kind of con­tent they’re inter­est­ed in, what’s the infor­ma­tion they need from a par­tic­u­lar event? Invit­ing them to shape the con­tent not only makes the event more rel­e­vant for them, it means they’re more like­ly to engage with con­tent post-event.”

How to encourage participants to share their data

This col­lab­o­ra­tive approach also makes par­tic­i­pants more will­ing to share per­son­al infor­ma­tion, which can be a stum­bling block for busi­ness­es organ­is­ing events after the Euro­pean Union’s Gen­er­al Data Pro­tec­tion Reg­u­la­tion.

“Automa­tion and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence are great for gath­er­ing data, but there’s a mas­sive lack of trust towards them. The chal­lenge is how do you inter­act with a per­son and deal with that free flow of data in a very trust­ed way? You just need to be real­ly clear about how long you’re going to have that infor­ma­tion and what it’s going to be used for. Where pos­si­ble, you always look at a very short-term require­ment for data and use it as a sep­a­rate data pool to the cus­tomer data the client already owns,” says Mr Fer­rar.

While this makes it hard­er in terms of the deliv­ery process, through embrac­ing trans­paren­cy, busi­ness­es can still gath­er the data they need to extract max­i­mum val­ue from their events.