Data can dictate your success with Event Marketing. Full stop. Too dramatic? Nope–it’s just the truth.
Your Key Performance Indicators are your ticket to achieving your goals. You can’t improve what you don’t know is going wrong. That’s why setting solid KPIs needs to be a part of any strategic planning for your business. (For the why, go here: How To Use Date To Reach Your Goals. For the KPI specifics, keep reading.)
So what are KPIs anyway?
A Key Performance Indicator is a type of performance measurement that organizations use to evaluate an employee’s or an organization’s success or the success of a particular activity in which it engages. In other words, these metrics help guide your efforts, help with decision-making, and measure success.
But what’s the difference between a metric and a KPI? There is some overlap: All KPIs are metrics, but not all metrics are KPIs. Your KPIs measure very specific goals and metrics can just be more general data that has been collected. It’s essential to differentiate between the two to avoid confusion and getting overloaded with unnecessary data.
How many KPIs should I have?
Yes, there is such a thing as too many KPIs. Too many can make it hard to focus on your top-priority goals. Taking the advice from Joe Federbush on our podcast Event Marketing Redefined: Ep 35 | How to Use Data to Transform Exhibits and Events: A Deep Dive Discussion with Joe Federbush He suggests to keep around 10 KPIs at a time even if you are tracking more metrics on top of that. The KPIs should be the top 10 most important metrics.
Ready to find out what you should be tracking at your events? Here’s our top 5!
Five KPI Buckets for Event Marketing
- Visitor Demographics: This entails anyone who is visiting the event and what key audience targets are reached by their attendance. Learn about their age, location, career, industry, and anything else that would give you an idea of how to reach them better. Use this information to cater to your audience for future efforts, or make adjustments to bring in a new demographic that you want to focus on.
- Return on Experience (ROX): The Return on Exprience metric details what visitors did at the event and the value they derived from it. By analyzing this data, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your focus. It prompts you to reflect on whether the experience you created fulfilled its intended purpose and if it unfolded as you hoped and planned. By examining the attendee’s engagement, satisfaction, and overall experience, you can gauge the success of your event and identify areas for improvement. This metric goes beyond traditional return on investment (ROI) measures by focusing on the intangible aspects of an event and the emotional connection it establishes with attendees.
- Content and Education: One crucial aspect of event success is the quality and value of the content and education provided to attendees. The information presented plays a pivotal role in shaping their experience and perception of your brand. Evaluating the effectiveness of this content can be done through methods like exit surveys or by observing the long-term impact on attendees as they continue to learn and engage. To ensure that your messages resonate with attendees, it’s important to strike a balance between being concise and delivering the messages that matter most. With limited attention spans and an abundance of information available, distill your content into its most impactful and digestible form. Focus on the key takeaways and present them in a clear and compelling manner.
- Brand Metrics: When evaluating the success of an event, it is essential to measure brand metrics such as changes in brand preference, awareness, and perception among attendees. These metrics provide valuable insights into how the event has influenced attendees’ perceptions of your brand.
- Brand preference, one of the key metrics, measures the extent to which attendees prefer your brand over competitors. It indicates the level of affinity and loyalty they have towards your offerings. By tracking brand preference before and after the event, you can determine if the event has positively impacted attendees’ preferences and increased their likelihood of choosing your brand.
- Brand awareness measures the extent to which attendees are familiar with your brand. It gauges the level of recognition and recall of your brand among the target audience. By surveying different groups of people who have had varying levels of exposure to your brand, you can assess changes in brand awareness following the event. This data will help you understand if the event has successfully increased brand visibility and recognition.
- Brand perception evaluates how attendees perceive your brand based on their experiences and interactions during the event. It encompasses factors such as brand reputation, quality, trustworthiness, and relevance. You can measure brand perception through audits, surveys, social listening, and reading reviews. By carefully analyzing these metrics, you can gain insights into how the event has shaped attendees’ perceptions of your brand and identify areas for improvement.
- Demand Generation / ROI: Demand generation dictates whether your event spurred the demand for your product, service, or brand as a whole. Ultimately, this can be understood as ROI or how well you were able to convert leads into customers. Some common metrics associated with Demand Generation efforts include conversion rates, cost-per-lead, average deal size. These can help inform your events and future campaigns to determine the effectiveness of your event marketing and ultimately help you make better decisions for your exhibiting.
Data plays a pivotal role in determining the success of event marketing. It is not an exaggeration to say that data holds the key to unlocking your goals and improving your strategies. By establishing solid Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and leveraging data-driven insights, you gain valuable visibility into areas that may require improvement. Setting clear KPIs as part of your strategic planning process is essential for driving growth and maximizing the impact of your business initiatives. With data as your guide, you can make informed decisions, optimize your event marketing efforts, and ultimately achieve your desired outcomes.