Each and every event held in 2024 will serve a purpose. Whether that event is to garner new business, train employees, open networking opportunities, foster goodwill, or generate revenue, a clear objective is always assigned to every professional get-together. As the world becomes more efficient and streamlined, how to measure success at these events will certainly be looked at with a more discerning eye in 2024.
Measurements for a successful sales meeting or seminar are compared up against an event’s objectives. Your team will have to ask: was all the effort we exerted put into the right places? Virtual, hybrid, or in-person, it’s important to point out that the event format matters when deciding what performance indicators to measure. For instance, chat activity is much easier to measure during a virtual conference than an in-person event.
No matter the type, measuring as many elements of your event as possible will make an impact on your current event, as well as future planning. Predicting and improving upon your ROI, KPIs, and survey results are what make the investment of your organization’s time and money all worthwhile.
Let The Vendry help you focus on ways to measure your event’s success in 2024. Below are the top 10 indicators of how to track your event’s accomplishments in the coming year.
1. Event Surveys
Want immediate results? Just ask! The best way to find out how event attendees feel is to simply ask them through a survey. This valuable feedback can be gathered at any time during your event – before, during, or after. Surveys allow you to crawl into your attendees’ heads and take a reading on their preferences. Attach a pre-event survey to your registration page. Have a few questions loaded on the tablets at event check-in, or send a quick survey during downtime to gauge the audience’s take. And naturally the post-event survey is always helpful, guiding you on what to improve upon for the next time. When it comes to surveys, the more specific the question the better. Numeric responses with a comment area are the best way to get hard numbers and deeper insight. These types of responses will allow you to compute the NPS (Net Promoter Score) to give you a genuine scale for how attendees favored your event, while also giving them room to elaborate.
2. Social Media Engagement
In today’s world of constant connectivity, social media activity might be one of the biggest indicators of real-time event success. Establish a specific hashtag for your event to share immediately. Track this across all social media platforms to see what your attendees are saying. This will not only help you gauge how many mentions of your event is out there, it will analyze the social media savviness of your crowd.
3. Event Attendance/Check-ins
One of the first and foremost measures of success has always been and will continue to be the number of tickets sold/registrants for an event. Just as important, be sure to count how many attendees actually check-in to your event, whether in-person or virtually. And there are ways to become more detailed with this metric. For instance, following when participants signed up will assist in tracking how well the marketing efforts are working.
4. ROI
As they say, numbers don’t lie. Anyone can say an event was successful, it’s another step to prove it with math. Event ROI (Return On Investment) is the measure of the financial return a business gains from its investment in an event. ROI for any event equals the total return minus the total cost, then that number is divided by the total cost of the event. This will provide hard numbers to prove the value of your event to stakeholders. ROI can be nuanced, but it can be a baseline to help direct you and your team on where to spend your time and resources.
5. Customers Acquired
Better brand recognition and customer acquisition is one of the top rated benefits of a successful event and will continue to be in 2024. Event marketing attribution goes hand-in-hand with the aforementioned ROI. It’s the ability to say “yes, we got this customer from our event”. If things go the way they should, that new customer is then bringing in additional revenue. But if you are looking to keep those ROI numbers high, tracking the spending habits of that new customer month after month, year after year, will be key.
6. Audience Reaction
Similar to social media engagement, tracking audience reaction helps you gain insight into significant moments that occurred during the duration of your event. For instance, if your presenter gives a certain inspirational remark online, and you notice lots of virtual applause, save the quote to share in marketing materials at a later date.
7. Sponsorship Satisfaction
It is good practice in 2024 to send out a post-event survey to your sponsors. You have likely already formulated a survey for your attendees, it should be no bother to send one to those who helped get your event off the ground. Another tactic is to measure their satisfaction during your post-event report debriefing. Not only will your sponsors embrace the opportunity to share, it might very well help foster future collaborative efforts.
8. Returning Attendees and Sponsors
If you record potential clients or customers signing up again and again for your events, consider that a success. But nowadays, this is a metric that will deliver quicker results than you might think. In the past, if your organization only held one or two events per year, you were only collecting data when you could. With the advent of more virtual events, the quantity of offerings has shot through the roof, so now it’s easier to track who is logging on. As you see numbers rise, that means the content is resonating, no matter if it’s being delivered in person or virtually. And when it comes to sponsors, a returning partnership shows that previous events had value.
9. Cost-to-Revenue Ratio
The cost-to-revenue ratio gives your organization an idea of how much profit your event has generated. Of course gross revenue will give you a bigger picture of what has come in, but the cost-to-revenue ratio is a more accurate metric. In 2024, stakeholders are going to want to see the bottom line on this equation.
10. Community Engagement
A metric that allows you to see which types of events are most active, community engagement refers to how interactive your participants seem to be. This can be measured online by the number of pages viewed, the time spent on pages, or the number of chats sent.
With all the time it takes to plan an event, gauging its success is crucial. When you have a better understanding of how to better serve your attendees and sponsors, your future events will flourish. So here’s to a 2024 full of successful, measurable data!
