All marketers are under increasing pressure to produce a data-driven event by using data to justify their spend as well as prove their ROI to the business. In their annual CMO spend survey, Gartner has reported that marketing budgets have stabilized after years of growth to sit at just over 11% of company revenue. This means each area of marketing is under additional scrutiny from executive teams to demonstrate that their budget is being spent effectively. With live events occupying 24% of marketing budgets on average, expect fierce competition to keep this spend moving forward.
In this blog, we’ll explore what event marketers need to do utilize their event data.
Can you show ROI?
For some areas of marketing, like digital marketing, calculating the value and ROI of their spend is an easier task with a plethora of data available from a variety of sources and touchpoints. For event marketers, it’s not as straightforward. Harvard Business Review found that only 23% of event managers reported that they can calculate the ROI of their events.
Historically, event data has been challenging to aggregate across the event lifecycle. From registration data, marketing automation promotions, lead scanning, meeting management and more, it has been hard to get data into a single tool and make it actionable. More and more leading event marketers are now using tools to consolidate their event data across the event lifecycle and make it actionable by syncing it back to their CRM and marketing automation tools.
For event marketers who are able to get their data together, the results are well worthwhile. With data from across the event lifecycle, marketers are better able to understand their attendee journeys from both a marketing and sales perspective. Knowing when to send out registration emails and how to engage high-value attendees with sales pre and post conference are just some of the advantages of getting event data in order.
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Do your sponsors and exhibitors know their value?
In addition to providing value for event organizers, getting data in order can increase value to exhibitors and sponsors at your events. Event Manager Blog has reported that 53% of event organizers are struggling to find event sponsors and that sponsorship retention rates are stagnating or decreasing for 90% of events. Being able to show your event sponsors concrete numbers from prior years can increase the likelihood of them signing on – and returning year after year.
New wearable event technologies, like beacon-in-a-badge technology are providing event organizers with an unprecedented amount of data to deliver on the demands of their sponsors and exhibitors. Wearable beacons place a small beacon in each attendee badge and collect onsite data, like dwell time at exhibitor booths or in sessions. With this information in hand, event marketers can prove to their sponsors and exhibitors that their investment is worthwhile and create a more data-driven event.
Collecting behavior data
Beacon-in-a-badge technology also opens up new data possibilities for event marketers. They can see who attended which sessions and measure the popularity of specific tracks, sessions and keynotes. This helps them to better create personalized experiences at events with a deeper understanding of what each audience segment enjoys.
What’s next?
As pressure continues to mount for event marketers to show their ROI, we’ll see more and more enterprises get their event data in order to show not just leads generated or registration numbers, but converted pipeline and associated revenue.
