Many organizations are using event marketing to help drive sales. Whether through an experiential experience (pop-up shop or booth) or informative event (i.e. conferences and workshops), event marketing has officially occupied line items on marketing budgets for the past several years and the industry’s expectation is it will only increase over time and in dedicated resources for its execution.
There is a standard or basic way to handle event marketing and there is an innovative way.
Standard event marketing says to get a registration system, a good venue, do some marketing, present great things and ask attendees to share the event on social media and complete surveys afterward in hopes of gaining clients, improving for future events and using the statistics and feedback to garner new sponsors. The logistics, production, and execution for events matter, but how are you measuring the ROI or success of meeting your KPIs if you only follow the event marketing 1.0 guide.
The more revolutionary, the 2.0 approach requires you to build upon the basics of event marketing and even event marketing technology.
Common KPIs for Measurement
Here are only a few KPIs most commonly looked at by event marketers:
- Number of registrations
- Attendance rate
- Engagement during the event
- Quality leads, partnership opportunities or deals closed during or after the event
- Feedback post event
The 1.0, standard event marketing way often fails to incorporate today’s latest event marketing technology to measure these things.
Event Marketing Technology
Using a 2.0 strategy gives you the opportunity to dive deeper, save time and resources to get to these same KPIs, but with more real-time, full picture, and accurate results.
There are a few ways we tackle these KPIs. Brands can stand apart from other events by using computer vision software at the venue.
- By using our preferred computer vision software, brands are able to measure attendance rate beyond the initial check-in of a name. Companies are able to measure the age, sex and emotion of attendees. While RFID can place a person in a location at the venue, we can measure their experience. Additionally, brands are able to determine if the attendees met the intended target audience of the marketing campaign at the event.
- Brands can know how attendees feel about the event in real-time. The computer vision software can gauge facial expressions to determine if participants are happy, upset or unresponsive to programming. Imagine being able to course correct in the middle of an event.
- Another awesome feature of using the latest in this event marketing technology is you can skip waiting for post-event feedback to gauge if the event was a success. Surveys have an average response rate of 33%, per Survey Anyplace. This type of rate typically requires the attendees to be reminded to complete the surveys and usually take around 7 days to get to that number. The computer vision software cuts that time by giving you real-time feedback. Yes, you may still want to probe into the effectiveness of the marketing and registration process by using a survey to help you drill down, but to be able to measure the success of a workshop or speaker immediately, takes a technology working off of facial recognition.
- The more successful an event is at ensuring programming is fresh, relevant and engaging, the higher the chances are for closing leads at the event or post-event. Using a real-time feedback solution helps organizations to hit the targeted ROI.
Bonus features for this technology include serving up sponsor ads at the event when their desired demographic reaches a certain location at the event.
Conclusion
There are several ways to incorporate other tools such as touch screens, RFID beacons, mobile app development, dashboards, and more to take your event marketing to the next level.
For questions on how you can incorporate our preferred computer vision software or other marketing technology tools, please contact our office. We will be happy to discuss how other brands are using the solution for insights and resource planning.
