Two Types of Data You Need to Boost Event ROI
Angie Neas, Senior Field Marketing Manager, Justworks
Victor Kippes, CEO, Validar
We’ve all experienced or hosted an event where ROI crashes and burns.
The silver lining: it probably wasn’t as bad (or as public) as what happened with the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.
The event cost over four times more than its original $12 billion budget, and the infrastructure that was constructed for the Winter Games didn’t provide long-term benefits to the region, one of Russia’s most popular beach resorts.
The lessons for event leaders: don’t spend poorly, don’t make nonsensical investments, and don’t leave potential revenue opportunities on the table during or after your events.
One way we can safeguard event ROI is by collecting and combining two categories of data — event-level data and revenue-level data — in a way that’s accessible across go-to-market teams. It’s no longer enough to present event- and revenue-level data in isolation: bringing them together empowers both event and sales teams to drive higher event engagement, more informed sales conversations, and shorter deal cycles.
In other words, better ROI.
In this guide, we’re sharing expert guidance on:
So buckle up. We’re going to share how to measure the right data and leverage it to drive return on investment.
Not sure how to start measuring event ROI? Check out our soup-to-nuts event ROI guide.
All marketing leaders know that tracking the right metrics is critical to proving event ROI. And while traditional metrics like attendance and engagement are valuable, they’re only part of the story.
To fully understand the impact of your events and justify future investments, you need to dig deeper. Here’s how event-level data and revenue-level data each play a role in optimizing and measuring event success.
You probably already know this data type as its more common (and more stigmatized) name: vanity metrics. We’re talking about data that shows how the event and its content resonate with attendees.
This could include (among other things):
Number of
registrations
Number of
attendees
Sessions
attended
Survey
responses
Event-level data is often used to help marketers optimize future events and strategies, like changing event type, content, or promotional tactics.
For example, Justworks, an HR technology company, uses event-level data to figure out what kinds of events their audience prefers and whether they need to make adjustments (like moving from hosting corporate luncheons to breakfasts).
Event-level data can be tracked in real-time for both the event and individual sessions. Technology like Swoogo’s Go Onsite app or Validar’s vCheckin product gives event organizers attendee data such as content consumed, sessions attended, and contacts made during sessions.
All of this is great for event pros looking to optimize the attendee experience and get buy-in for future event budgets. But that’s not enough.
Executives want to know the financial return from an event — and you can’t get that by tracking only event-led data. This is where revenue-level data comes in.
Discover the four key metrics field marketers should be tracking right now.
Depending on a company’s business model and the types of events they run, revenue-level data could mean:
Direct revenue-level data
Applies to events that generate revenue directly from ticket sales, sponsorships, and merch
Indirect revenue-level data
Applies to events that don’t necessarily generate revenue immediately, but are part of a larger buying journey
Indirect revenue-level data is more complicated to track. It’s harder to attribute pipeline in a multitouch attribution model than in a 1:1 ticket sales model, and not just because it involves a long sales cycle. It’s because indirect revenue-level data can be related to net-new business (data that helps capture new opportunities) or growth (data that helps upsell or expand existing business).
Let’s bring this back to events to make it clearer.
An events team that evaluates event ROI based on ticket sales needs only to track individual sales and revenue. An events team that evaluates event ROI based on pipeline needs to think about net-new and expansion revenue, and show how events influence both of those in a multitouch sales cycle.
At the end of the day, there are three key reasons why revenue-level data is so important:
"Event data serves two entities — the event team and the sales team. If your event content generated renewed interest, this needs to be captured within your marketing stack, tied to an opportunity, and acted upon by sales or a more personalized nurture stream."Victor Kippes, CEO at Validar
Time for a reality check: event-level and revenue-level data are most useful when they can flow into the same martech stack. This helps all members of the marketing team identify opportunities to increase event ROI.
In the past, making event-level and revenue-level data compatible and getting them in the same system was a chore.
Event-level data was often collected and entered into systems manually. (Who remembers counting attendees with clickers or checking people in on spreadsheets?) We all know what kind of problems manual data capture causes.
Information was also siloed within teams, mainly because of disconnected technology platforms. Marketing used an event management software, sales relied on a CRM, and ROI? ROI slipped through the cracks.
Solving these challenges requires collaboration across marketing, sales, and marketing operations. Data needs to be captured with technology and tied to an opportunity so sales can send the appropriate follow-ups or marketing can send personalized nurtures.
Luckily, event teams can now capture this data and make it actionable across teams by integrating their marketing stack.
Integrating your marketing stack means making sure that data flows between different tools and platforms automatically, updating in near real-time. If you’re using API integrations, you only need to set this up once, and then forget about manual data transfer tasks going forward.
While every event marketing team has different requirements, there are a handful of integrations that just about everyone can benefit from setting up:
Pushing data from your event management platform to a CRM or martech tool means attendee engagement can be linked to new or existing opportunities for the sales team. Victor from Validar advises flowing the following data from your event platform to the CRM:
Likely, the wider marketing team at your organization is already using a marketing automation platform (MAP) to take care of repetitive tasks, like triggering nurture emails or re-engagement campaigns.
When you integrate an event management platform with your MAP, you can combine event- and revenue-level data to run cohesive campaigns across email, social media, and SMS, all triggered by attendee behaviors or milestones.
For example, think about setting up automated workflows to engage attendees with follow-ups like additional resources or survey links after a session they attended. Or, if your goal is to drive event revenue, use marketing automation to promote exclusive add-ons (VIP passes, workshops, executive breakfasts, etc.) based on registration data.
Finally, you can also think about integrating event management platforms with the wider company communications tool stack. This means you’ll be able to collaborate better across the organization, and highlight the impact of your work on core metrics more easily.
For example, Angie at Justworks shoots event- and revenue-level data over to Tableau, the team dashboarding tool. This allows them to track the progress of interested opportunities through the entire buying cycle, and ensures other teams see that progress as well.
You can also leverage real-time updates, such as notifying the sales team about new registrations via tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. If you’re really handy, you could trigger related alerts for specific tasks, like booth set-up, to the appropriate teams in real time.
You now have both event-level and revenue-level data integrated into your cross-functional marketing stack.
The onus is now on sales teams to use this information to personalize the rest of the buying journey for each event attendee. The more granular the data, the better account execs can build meaningful connections.
For example, the Justworks sales team uses revenue-level data to identify prospects they met at an event (perhaps through a booth demo), and prospects they still need to build a relationship with. The latter goes to the business development team, who do cold outreach. This helps their sales team personalize next steps for each prospect.
Sales teams can also use event- and revenue-level data to surprise and delight prospects. Event-level data, like sessions attended, can be used to identify lower-funnel content that will be truly useful to attendees, such as sharing the story of a customer who solved a particular challenge the attendee is interested in. Account execs can also use revenue-led data to offer discounts and special offers, such as using merchandise purchase data to recommend other products.
You can also do personalization a little higher up the funnel too, if your event management technology allows for it. For example, event marketers can use registration data to customize what content attendees see on a website or app. Say you want to show premium content types to VIP registrants. You can set conditions on registration type in your event technology, share a direct link, and streamline your web content to show one specific track.
Find out how Swoogo can help with personalization.
To avoid a Sochi Winter Olympics situation, capturing and combining event-level and revenue-level data is key. This data empowers you to both optimize event ROI, and help others across the company understand events’ contribution to revenue success.
By flowing event and revenue data into the martech stack, you’ll ensure that all demand teams have a unified picture of attendees and prospects, and information is coherent and complete across the buying cycle. Plus, sales teams can better personalize follow-up, leading to higher close rates and potentially higher-value deals.
