Plan Your Meetings

ROI metrics and measurement objectives

In last month’s column I briefly touched on how we’re not just meeting planners anymore, we’re also event marketing managers, which means we have to prove ourselves through ROI. This month I want to share a specific equation and other techniques on how to accomplish this very difficult task.

Since ROI is the World Record-setting and gold medal performance standard for CFOs, VPs and everyone else that sees the money we marketers spend, here are a few of the best ways to get at that metric.

The easiest approach calculates the cost per attendee, which is the event revenue contributed by the event minus the event expense and then divided by the event expense. In other words, it answers the question: Was this event the absolute best use of marketing dollars?

This can be used for all types of events from online Webinars to product launches to trade show attendance if you have the metric equation in place. For example, an exhibit manager can measure the revenue generated from sales at a show by identifying all attendees that walk through the booth and registering them into a database, and then matching that data against sales over the next one to three months (or longer depending on product and sales life cycle). If those trade show attendees purchased from your company, claim that as revenue.

Here are some techniques and metrics that can be measured to prove the ROI of an event:

• Primary objective-associated metrics
  • Goals achieved
  • Return on objective (ROO)
  • Cost per attendee
  • Money saved
• Associated objectives and applicable metrics
  • Introduce new product
    • Number of demos given
    • Number of attendees
    • Number of samples ordered
    • Number of press mentions
    • Number of qualified leads generated by product
  • Generate sales leads
    • Number of qualified leads
    • Cost per qualified lead
  • Gather new prospects
    • Number of prospects gathered
    • Cost per new prospect contact
    • Number of new accounts added to the database
  • Enter new market
    • Number of prospects gathered by industry
    • Number of qualified leads generated by industry
    • Number of RFPs requested
  • Sales
    • Revenue
    • Number of transactions closed
    • Number of purchase orders signed
    • Expense to revenue ratio (E:R)
    • Return on investment ratio (ROI)
    • Number of new accounts/customers
  • Awareness
    • Number of attendees
    • Pre-post event awareness levels
    • Number of press mentions
  • Recruit channel partners
    • Number of partners recruited
    • Cost per recruited partner

Event marketing and ROI is measurable. It just requires some planning — and the discipline to do it.