How To Measure Event Success
Measuring the success of an event is one of the challenging tasks marketers have to accomplish to understand the effectiveness of their marketing strategy and to determine ROI. Here are some tips on how to make that process easier for you and your brand.
Send Participants a Post-Event Survey
This is one of the easiest ways to evaluate the success of your event and to gather data from your target audience to improve on your next event. There are many ways to create a survey and many companies, like SurveyGizmo and SurveyMoney, that can help you create a survey. The post-event survey can offer great feedback about which aspects of the events worked, and which parts didn’t. Before sending out your survey, ensure that you come up with concise questions about information that you really want to know to increase the response rate of your survey. Also drive up response rates by including incentives for the survey completion, such as a product discount, a free ebook, or something worthwhile to your target audience. To receive the best feedback, make sure to send your post-event survey immediately after the event has ended because that way you can get feedback when the experience is still fresh on the minds of your target audience.
Use a Post-Event Focus Group
Using a post-event focus group allows you to get more in-depth feedback than you would by using a survey. Surveys can effectively give you a large scale report to help assess what worked and didn’t but smaller focus groups help generate critical, “big picture” observations that can help you understand the strengths and weaknesses of the event experience. Using a small focus group might even help you formulate the key questions that you include in your post-event survey.
Gather Media Mentions
Know exactly how many people/publications/blogs covered your events. If you didn’t receive much press coverage for your event for whatever reason, make sure that you reach out to publications to offer them event highlights and give them access to your team and target audience for interviews. Getting your event in the media will both attendance, sales, and sponsorships for future events.
Monitor Event’s Social Media Mentions
Use tools like HootSuite, ManageFlitter, to sift through individual social media profiles and produce exhaustive reports of who mentioned your event hashtag (which you should have created before the event). Using the generated reports, you can then gauge how successful your event was by looking at how many people are talking about it and writing about it across most social media outlets. Learn more about how to align social media with event marketing here and here.
While doing all of this might seem tedious and hard, it is important to be able to gauge the success of your event so that you can be better prepared for the next event that your brand plans.
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