No B2B marketer worth their salt would deny the power of events as a weapon in their promotional arsenal. They enable marketers to bring the brand to prospects in person and create an opportunity to have much more human interactions. This goes beyond the one-way traffic of advertising – whether in its digital form or in a more traditional advertising – providing an opportunity for genuine engagement. Yet there’s one vital area where events are lagging their younger digital cousin: measurement.
Considering that more than half (53%) of B2B marketers consider events and tradeshows to be their top spend area, this is worrying. The rise of digital marketing has created vast swathes of data for marketers to break down and analyse, providing granular measurement of how well their marketing is working and of return on investment. These insights provide the basis for further optimisation of these digital campaigns, making them even more effective.
By contrast, marketers using events have traditionally lacked exacting forms of measurement that provide a solid foundation on which to hone their engagements. However, new technologies are emerging that can help them better get to grips with their events and make the most of this potent marketing channel.
What metrics should be B2B marketers examine when using events, and how can they best go about it?
Who are you?
The traditional marketing funnel places awareness right at the top, and with good reason – being known is important. Fame can help your brand become the default choice in the category, whether that’s cloud computing or management consultancy. While events don’t necessarily have quite the reach of an OOH campaign, they nonetheless can contribute greatly to getting your brand on the radar.
Yet too many B2B marketers are measuring the reach of their event deployments in imprecise ways. This is leading to an undervaluation of events’ capacity to raise brand awareness. For instance, manual counting methods, such as people armed with clickers, rely on human concentration and counting ability – two things that people struggle with, as our attention wanders in busy environments.
Marketers sometimes attempt to get around this by using event attendance as a proxy for reach. Yet this method is ultimately flawed – somebody could have attended the event without ever having come across your brand, and therefore their awareness would not have been swayed.
It’s therefore important to have a measurement method in place that can precisely break down who and how many people have had contact with the brand at the event. As with digital marketing, technology provides a way forward: several forms of location analytics can uncover this information.
By breaking down how many people came within a certain proximity of your presence at an event (whether that’s a stand or an experiential activation), location analytics can provide a much better insight into awareness. Being able to say that, say, 500 people passed within 10 metres of your event stand gives a much more accurate idea of the number who saw your logo and strapline, and who were therefore put into the top of the funnel because of your event marketing.
Yet awareness is only the start of the journey.
Separating the wheat from the chaff
Differentiating those who are merely aware of you from those who are interested is vital for B2B marketers, especially as this information can feed into further marketing and sales efforts. Events are a great tool for moving people down the funnel, yet traditional methods don’t provide a good insight into how effectively your event presence is garnering interest.
You might have experienced and savvy people manning your presence, but they’re only human – they can’t possibly report back accurately on every person who spends time flicking through your leaflets or using your demos.
However, location analytics once again provide a way to gather a different, more valuable kind of data. By getting information on how long people spend within a certain vicinity of the event activation, you can develop valuable insights into how well your event marketing is converting awareness into interest. Moreover, it can also provide information on frequency of visit, enabling you to segment your event audience to a higher level of consideration.
This kind of data on interest can be very useful for optimising your events by providing an insight into how your activation is (or is not) working. For example, a high volume of very short visits might indicate that while your stall initially looks exciting, it is not actually holding people’s interest. Cross-referencing this against information on exactly where people are spending their time on the stall, you can develop an understanding of how to improve your event activation for next time.
Not all data is equal
Event marketers aren’t short of data about visitors, but sometimes the information is not that relevant to their goals. Overall attendance, for example, doesn’t tell you much about how much value your presence is delivering for the business.
It’s therefore important to take a scientific approach, choosing measurements that answer valuable questions. Knowing where your audience went, how long they stayed there, and what they did is much more useful – not only can it be used to understand how successful your activation was, but it can also be used to refine and improve events. Moreover, by backing these judgements with verifiable evidence, marketers can put events on the same level as digital when it comes to granular data analysis.
