Measuring what Matters: How to Track your Events and Determine your ROI

One of the most important tasks in PR and marketing is the coordination of events for promotion and the spreading of your company’s reputation. These events can range from anything to large and extravagant galas and presentations to a simple booth at a career or job fair. The important thing about hosting an event to market yourself or your company is to know what you’re going to get in exchange for all of your hard work. This is known as your return on interest or ROI. The best way to determine your ROI is by tracking the event that you either coordinate or participate in.

There are several different ways to determine how effective an event is at getting people talking about you or your company. In her book “Measure what Matters”, Katie Paine provides one of her classic seven step lists that outline her perspective on how to successfully oversee the effectiveness of your presence at an event. The list consists of several obvious steps such as “Define your Objectives” or “Select a Measuring Tool”, but also incorporates one step which I think is very crucial to carrying out a successful analysis of an event. This step being the “Determine You Measurable Criteria for Success” step of the process. This process involves the determining of the stats and metrics that you want your measurement campaign to focus on. Paine provides several examples of metrics and other measurements that can be used in a campaign to determine the effectiveness of an event. These range from “Percent of attendees more likely to purchase”, “Number of qualified sales leads generated “or “Total exposure of key messages in the resulting press”.  The metric that I feel would be most important to monitor would be the presence of your message or slogan in the resulting press releases from an event. Getting yourself into the event newsletter or an article in a newspaper writing about the event spreads your message to even more people than originally anticipated for the event. This spreading of your information can boost the worthiness of an event, and ultimately lead to a rise in sales or referrals. A good example of this would be a catering service for an event having their information shared either in a thank you section of the program for the event, or being mentioned in an article written about the event. A good way for the catering company to measure the business it drums up from the event is to create some sort of promotion associated with it. This way they can track the number of people that are actually doing business with them because of their presence at the event through the code that you have created as it is used. Tracking your sales as well as your media presence due to attending an event are good ways of determining your ROI for attending. The ROI may determine if you decide to again attend this event in the future, or use the resources for other ventures in hopes of reaping more of the benefit.