After months of touring on a roadshow, you need to see a return on investment (ROI) on what this event has done for your company. Therefore, it’s imperative that each promotional event is evaluated thoroughly against the objectives set, as well as knowing the tools to see tangible results.
Evaluating the event’s effectiveness may be carried out by the organisation itself or by independent researchers, but it needs to be thorough, systematic and, above all, objective if it is to be of used in future campaigns.
Understanding the ROI of an awareness driven campaign like a roadshow is going to be measured by how many more people learn about your event than before you began your inbound marketing.
Google Analytics
One way you can measure a ROI would be an increase in traffic to your website, if you assume that your website has been generating 5000 visitors a month currently. Of those 5000, 40% are returning visitors and the remaining 60% are new, this would mean that 3000 of those visiting came because of the interest generated from their experience to your brand through your roadshow tour. Not only this but google analytics can be used in various ways also. URL Destination where your able to measure once a user has reached a certain page on your website, for example once they click your web link and reach your landing page, or if they sign up to a newsletter, and they get sent to a ‘thank you’ page this can be recorded to see how many people have signed up to your newsletter. Time on Site, where you can also measure how much time visitors spend on your site. You can judge success by the amount of engagement that you have, this could be an increase in comments, email signups or social shares.
Perception should be monitored before and after an event to track shifts. Social media has brought endless tracking opportunities, and it’s particularly useful for capturing longer-term results. It’s essential that conversations are monitored throughout a campaign and metrics from channels such as Facebook and Twitter are integrated as part of wider ROI measurements (Whelan, 2016).
Number of Twitter mentions
There are number of metrics which you can use like a hashtag where those can follow up upon the end of an event to share the views and also have other people that didn’t join the event to also continue on the conversation. An increase in exposure is always good and if you see that there is a positive conversation going on than this puts your brand in a positive light. An increase in followers on the twitter platform is a good indication. Along with other social media platforms.
Sales
Typically, you would expect for sales to increase on whatever you were promoting during the event.
Participation
Providing the means for businesses to talk directly with customers and prospects is one of the strongest opportunities presented by roadshow marketing. Evaluation must be able to facilitate and capture these conversations and an innovative approach using mobile devices or video booths can help encourage visitor participation.
However overall these are some techniques to help you identify if your event was successful, but in truth it is quite difficult to measure its success, as there are not a lot of metrics that you can use to specifically get data and compare your position before and after a promotional event. But this also depends on the type of product that you are promoting. A concrete example would be if they signed up to come to this event with their email, and they are a new customer to your brand, and after the event they bought the product from your website and they use the same email, then you can easily identify that they event helped boost their intention to purchase your product as they liked what they saw, but unfortunately this can’t be guaranteed with each and every company.
References
Masterman, G. and Wood, E. (2006). Promotional Events. Innovative Marketing Communications, Strategies for the event industries, pp.215-233.
Kumar, A. (2012). Three Secrets to Using Google Analytics for Measuring Your Website’s ROI. [online] Entrepreneur. Available at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222947 [Accessed 14 Apr. 2016].
Whelan, N. (2016). Effective roadshow measurement techniques. [online] EventMS. Available at: http://www.eventms.com/news/staff-blog/effective-roadshow-measurement-techniques/ [Accessed 14 Apr. 2016].