Why so many event marketers aren’t measuring their event content
(and what they can do about it)
A lot of work goes into planning the content for your event. Whether it be booking speakers, making up-to-the-very-last-minute updates to your program, curating the social feeds, or agonizing over design details, every bit of it goes on to play an important role in the success of your event. Why then, are so many teams heading into 2020 with budgets, jobs, and businesses on the line without a clear plan to understand event content performance? We’ve collected a few reasons event marketers aren’t tracking their key in-event content and of course, a few tips for overcoming these blockers.
- You’re too busy during the event. Let’s face it, the days closest to and during the event are tough. Travel, long-nights, days on your feet; sometimes it takes everything you have just to keep the event running, let alone worry about which attendee is going where or how a particular session went over (you can’t be everywhere at once).
- Tracking content consumption is expensive (and annoying for attendees). We’ve all been to a conference with a fancy ‘state-of-the-art’ badge that was supposed to make the mandatory check-in stations outside sessions be ‘seamless’, but never seemed to scan until the tenth try. Or, even worse, a log jam at the keynote door because event staff are trying to count or check people in (in yes, another line). Eventually, it breaks down somewhere and you end up with unhappy attendees and unreliable data.
- You tried it once and didn’t use the data anyway. Maybe you went through the trouble of tracking content consumption at an event in the past and ended up with a messy, siloed spreadsheet you didn’t quite trust, or perhaps an overall event survey that was nebulous in its feedback. How did I do? What am I going to say if my CFO asks?
If something like one of these got in your way, we totally understand. Victor, our CEO at Validar, founded the company precisely to solve issues like this. If your event has to deliver tangible results, drive business, and works on a budget, you will benefit greatly from having a better understanding of your event’s content performance and your attendee’s behavior.
With that, our first tip is simple: Revisit your options for attendee feedback and attendee tracking. When capturing feedback, make sure you take a snapshot of every experience, speaker and session individually, score that content and adjust if need be. We’ve been working on this problem for a long time and the options are better than ever. We’re obviously a little biased toward Event Insight and EventHub, but the point is, you don’t have to suffer with messy spreadsheets at the door or badges that give your attendees fits.
Second, approach tracking your event content with a minimalist’s mindset. You don’t have to track everything, in fact, you’re better off making sure you get a few reliable points of feedback that you are really going to use. Example, instead of worrying about how many people were in X or Y session, make sure 15% of people in those sessions filled out an evaluation (why 15%?). This will allow you to know what type of content really moved the needle and make planning the next event a data-driven endeavor.
Third, talk to your sales team before the event starts and see what they believe the most important indicators of future conversion will be (and where they and other business units need the data made available!).With a few key indicators mapped out, you can more easily put a handful of simple measures in place to capture the data needed to narrow down and best follow-up with new leads from your event.
So, have you felt one of these pain-points in the past? Are any of them currently blocking you? Something else getting in your way? Let us know on Twitter, we’d love to further understand your blockers so we can keep improving solutions for them.
