The Best Way to Guarantee ROI from Your Next Event
Events are a great way to meet a multitude of business objectives, such as:
Improving sales results
Rallying a group of people together behind your cause
Generating leads
Creating new peer connections
Increasing staff morale to have one isn’t a light one.
Events can be beneficial, but they aren’t easy to make happen. There are many moving parts, considerations, and expenses tied to each part of the process. Even if you invest in an event producer (well worth any busy person’s time!), you will still have a lot of decisions to make and bills to foot.
But most leaders would invest any amount of money if they knew they would make it back.
If planned and executed correctly, most events have a quickly calculable return on investment. Events are, quite simply, the most bang for your buck in a communications or marketing setting. They amplify trust while at the same time multiplying impact; there’s simply no equivalent tactic and probably never will be.
A quick note is that I use communications to describe the world INSIDE your company with your stakeholders and marketing to describe the world OUTSIDE your company with your audience of prospective or current clients, customers, or followers.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if your budget is $20K or $2M. If you haven’t defined what success would look like, you are setting yourself on a difficult trajectory. Why? Because you won’t have determined where to focus your efforts, you’ll feel frantic trying to do all the things and overlook details.
Whenever we’re starting a new event or launch for a client, I know that they will want to do all the things. And often, they have the budget to do all of them too. More often than not, our primary constraint is time, not money.
When you’re a specialized resource in high demand, you know you could do everything, but you shouldn’t.
To help decipher which goals you want to achieve for your next event, ask these essential questions:
“What would success look like?”
This question defines the first filter through which all decisions about your event should be made, and it also sets up the basis for measuring success.
Will the event be a success if people simply show up? Enroll? Take a specific action? How are you going to measure it? What are the existing benchmarks, if any?
“What would this look like if it were the most on-brand for us?”
This helps you to find the highest impact moments of design or intervention. It might be a concierge welcome experience, a hotel room welcome package, or an event app.
“How do we surprise and delight our audience?”
This is magic.
In communications settings, it’s often just expectation escalation. You produce a fantastic experience one time, and the same audience expects the same or better next time. You fall into a cycle of thinking, “There’s no way we can top this!”. But if you ask this question, you’ll find space for creativity and pushing the envelope.
In marketing settings, these are often physical things that you giveaway, but they don’t have to be. We can all picture an audience full of fans getting excited about Oprah’s favorite things, which is definitely on-brand for Oprah!
Once you have success filters for your brand, you can find a unique way to add surprise and delight your audience.
Some final thoughts
It doesn’t necessarily matter if you use my filters, but having at least one filter will help you better allocate your resources for the crunch that events naturally create. Events are a high, but they can become a low quickly when you’re just struggling to keep up with the tide of work required.
Apply filters and amplify the experience–both yours and your audience’s.
I often say that launches don’t have to be stressful, and it’s because of these filters and having enough space to prepare adequately.
If you’re struggling with discovering the top goals for your next event, getting our perspective with an Outspoke Roadmap may be just the thing. Check it out and see if we can help with your next event.
