Measuring the Impact of Your Speaking Engagements: How to Evaluate the ROI for your efforts
With the return of speaking engagements and in-person fintech marketing events back in popular demand post covid, companies are allocating large percents of their marketing budget on events to drive traffic to their fintech brand, product, or service. With such a large portion of marketing spent on these events, it’s important for fintech brands to understand and know how to track their return on investment (ROI) to ensure that these events are actually helping promote the success of their business and are inline with marketing initiatives or campaigns.
While calculating revenue is one method, most event objectives and goals go beyond just earning a profit. Fintechs often go into an in-person event expecting to lose immense quantities of funding in order to lift their brand up into the eyes and ears of their consumers. Priorities often include nurturing existing relationships with stakeholders and customers, or simply focusing on brand and product awareness for the fintech in order to generate future sales. Some potential sales often do not get realized until years later when the customer remembers about their positive experience from an event and decides to partner with the fintech years later. So when it comes to measuring the success and true impact of an in-person event, many companies struggle as there are alot of factors and aspects to consider. Below discusses some strategies to properly measure the return on investment when it comes to speaking engagement events to build authenticity with one’s audience through in person marketing events.
What is Event ROI?
In simplest terms, ROI can be summarized as: [Revenue – Total Expenses] / Total Expenses. For events that are designed to generate revenue from ticket sales, merchandise sales, or sponsorships, calculating ROI is relatively simple. However, not all events have sellable tickets, merchandise or sponsorship opportunities. Not all events are directly tied to revenue or profit so every organization defines their personalized event success differently.
Therefore, event ROI is defined differently for different companies especially in the fintech industry. The definition must be more flexible and have other values or metrics that influence the amount of value derived from the event. Other aspects or factors that could contribute to event ROI include total number of attendees, satisfaction levels of attendees, sales leads added to the sales/marketing pipeline, company partnerships, and more.
How to Measure Event ROI
- Identify Event Goals
As with any marketing campaign, measuring ROI begins with setting goals for the initiative. One should begin with a clear list of goals that are ranked based on importance. The level of importance should vary depending on the type of event, target audience attending, and requirements of the internal stakeholders. It is essential to align these with all participating parties involved to make sure that each interest is affirmed in order to lead a successful event. Marketing should work on increasing social engagement throughout the event while the sales team should work on closing new deals during the event. - Set up Measurable Objectives
Regardless of which goals have the biggest priority, one would find that reaching each goal comes with its own list of accompanying event objectives and metrics. For example if one of the primary goals is to build brand awareness then one should look at metrics such as the number of attendees at the event, number of new social media followers, and number of press mentions collected. The key is to set up measurable goals that are attainable but also ambitious and bold. Looking at historical events or data from competitor events can give teams a good benchmark to follow when preparing for and setting up these kinds of events. - Standardize Measurement
Calculating ROI on its own can be tricky, but it can get even more difficult when the data isn’t consistent across all events including those held in the past. One should define specific metrics and how they are calculated. For example, do sponsorships and partnerships count as event revenue, or are travel costs a part of the event expenses? Making sure to make such decisions and sticking with them for all metric calculations is important to streamline event data as much as possible.Moreover, if one is using quantitative surveys to gather feedback, one should make sure to keep the same set of questions and scales for all events in order to gather good data from the events. Using 1-5 or 1-10 scales is a great method of collecting feedback rather than a yes or no question.
Bottom Line
If one wants to boost their return on investment when it comes to speaking engagements or in-person events, then one must determine what constitutes their definition of ROI. One’s ROI doesn’t necessarily have to be a wildly ambitious figure or metric. Properly tracking or measuring one’s ROI metric is in many ways more important and valuable for one’s organization. While one can busy themselves managing and measuring various KPIs, no one single number adequately captures it all. The best fintech marketers can do is to carefully select performance indicators that they prefer and track them diligently and regularly in order to make the adjustments necessary along the way to continually improve upon one’s event ROI.
