Connecting the Technology Dots for Event Measurement Success
- Companies often measure leads simply to evaluate the success of an in-person event
- When companies take a holistic view of event measurement, they also look at reputation and other demand and sales metrics
- Marketers must look beyond event management technologies to achieve holistic event measurement reporting
As you learned in Julian Archer’s blog post, marketing leaders need to expand their view of event metrics to better articulate event ROI and make more informed event selection decisions. But there are significant implications from a technology and agency perspective.
First, you must have a holistic view of the entire technology and services landscape for event measurement. Event marketers often default to lead counts and thus focus on badge scanning as the core to event technologies. But when you take a more holistic approach to event measurement, you must expand the view to include other important systems like marketing automation platforms, sales force automation systems, social media management and customer advocacy.
Next, the appropriate integrations must be set up. This may require working with marketing operations or IT to ensure that the appropriate data is being passed within systems. This is where technology implementations often fail in sales and marketing organizations. The technology is rolled out to end users, but the systems aren’t integrated with other sales and marketing technologies. This often happens because the “out of the box” APIs promised by vendors aren’t quite as easy as advertised and require technical support to achieve.
Third, there must be alignment with the appropriate stakeholders to decide how to present this information. Companies usually pull this data manually for reporting purposes. But companies with business intelligence technologies in place may look at these systems for automatic reporting. Again, a core consideration is whether the appropriate integrations are in place.
Companies are just starting to advance in their thinking around event metrics; now they need to address how to gather these metrics. By bringing teams together to set these goals and align to new holistic metrics, you can create the perfect opportunity to also address the technology and services provider requirements for achieving these new business requirements.
Make sure to join me and Julian at 2019 Summit, May 5-8 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin to learn more!