A Great Customer Experience Isn’t Enough — Your Event Must Deliver Results

Delivering Results

Picture McCormick Place — the largest convention center in North America — situated in the heart of Chicago. It’s the weekend of the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, and runners are picking up their race packets at the Abbott Health & Fitness Expo at the convention center.

Within just two days, 45,000 runners and their families will shuffle through the enormous space the size of 46 football fields, browsing booths where more than 200 exhibitors are showing off the latest running shoes, organic veggie chips and new flavors of sports drinks.

Every brand present has staffed its booth with helpful, smiling representatives. The samples are plentiful, and the event center is buzzing with excitement for the race. But if these exhibitors’ only goals are brand awareness and customer engagement, they won’t realize the maximum impact from the expo experience.

Although you do need to provide excellent customer service and create a fun, engaging event experience, those elements alone are not enough to guarantee success. And unfortunately, this “strategy-lite approach” is the reason many events flop and end up getting slashed from the budget.

To put on a live event that makes an impact, you need to set concrete objectives from the beginning and formulate a strategy to achieve them.

Success Doesn’t Always Mean Sales

Many marketers shy away from setting concrete objectives when planning an event because the term itself suggests a dollars-and-cents approach. Any marketer who has ever hosted an event knows it can be difficult to close the sales loop when leads convert weeks or months later. For this reason, marketers often avoid setting measurable goals altogether. However, it’s possible to set clear objectives for your event that aren’t measured in sales or revenue.

Recently, we recently worked with a major U.S. fast food brand to host an event for franchise owners and managers. Even though the brand’s main challenge was declining sales, the goal of the event wasn’t to move more product; it was to restore attendees’ faith in the brand’s future by demonstrating new initiatives, including using more fresh ingredients and implementing cutting-edge technology.

To show where things were headed, the brand built a prototype of a new store concept that franchise owners could experience firsthand. This store included touch screens that customers could use to order food and pay with their iPhones.

Giving attendees a glimpse into the future and providing a venue for them to ask questions about new products restored many franchise owners’ faith in the brand and stoked their excitement. And by measuring attendee engagement and participation, the brand was able to ensure that every major franchisee toured the mock store and, in turn, evaluate the overall effectiveness of the experience.

Read More Here: TSNN-Great Customer experience is not enough