Was That A Success? I Think So?

Often we get sucked into tracking the obvious measures of success for an event (e.g. Likes, Followers, Opens, Visitors, etc.). However, we should be asking ourselves, “Does this really matter to us?”  Do you really care if you have 10,000 likes on your Facebook page if those likes came from 10 year olds who will never attend your event? Probably not.

Keeping your business goals in mind will help you uncover the metrics that do matter to you. Do you just want live bodies in the seats or do you want engagement and interaction from the audience?  The number of attendees may not matter, but the number of questions and discussions started during a session could be very valuable in measuring the success of a session or guest speaker event.

Once you figure out what you would like to measure, you can put tools in place to capture this data.  Often we are so busy worrying about planning for an event, creating a marketing campaign or making a deadline that we never think about how we will know if the event is a success in the end.

Thinking about this after the fact is too late. How to measure success should be discussed in the early stages of planning an event. Then the proper measurement tools and analytics can be put in place to track your predetermined success factors.

However, tracking data doesn’t have to be a daunting task. If you are using event management software, a lot of data may already be collected about your exhibitor and attendee activities. You may be able to customize visual dashboards to show you how many exhibitors are updating their booth profiles, buying sponsorships and engaging with attendees. All of the collected data and dashboard summaries can provide insight on how your booth sales process, sponsorship sales and marketing campaigns are doing.

– See more at: TSNN – Was That A Success? I Think So?