There’s been a steady change in the very premise of corporate event planning over the last few years. The justification used to be the footfalls, impressions, and as the social age rolled in, social media engagement. But social media metrics like post reach or number of retweets aren’t worth anything unless they bring in more leads or close customers.
There are a lot of factors that precipitated this change. The 2008 financial crisis increased sense of fiscal responsibility for companies, and forced them to take a keener look at the expenditures and the income those expenses bring. Also, the rise of the lean-startup, where extracting maximum value from each dollar spent is gospel, also has behemoths packing to ensure that they aren’t just burning money. Because in the instance of a downsizing, or even a decline in projected revenues, ‘discretionary’ expenditures such as events would be the first to get the boot.
An event that happens at such a large scale using money and internal resources faces an existential threat – unless it justifies its own occurrence. The event industry needs to be a conscious contributor to a company’s bottom-line.
So how do corporate event planners stay relevant?
To maintain relevance in an organization, teams need to demonstrate how they align with the company’s goals and objectives. And every company on the face of the earth would have revenue as one of their biggest priorities. Event planners looking to become executives and assume bigger responsibilities have already recognised this, and focus on the RoI of each of their events. The digital era transformed marketing into a ROI driven process where everything is measured and needs to be accounted for. Similarly the event industry needs to focus on RoI for justifying the massive costs associated with events.
What is the biggest source of RoI at events?
Each event has a different objective. The objective could be launching a product, generating more leads, clamping down on customer churn, generating more revenue, or increasing the customer base. All these objectives will have measureable results attached to them. The activities and process needed to meet these results all rely on meeting customers, prospects, vendors and influencers. So in reality all these results hinge on one thing – meetings. Albeit the myriad number of 1:1 meetings, booth tours, tracks and sessions.
Until not long ago, the event industry was stuck in a cycle of letting the creative and logistics drive the purpose of the event. They’ve now recognised the need to not let that dictate the purpose and path of an event, and have taken up a RoI focused approach instead. RoI that depends on the meetings. That’s what our Event-RoI hypothesis talks about.
Meetings and RoI are inextricably linked. Meetings are the only way to
- enforce your objectives
- track the success of your goals
- ensure the required business outcomes
- gather insights that further RoI at future events
So to show RoI at corporate events, companies focus on managing, tracking and analyzing meetings that happen there. For corporate event planners, this is the break that they needed to showcase the value that they are adding to their company’s bottom-line. That’s where a tool like Jifflenow comes in handy. It is designed to be a solution to the nagging RoI measurement problems that corporate events have been facing. You can quickly schedule a demo here.
