The Ultimate Guide to Event Marketing ROI – 6 Steps to Success | Circa Blog

Once you have the fundamental metrics of an event, it’s time to calculate the ROI. Looking at the cost of the event – your budget – compared to the outcomes of the event – engagement, leads, opportunities, and brand awareness – will give you your ROI.

Let’s say your team hosts a product-focused webinar to promote a new feature. There were great questions from the attendees, multiple new leads attended, and a few even turned into viable opportunities. Plus, since your team hosted the webinar over your in-house platform, the startup costs were minimal. This kind of event would have a much higher ROI than a large-scale conference with plenty of passing conversations but no real meat.

You’ll also need a few additional ingredients to calculate event ROI:

If you followed the plan, the first two should be quite straightforward. The third can be a little tricky.

A note on budgets: Costs get buried in many places, especially when you’re planning for significant events or multiple events at a time. Did you buy a case of stickers and use them across ten events? Does the line item for shipping the promotional materials live in one spreadsheet, and the line item for renting the cheese truck live in another?

You’ll need to configure your accounting software or use an event planning platform with the right features to keep all your costs in one place. This will allow you to trace all the costs back to the event and accurately calculate your ROI.

Virtual Marketing Event ROI

The new normal of virtual event marketing looks more than a little different than the past world of in-person gatherings. Instead of judging success on the number of booth conversations, event marketers have a plethora of new ways to track and measure engagement.

For marketing leaders, it’s vital to have a clear path of understanding between these engagement metrics and how the bottom line (i.e., revenue, deals, etc.) is impacted.

Here are the several numbers every marketing leader should know when it comes to event marketing metrics:

Always track virtual marketing event ROI back to your original goals.