So you want to grow your star events faster? Progressive, ambitious events business leaders will know that if they want to see a higher growth rate, all commercially focused functions will need to kick into a higher gear - especially sales and marketing.

To create a solid growth strategy, you need to know where your levers are. What will drive your growth? What do you need to do more of, and less of? 

A key success factor here is how you’re measuring your marketing performance. 

Getting your marketing KPIs, metrics and reporting in good order is a complex task and it can be daunting to those given this job. But it’s definitely worth investing in this area to give you full visibility of all you need to see as you push for growth.

We’ve seen, time and time again, event organisers that have the ‘marketing reporting’ piece set up well can work smarter by focusing on the right things - doing more of what works, and less of what doesn’t. And smarter working means faster, more profitable growth.

And this doesn’t mean only getting a marketing report after the event has run. You need constant visibility of how your marketing is performing leading up to your event - with benchmarked data points, insights and responsive planning action points laid out by your marketing team week by week.

Your event marketer should be monitoring the detail of how every campaign and tactic is performing, and then using this insight to adapt the marketing plan and approach so that all activity is fully optimised for best results. This kind of responsive marketing is essential to maximise growth potential.
 

Here are the 3 most important things the event P&L holders should be looking at in marketing reports:

1️⃣ Engagement scoring: metrics showing you how your audience is engaging with each of your marketing channels - benchmarked against what you should expect to see based on internal standards and industry standards. Well set up marketing engagement scoring to help you predict final results - taking a lot of the risk and most of the guesswork out of knowing where you’ll end up.

2️⃣ Results vs target: performance thus far vs targets and vs previous years i.e. leads, registrations, revenue, conversion rates, average order value and renewal rates. You need to see quickly and easily (with some good data visualisation) if you’re on track or falling behind. If you can see there is a problem early enough, you can do something about it!

3️⃣ Insights & action points: your marketers should be using the detailed data points across all activity, along with overall engagement scores, to map out meaningful insights for all stakeholders (what important things are the metrics telling us?), along with specific action points the team needs to take away for focus in the coming week to ensure focus is in the right places to get the best results.


Get a clear and exact understanding of what is driving marketing ROI

As an event leader with overall responsibility for event performance, it is important you know which marketing efforts and investments are delivering the outcomes you’re looking for i.e. registrations, revenue etc. This means you can make good, evidence-based decisions on where to spend more money, and where to spend less. And you can make sure your marketers are focused on the right things, also giving them air cover to do so.
 

Good reporting will help deliver a high quality audience for your event

When your marketing reporting is set up well, you can see the following in the lead-up to the event:

• How different audience groups are engaging with your marketing

• How your audience profile is shaping up compared to your ideal audience profile

• Where the gaps and issues are - early enough to take corrective action
   

You and your key internal stakeholders need to trust the marketing reports

You, your content people, your salespeople and your marketers need to be able to trust the data in your reports and the process that is being followed to use this data to gain alignment on where the focus should be, and to make good decisions. 
 

The two important questions you should be asking now:

Q1: Do we have the right things in place to measure marketing performance? These include:

 Targets
 Framework of key metrics 
 Benchmarks
 Website analytics (usually GA4) - correctly configured. 
 Conversion tracking on all channels 
 A data visualisation tool. MPG’s team of marketing analysts usually use Google’s Looker Studio for marketing performance dashboards we build for our clients.
 

Q2: Do we have the required analytical skills in place to:

 Build marketing reports - including integrations for data feeds from marketing systems for real-time metrics.
 Ensure reports include accurate and benchmarked numbers on a weekly basis.
 Interpret the data points to add valuable insights and make good recommendations on how to respond to what the metrics are telling you, taking into account the overall strategy and marketing plan and ‘in campaign’ adjustments to be made to marcomms activities for best results.
 

Investing in good marketing measurement and reporting will:

1. Stop you from wasting money on marketing activities and campaigns that don’t deliver a strong ROI.

2. Help you invest in the areas of marketing that you know will drive growth.
    

To build a data-driven events business you need to start with your marketing reports. If you don’t get this piece right, your products will underperform, your salespeople will bring in less revenue than they should, and you won’t grow as fast as you could.

We’d love to show you MPG’s Event Marketing Performance Dashboards so you can see how we do things. Drop us a note here and we’ll set up a video call:

 

Get in touch
 

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Coming up: the next instalment of this series for Events CEOs will focus on booking patterns and lead times. Make sure you’ve subscribed to MPG Insights to receive an email notification as soon as it’s published.