Event strategy is the key for event ROI

‘What does it actually bring us?’ ‘What is the event ROI?’ Questions we often ask ourselves when it comes to events and exhibitions. A legitimate question, but can be answered with a orchestrated event strategic gameplan. How do we show what the event can deliver? And how can we make those results measurable?

Challenge

Organizing an event or exhibiting can be a challenge for companies. It is complex and requires a lot of planning, coordination, knowledge, and resources to ensure that everything runs smoothly and successfully. Furthermore, measuring event ROI can be difficult, and therefore events and exhibitions are often seen as expenses. However, companies underestimate the potential that a strategic approach brings to achieve event ROI.

In this article, we will discuss how companies can seize these hidden opportunities through the use of a corporate event strategy.

Before you dive into event production or stand design, it is important to ask a few questions within your organization. Why are we organizing a client event, a conference, a staff party, or attending a trade fair? Furthermore, what do we want to achieve? And when is it considered a success for us?

The approach

First and foremost, it is important to understand what we mean by a strategic approach when organizing events. A strategic approach simply means mapping out the role that your events and exhibitions play within the existing corporate strategy and strategic goals. You are looking at the bigger picture of all the events you organize or attend, whether internal or external, live, online, or hybrid.

The below 5 tips will help you:

Map out all current events and categorize them based on existing strategic goals, target audiences and themes.
Talk to your most important internal stakeholders to find out what their goals, expectations and interests are to organize events.
Then, determine together 1 or 2 most important objectives for each type of event that the event must contribute to.
Next, define together 1 to 3 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) per objective, that you can easily measure and evaluate after the event. These KPIs will tell you whether you have achieved the objectives.
Ensure that you have all the infrastructure and necessary digital tools to measure the KPIs.

Most likely, when you map out your current events, you will come across events that do not align with a strategic goal. These are the events you should consider whether they are meaningful. They do not contribute to a higher purpose. It’s a waste of your time and investment. If there is no clear underlying reason, our advice would always be to stop these events.

Evaluate

Another important factor within a strategic approach is the post-event evaluation. After the event, it is assessed whether the objectives have been achieved and what can be improved for future events. Through these evaluations, organizations can learn and grow in their strategic event management skills. I speak from personal experience that good evaluation or evaluation at all is still lacking in many companies.

In summary

A strategic approach brings many benefits. A higher event ROI, more focus, a clear message, smooth planning, costs savings, more impact and experience for the participants and a better company reputation. Every reason to pay a lot of care and attention to develop a strategic approach for your events.

Ask a strategic partner

Do you want to know how to develop a strategic approach for your events and achieve an event ROI from your events? Discover Projects has a lot of experience in this area with a proven methodology. We have done this for, among others Signify, Delft University of Technology, and Hitachi. These companies have now a clear event strategy framework in place that gives direction and choice what type of events contribute to their strategic goals and deliver on event ROI per event.

Do you find this interesting? Feel free to contact us about your specific situation.