Attendees’ engagement matters. From ROI to ROE

It is difficult to underestimate the advantages of live events as marketing channels. Events facilitate communication between brands and their customers, build relationships, create communities and increase public awareness. However, in spite of being a great promotional tool, their impact can be difficult to measure.

When a company or a brand decide to invest a chunk of their marketing budget into events they have to evaluate their success or failure. That’s where Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Engagement (ROE) come into play.

So what is ROI and why is it important?

Wikipedia defines ROI as: “the benefit to an investor resulting from an investment of some resource”. Calculating the ROI helps the event organisers convince sponsors that their investment makes sense by determining the number of tickets sold, booths occupied and revenues obtained.

However, short term financial gain is not the only reason for organising events. Events help increase brand strength, release a new product with style or further develop those valuable customer relationships. If an event aims to improve brand performance in the long run through increasing awareness and creating trust among its customers, solely considering financial indicators (ROI) of success does not give the best insight into the customer’s journey and the brand experience. In this case the qualitative metric of the Return on Engagement (ROE) needs to be considered.

An engaged audience is much more likely to take actions: browse through a company’s website, buy their products or recommend the brand to their friends and family, and consequently create better value in the long run. The aim of ROE is to determine the impact of the event on the brand strength in terms of audience participation, perceptual change or company visibility.

However, measuring one’s ROE might seem like a tough task to accomplish as interaction and networking at an event are difficult to quantify using the standard tools available. That’s why choosing the right event tech tools allows an event manager to capture and evaluate the important data on audience engagement.

One of the most important event technologies to get right is managed WiFi, which allows event organisers to use interactive platforms such as live polling or event apps to engage with the audience.

Event apps are a great tool for keeping the audience engaged on-site and after the event is over. Moreover, they not only increase the engagement and consequently improve the ROE but also allow to keep track of the data that reflects customers’ involvement and satisfaction such as:

• Adoption rate
• Number of conversations generated
• Social media shares
• Number of pageviews (profiles or sponsors pages)
• Post-event surveys
• Discussions

Live polling and Q&A stimulate interaction between speakers and attendees and at the same time create a collaborative learning environment. The results displayed in real time during sessions generate discussions and grab the audience’s attention.

Another technology that is worth considering when trying to increase ROE is digital scribing. Digital scribing, or graphic facilitation, is a process of transforming words into visually appealing stories. Visually rich content created in real time at an event keeps the attendees engaged and creates an emotional connection between visitors and speakers. As we all know emotions generate engagement which consequently leads to higher ROE.

To conclude, while measuring financial success is important, short term financial gains are not always the sole goal of event professionals. Very often an engaged and loyal audience is much more valuable. Using the right technology at events allows both sponsors and organisers to significantly increase audience engagement and improve ROE.

At TapFuse we strive to help event professionals achieve greater engagement with their audience and a greater return on investment. For this reason, we endeavour to deliver the best and the most user friendly event tech solutions. What makes this possible is combining our efforts with event tech specialists who are experts in their particular fields. Working in partnership with the pro wifi service provider Simpli-Fi and digital scribing gurus SmartUp Visuals we are able to help event organisers achieve higher ROI and ROE and transform ordinary events into engaging and fully connected experiences.

Originally published in the Conference News (April 2017)