Launching a new feature, a party for your customers, a summit, conference, or class all fall under marketing in some way or another and marketing helps to create some of the results of the events as well. And often times, calculating the ROI of an event is one of the hardest things to do.

What do you measure? How do you measure it? Where do you start the path to figure out what your ROI is? Are there specific metrics to observe?

Like I said it’s not easy and it’s entirely frustrating because the last thing you want is another headache after the ones you may have gotten trying to pinpoint the location of the event, guest list, times, speakers etc.

After hosting a few events and talking with our customers, we’ve figured out a pathway to help you calculate the ROI of your marketing event.

The Path to Figuring Out the ROI of Your Marketing Event

1. Identifying the Immediate and Potential Future Goals of the Event

Why are you holding this event? Is it to launch a new feature? Is it to help customers understand the foundations of your product? Is the event centered around networking to open new opportunities?

Ok, so then what do you hope to achieve?

Identifying present and future goals for any marketing campaign is essential. Its also the lifeblood for your events as well because you need to be firm in what you want to accomplish and measure in order to determine the success. Knowing the goals help to keep you on track to look at the bigger picture.

2. Who are you inviting?

Would it be a customer only event? What about press? Are you inviting opportunities?

This section has easier measurements to determine, if you are holding a conference, summit, or actual event, as you can quantify those factors. For example you would look at the number of people you invited versus the number of people to who attended. You can then segment the invited people as well to determine which sections were most successful in comparison to your larger goals of the event.

Another metric to look at is the level of attentiveness (which is harder to measure), times that attendees showed up, and how long each person stayed. Granted, these are much harder to calculate; however, if you have someone at the door, they can take note of the fluctuations of attendees heading in and out at different times. Also, holding surveys at the end of each session can help assess these factors too. All of these things can help you determine the optimal times for your next event and the costs as well.

For conferences, you should also look at your speaker list. Who are you inviting to speak? Are you giving them tickets to people to invite as well?

The invite list is a factor of costs as well that I’ll discuss last, but it’s a quantifiable metric that should not be overlooked when determining your ROI.

Sidenote: Eventbrite makes it easy to track who attended and who didn’t as well as Splash.

3. Brand awareness or Sales?

This ties into the previous two stops in the path and it’s an extremely important question to answer. With your marketing event are you trying to create or fortify your branding? Or will it be an event to warm up prospects and to close sales?

Each of these sides will have positives and negatives associated with your ROI, but you need to determine what are the actual goals of the event. This also blends into the first stop in the path in setting goals, but these also outline specific tasks for the event as well.

4. Reach

Reach can often times be looked at as a vanity metric, something a little fuzzy to measure, and certain components are subjective. However, for any marketing event it shouldn’t be overlooked. And although those things may be true, reach can be quantified as long as you have a numeric goal to target.

Reach is associated with word of mouth, which is sometimes very hard to measure. Tracking the reach of hashtags, number of tweets, Facebook likes, Instagram photos to even the event attendance, can get overwhelming. Setting a plan beforehand keeps everything organized and you can assign numbers to each of the sections in order to see how you hit those goals.

Tools like Tagboard (or even TrackMaven ;) ) can show you the the number of posts that were involved with the event or the effectiveness of your posts during and after the event.

For our Competitive Summit, we used tagboard to look at the number of posts tagged with #CompetitiveSummit and then TrackMaven to see how effective our own posts were. We set an actual number as to how many tweets we wanted with the usage of the hashtag as well.

Granted some of these metrics could be taken to the fluffier side if there aren’t specific goals attached, but they do help to determine the reach of your event and even the engagement of it as well.

5. Cost

Cost, one of the seemingly easiest things to calculate for the sake of the event ROI. How much was the space? Did you make any money from the tickets? What about travel expenses? Or swag for attendees? These are simple numbers to determine, but they can be overlooked. So, don’t forget!

There’s the cost per person and if you made any money for the ticket selling to consider in the costs. But here’s a quick checklist to keep track of most, if not all, of your direct costs:

Each of these factors should have a type of measurement in order to come up with a solid ROI, like with the examples from each of the categories above. Calculating those factors together should help you determine whether you have a positive or negative ROI for your event. It also should determine if you should have an event like that again.

Pinpointing the answers for each of these stops along the path to getting the final number of your marketing Event ROI.