Report: How Event Marketing Data Has Broad Ripple Effects

All that data you pick up from your event doesn’t just have to live with the event itself—in fact, it can have some pretty major, long-lasting ripple effects from a marketing standpoint.

A new data benchmark report from Freeman  (opens in a new tab) [registration] makes the case that event and experiential marketing are becoming increasingly important parts of the brand data pie. The report finds that nearly 9 in 10 marketers (88 percent) use event marketing to inform their marketing approach elsewhere.

“Event marketers are measuring all of the metrics and areas that are most important to brand marketers,” The Freeman Data Benchmark Study states. “In fact, overall, a higher percentage of event marketers are measuring more key marketing metrics—and collecting more data—than brand marketers across other channels. No other marketing channel provides the opportunity to measure nearly the full spectrum of metrics and key customer and consumer interactions.”

The report notes that event marketers are more than twice as likely as general brand marketers to collect and measure data on social media activity (55 percent versus 22 percent) and the total number of leads (53 percent versus 17 percent). On top of this, they’re nearly seven times more likely to track data on press coverage (33 percent versus 5 percent) and tend to leverage data points in a wide variety of other categories more often, including website traffic, total sales, and brand perception.

Why is there such higher data utilization among event marketers? The study argues it’s because brand marketers are often more narrowly focused on a single channel, and because events have a specific start and end, event planners can look at a broader data set over a shorter amount of time.

“Brand marketers have ongoing programs across a number of channels that may make it hard to get to the ‘what’ and ‘why’ from their data in a concise way,” the report adds.

The broad depth of event data allows for information that can be used elsewhere in the food chain. While 74 percent of respondents said they used the data to further inform event strategy and 62 percent used it as a mark of event success, a significant percentage of respondents used it for purposes not strictly related to the event itself, such as the calculation of sales impact (48 percent), budget justification (47 percent), and customer/attendee feedback (35 percent). In addition, 42 percent of respondents noted it was very important or critical to use event data for purposes of securing 2019 budgets, while an additional 44 percent said it was important.

And many event marketers saw the potential to take things even further; 77 percent of respondents claimed having higher-quality data might be able to boost their revenue by 10 percent or more.

In comments to Trade Show News Network  (opens in a new tab), Freeman Senior Vice President of Research and Measurement Skip Cox made the case that data was getting an increased emphasis, expanding into a variety of realms in the ways that organizations operate. He noted that event marketers were often at the center of that.

“For event marketers, the actionable insights derived from data analytics empower them to not only drive results, justify event and marketing budgets, and improve overall attendee quality and event experiences, but to bring those insights back to the larger marketing strategies,” he told the outlet. “Data is a tool, and if your organization is not using it, you’re missing out on reaching and exceeding your potential.”

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