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We know at Colour Graphics that when you are running your marketing events you need to have a means of assessing your success. You need to be able to explain to managers and investors alike how you calculate the return on investment of these events. Here’s our guide to some of the essentials of evaluating your success and making sure that these marketing events are paying off.
A simple guide to calculating ROI in marketing
A fundamental way to assess if marketing is having an impact is to look at your sales growth. If after £1000 worth of market at an event you achieved £10,000 in the growth of sales, then this represents a 900% return on your investment. You take your sales growth, take away the cost of marketing and then divide the remaining amount by the marketing cost – and voila – you have your ROI percentage.
This simple calculation can be easily challenged, as it presumes that sales growth is entirely a result of your marketing event and no other efforts by your company.
So, you will need to work out attributable ROI. You will need to assess the sales trends leading up to the start of your event or campaign and then evaluate the trends afterwards. You need to understand the average organic sales growth before you consider what was generated by your marketing.
Data is only one way to assess impact – but not the perfect way to be honest. It attempts to impose a figure on the subjective impression of your customer. What about determining if they are more loyal now? How about understanding if they are likely to recommend you to a friend? The data may be necessary for your financial sheets and investor feedback – but it is not helping you understand the impact of your marketing event.
The feedback form
The point of a marketing event with a stand covered in the best colour graphics available is to create a one-to-one in-person marketing channel with your customer. This also gives you an opportunity to get direct feedback on the success of your marketing materials and approach. This involves designing the perfect feedback form that offers the best information but does not command too much commitment from the participant.
A strong feedback form will give you the raw data you need for your evaluation – as well as the subjective feedback that could inform future marketing events. The sort of questions you should focus on what went well and what could be improved. You want to give room for the customer to celebrate your successes so that you can repeat these in the future. However, you also need to realise that perfection isn’t possible – and there are likely some excellent ideas amongst your client-base that could boost efforts in the future.
Make the feedback form brief! And, make sure the participant gets something out of the effort – a gift, voucher-code, entry into a prize draw – never expect something for nothing from your customers.
Self-reflect
When drawing together the successes and failures of your marketing event, you are the most essential resource. You were there when the event was designed and you understood the aims and objectives. Therefore, you need to reconnect with the core of your strategy. Start by summarising what you were attempting to achieve and then decide if the event lived up to the hopes you laid out. This seems like common-sense – no gimmicks – no acronyms – no pile of paperwork – however at some point you should sit down and say: did we do what we said we would?
And, now evolve
The only reason to set about assessing the impact of a marketing event is if you are prepared to do it differently next time. Evolution of strategy will ensure that your event becomes more and more successful. Reflection should, therefore, be followed by action – it might be that you change your target audience or focus more directly on a subset of this audience. It might be that the needs of this audience are changing, and they need different incentives to get them involved in your product or service. It might be that new opportunities are emerging that are shown up in your self-reflection and customer feedback.
Ultimately, there are two end conclusions you should reach by the end of this evaluation. Should we do the marketing event again? Should we change the way we approach the marketing event? And, then act decisively based on the evidence you have gathered.
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