When you are planning an event, you put a lot of work and thinking into creating a memorable experience. After all that, you don’t only want to sell tickets, you want the public to enjoy it, to remember it, to talk about it, to be willing to come back… You want engagement!
Are you planning an event for marketing purposes? Engagement is important for you as well.
Just like engagement matters in online channels, you need to bring engagement to your live events. However, how would you know whether you have driven engagement to your live event or not? How would you even define engagement for live events?
If you’re confused with all these questions, this article has all the answers you need.
In this article, we will discuss what is event engagement, how to measure event engagement, and event engagement strategies so that every live event you conduct is a success.
Summary
1. What is Event Engagement?
Event engagement refers to the interactiveness of the audience with one another as well as with the event as regards its content, sponsors, brand, team, etc. It’s basically the tangible result of the event in terms of the return on investment that it produced.
The more the audience interacts with an event, the higher the return on investment. So, your focus must be to make your events as compelling and attractive as possible so that the audience remains hooked to the happenings of the event.
2. Why measuring event engagement is important?
You organise an event but how do you know if it was successful or not? Just some people saying that they liked your event is not exactly how you determine its success. You need to have concrete data in your hands and that comes only when you measure event engagement.
Here are some reasons why measuring event engagement is important.
Measuring the success of the event
Measuring event engagement is directly related to measuring the success of the event. When you measure how the audience interacted with others and the content of the event, you are able to understand whether the goals of the event were met or not. Measuring this success is essential to find out the return on investment of the events.
Plan future events
Measuring event engagement gives insights into how much the audience liked the event and you can find room for improvement in your event planning and management. Thus, measuring event engagement gives you the necessary insights and knowledge about planning your future events.
Approach brands for monetization opportunities
When you measure event engagement, you study the concrete data about the events and get insight into the interests and behaviour of your public. This is an extremely valuable information for your sponsor brands.
You will be able to offer your current sponsor greater reasons to stay with you. For example, if you measure data using the information available to you when using a cashless payment system, you will be able to tell your sponsor exactly when and were the interaction of your public with their brand has worked better, in order to improve future brand activations at your event.
This also gives you strong sales arguments when approaching new brands and discussing collaboration and monetization opportunities with them.
3. Tips for measuring engagement at your event
So far we have discussed the importance of measuring event engagement in your live events. You would not know the success of your event unless you measure its engagement nor would you be able to plan future events efficiently without measuring the response at your current events.
However, how can you measure event engagement? That’s a huge question.
Well, here are seven tips to answer the question and help you understand how to measure event engagement at your live event.
Analyse your website traffic
Your website is the online profile of your business. So, if your event has been successful and the audience engaged well in it the effect will be 100% visible on your website in the form of increased traction.
However, while you go on analysing your website, you must also ensure that your website is working well and loading quickly because the audience will get frustrated with slow-loading websites and the traffic will go sooner than it comes.
People will abandon a low-speed website and buy their products from some other website instead.
You don’t want that to happen to your website, especially when an event has been successful. Don’t hesitate to continue bringing traffic to your website after the event, for example by publishing pictures, an aftermovie, etc. If you don’t wait too long to start selling tickets to your next event, you can use this traffic and the fact that the fun they had are your event is still fresh on their minds to sell more tickets. So, keep up with speed optimization so that website traffic plays to your benefit.
Create an event app
It’s common knowledge that your audience will download any application that you create for your event if they’re interested in coming to that event.
You can put in all the event information in the application itself and the audience can check out minute details of the event from the app. If you are using cashless payment technology, it is a great idea to have a page on your app dedicated to your cashless widget and information about how to top-up, how to request a refund, etc. It is also interesting to connect your app with your ticketing platform so that attendees can have their ticket’s QR code directly in your event app.
Additionally, you can analyse how the audience is interacting with the application and therefore the event and measure their engagement based on the data and insights collected from the application. You can even track if people are referring other participants to the event by combining this with a referral program app.
Use a ticketing and access control system
In addition to creating a mobile application for your event, you can also add a ticketing and access control system that will allow you and your team to control the attendees’ tickets at the gates, to create a safe and secured access to your event, no matter if the tickets are free or paid.
One of the first engagement signs for your event is if your public registers for it or buys tickets, and if after doing so, they do actually attend the event, so don’t forget the basis and keep this in mind!
Besides, online ticketing allows you to get a lot of useful data for your event planning itself: from the number of people interested in attending the event to whatever you want to ask them during the registration to help with the organisation: do they have food allergies? How will they get to the event? This tool is very useful but use it with care and ask only what you really need to know and will benefit the attendees.
You can also use your access control system to analyse the crowd at the event at any given point and understand how that crowd is interacting with the event thereby measuring event engagement.
Use content and social media marketing
Using social media and content marketing channels can come as one of the best marketing strategies for measuring event engagement.
When the audience engages with your content and events, they tend to check your social media channels. The more traction you’re getting on your social media channels, the better your reach, and the higher the audience engagement in an event. You better be ready to create branded social media posts so people can easily identify your events and other announcements.
Measure the lead generation results
One of the major goals in any of your events is lead generation. The better the lead generation results the higher your audience engagement. So, when you measure the lead generation results, you’re directly measuring audience engagement.
Your current event is at the same time a way to promote the next edition of your event. If they are engaged, attendees will talk about it to their friends and family, and on social media! Don’t forget to take advantage of this.
Conduct a survey
Conducting a survey is the most direct technique of measuring event engagement as you’re directly asking the audience their experience of the event and it shows how well they interacted during the event.
You can get feedback forms or create any kind of survey or interview for the audience to measure event engagement in the most straightforward manner.
Are you ready to make your next live event engaging?
So, this was all about event engagement and the ways to measure it. You need just a few simple tricks to measure event engagement and you’re good to go with making your events a huge success.
Are you planning an event and want to make the most out of it? Check how ticketing, access control and cashless can help with your event’s success.
