7 Tips for measuring engagement at your next live event

7 Tips for measuring engagement at your next live event

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.

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