The ROI of Meetings
MPI and its associates have just published research that "proves" that meetings deliver the highest ROI among all marketing initiatives. http://meetingsreview.com/news/view/10258
The research, while clearly more marketing than science, raises some interesting questions. First, how should ROI be measured for meetings and events? (For this research, the pollsters asked marketing exec which marketing approach delivered the best ROI -- and voila! Proof!) The easy stuff to measure (like "satisfaction") is often what gets measured first, and those early measures often then drive decision-making as an organization moves forward. The most important things to measure (like "business impact") are a lot trickier. How can you isolate the impact of one meeting or event in a company's quarterly earnings, for example? Just because it's difficult, however, doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
How can we more effectively measure the ROI of meetings? About.com offers a nice overview of a more strategic approach to measuring event ROI. And to be fair, each company that organizes events does so for different reasons. A meeting might be "high-value" if it saves cost over the previous year's event through better negotiations. But again, meetings are held for a reason - in theory, that reason should be tied to a company's strategy.
Back to the MPI survey -- "33% of respondents say they will move from event marketing to experience marketing in the next 12 months." Shouldn't events BE experiences? I know there's a technical distiction between event- and experience-marketing, but we've been trapped too long into a model of what an "event" can be. More engagement. More interaction. More real work! It can be done.
The research, while clearly more marketing than science, raises some interesting questions. First, how should ROI be measured for meetings and events? (For this research, the pollsters asked marketing exec which marketing approach delivered the best ROI -- and voila! Proof!) The easy stuff to measure (like "satisfaction") is often what gets measured first, and those early measures often then drive decision-making as an organization moves forward. The most important things to measure (like "business impact") are a lot trickier. How can you isolate the impact of one meeting or event in a company's quarterly earnings, for example? Just because it's difficult, however, doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
How can we more effectively measure the ROI of meetings? About.com offers a nice overview of a more strategic approach to measuring event ROI. And to be fair, each company that organizes events does so for different reasons. A meeting might be "high-value" if it saves cost over the previous year's event through better negotiations. But again, meetings are held for a reason - in theory, that reason should be tied to a company's strategy.
Back to the MPI survey -- "33% of respondents say they will move from event marketing to experience marketing in the next 12 months." Shouldn't events BE experiences? I know there's a technical distiction between event- and experience-marketing, but we've been trapped too long into a model of what an "event" can be. More engagement. More interaction. More real work! It can be done.
posted by Jay Smethurst at
12:10 PM
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