For event marketers or any business unit organizing events, the main motive is to satisfy the attendees. The event's success, be it virtual, in-person or hybrid, depends upon multiple event strategies, but the key factor is to delight those who choose to attend your event.
The pandemic has led to a sudden surge in webinars, workshops and virtual events. In order to stay in the league, all B2B and many B2C businesses have weaved events and event marketing into their marketing strategies. Though most of us may be ready with a palette full of different event ideas, we may still wonder what the major but minute details we tend to miss are. Well, it is extremely important to measure event attendee satisfaction for all your events. It helps you to know which ideas and techniques helped to capture the attention of the event attendees and which ideas failed to do so. Measuring event attendee satisfaction leaves a lot of room for growth, evaluation and ideation.
The problem of coming up with the best event strategies for your business becomes easier if you consider evaluating quantitative and qualitative variables of event attendee satisfaction for all your events.
Often, people tend to confuse audience engagement with attendee satisfaction, but these are two completely different terms. In terms of execution, the former helps the latter. The key difference is that varying audience engagement tactics help create a more robust and insightful event attendee satisfaction analysis.
Without further ado, let's get to understand the KPIs for measuring event attendee satisfaction.
1 KPIs to Measure Event Attendee Satisfaction
Gauging the extent of the success of your events and measuring event attendee satisfaction will elevate your status as an event marketer or a business. The ways in which you can understand the level of attendee satisfaction are as follows:
1.1 Repeat Registrations
This is one of the most basic guides for knowing that your attendees keep an eye on your events. You know you successfully organized and hosted an event when your event attendees repeatedly show up for your upcoming events.
It is important to note that measuring your event's success does not necessarily have to be based upon the number of repetitive registrations in every event. Instead, it is just important to track the data of the attendees who register for your event multiple times.
You should always keep track of the attendees who show up for your events more than once because building a loyal customer base is important. In the case of events, an attendee base will be advantageous for your business and events.
One efficient marketing strategy to ensure that your attendees come back to you would be to offer discounted tickets upon registering or to give some other goodies during the event. Rewarding your loyal attendee base will help ignite the chain of word-of-mouth publicity of your brand, business and events.
1.2 Monitoring Live Social Media Activity
Social media is at the top of all kinds of marketing strategies because news and posts are immediately disseminated over social media platforms. Therefore, it is important to create pre-event and post-event buzz before and after your events, respectively.
When it comes to measuring event attendee satisfaction, social media plays an important role here, too. The ideal way to go about this would be to set up a social media or an engagement/networking hub where you can collect all content that is related to your event and is being circulated amongst the attendees. Capturing real-time sharing and buzz indicates how much engagement you were able to create via your event.
You can track the number of likes, tweets, and shares that your event content and posts have received pre-event, in real-time and post-event.
You can try to create marketing policies via monitoring social media activity. For example, you can tell your event attendees to share your event posts, content and reviews across their social media accounts and give discounts or a free ticket to an event to the attendee who has received the most likes by posting/promoting your content.