Actual article date: Jan 19, 2015

As event organisers, many times the utmost task is to convince CMOs that the show is a worthy investment of their sponsorship, exhibiting or attendence money.

The conventional way to justify investment for customers has until now, been one where customers can calculate their investment/cost to the show itself in a finance sheet provided by the organiser.

The issue with that is there is no true measurement of ROIs at events. How do we measure our customers’ success or ensure that their ROIs are met? We know that event ROIs have traditionally been really difficult to measure.

And in this year, ROI for your customers and CMOs is going to be an increasingly important and pertinent point that should be addressed. Here’s why as described in various cohort studies on CMOs perception. I am highlighting a few of them.

1. 93% of CMOs are increasingly pressured to show marketing ROIs.

- 2014 CMO Digital Benchmark Study by Leapfrog

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2. 50% of B2B marketing executives find it difficult to attribute marketing activity directly to revenue results as a means to justify budgets.

- Forrester/BMA joint survey

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3. 81% of marketers would increase spending on digital, mobile, and social channels if they could better track ROI.

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4. 79% say proving the business impact of marketing will be even more important in 2015.

- Adobe Digital Distress Survey

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5. Events is the LEAST of marketing channels that is co-related to marketing success.

- Adobe Digital Distress Survey

While most of these surveys have a digital angle to it, there is a general trend that customer ROIs must be more deeply measured at physical events, to keep up with the digital domain lead in marketing analytics.