Events are an excellent opportunity to build not only awareness, but also a better understanding of, and loyalty for, your brand. That’s why many associations, government agencies, and companies host trade shows, user conferences, seminars, road shows, and the like. In fact, according to a 2005 MarketingSherpa survey, in-person seminars and road shows are the number-one favorite lead-generation tactic of IT marketers.

On the flip side, events are an expensive marketing tactic and, if poorly planned and executed, can actually be detrimental to your organization’s brand and market perceptions.

The key to event success is to avoid planning in a vacuum. By utilizing post-event surveys to assess attendee satisfaction levels, you’ll gain the insights necessary to make your next event even better. Plan to survey attendees no more than a couple of weeks after the event so that their memories are still fresh. The survey instrument should cover several areas, including:

• Content, including the quality, relevancy, and effectiveness of the session topics, speakers, exhibitors, and hand-outs.
• Structure, including the duration of the event as well as the balance between speaker sessions, break-out sessions, exhibit floor time, and networking/social activities.
• Logistics, including the location, timing, registration process, event communications and literature, accommodations, meeting rooms, audio/visual aids, and so forth.

Those who have planned events know that few rarely go off without a hitch. Perhaps a meeting room is warm, the chicken sauce is cold, a speaker goes way over his allotted time, or the sound system squeals. Certainly, “stuff” happens. But the one area where mistakes are unacceptable is content. After all, that’s the main reason attendees show up and what truly reflects on your organization.

Smart marketers seek input via trade journal articles and customer/member conversations before planning content and speakers for a first-time event. And, they ensure they don’t make content promises in event marketing materials that they can’t deliver on. In fact, some marketers conduct surveys on-site to ensure the content is meeting expectations.

For example, using hand-held data collectors, Market Connections helped one client survey attendees immediately after educational sessions. Within hours, the speakers used this feedback to improve their presentations, which were being repeated throughout the week-long event. As a result, quality of the content and speakers was rated extremely high in the post-event survey.

Indeed, event research is well worth the effort. It’s the only way to ensure you meet the expectations of attendees – and keep them coming back again and again.

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We’ve emphasized in numerous Research IT articles the importance of conducting brand awareness benchmarking studies to gauge the holistic impact of your integrated marketing campaigns. But, how do you measure the effectiveness of individual tactics? Clearly, with lead-generation activities like direct mail, e-mail blasts, and trade shows, you can employ a closed-loop system to calculate each program’s response rate, cost per lead, and sales conversion rate.

But, unfortunately, such an approach can’t be applied to paid advertising – a tactic that typically doesn’t drive leads but is nonetheless very important for building, changing, or maintaining a differentiated brand identity.

That’s where ad recall studies come in to play. This type of research measures the effectiveness of creative executions against message strategies and also purchased media outlets against the desired target audience.

We’ve helped some clients conduct ad recall studies every six months so that, if necessary, they can tweak their creative and/or media buys to improve effectiveness before their full annual budgets are expended. Among other things, we ask survey participants – which are aligned with the target audience of the ads – when and where they first heard of the company as well as their top-of-mind perceptions of its strengths, weaknesses, and offerings. We also ask if they recalled specific ads and, if so, what they recalled about them and where they saw or heard them. Even if they can’t remember if or where they saw the ads, we know the campaign is working if an acceptable percentage of respondents share perceptions that the advertising messages support.

For other clients, we incorporate ad recall questioning into their annual market awareness studies, which provides excellent input for planning the next year’s ad campaign.

Advertising can be an extremely effective branding tool. But, it’s also an expensive one. Ad recall studies will ensure you maximize the return on this important investment.