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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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 9:45 am and is filed under Market Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.