Only a few companies are seeing decent returns from
attending events, according to a new ranking of 100 brands based on the ROI
they achieve from their in-person strategy and budget.
On a scale of one – 10, the top-ranking company, Pecan AI, achieved 7.2, followed by the next top five brands: Inmar (6.7), Calendly
(6.6), Signifyd (5.9), InMobi (5.6), and Riskified (5.3).
Nobody outside the top six scored more than 5, while more
than half (56%) of the brands analysed by Vendelux, the first AI-powered event
intelligence platform, scored less than 3.
For its inaugural Event ROI Index, Vendelux
leveraged its proprietary 65M+ data points from over 160,000 events to quantify
the business value of leading enterprise brands’ events strategies.
It sought to identify the variables that most impact event
ROI and to determine areas for optimisation with regards to in-person event
attendance, sponsorship, and speaking engagements.
“Today it’s clear that no B2B brand’s event strategy is 100
per cent perfect, yet these strategies are built by teams that have been
drastically underserved by technology that’s purpose-built to bring
transparency and quantification to their efforts”
“In a complex world of enterprise buyers, where digital and
in-person touchpoints all matter to closing a deal, events are truly the
foundation of those relationships and of the communities these brands rely on
for growth,” said Alex Reynolds, CEO and co-founder, Vendelux.
“Each event a brand invests in - whether sending one sales
person or having a sponsorship with a massive booth - serves as the glue that
binds together various channels’ efficacy to contribute to a lead becoming a
customer.
“We have worked tirelessly to collect, clean, qualify, and analyse
the industry’s first dataset looking across hundreds of thousands of events and
millions of data points to truly understand the ROI from companies’ strategies
as everyone from event marketers to sales leaders, to CFOs and CMOs seek this
visibility as they plan their budgets.”
Key takeaways for B2B brands from the Event ROI Index
include:
Strategic Importance: ROI doesn’t always scale with
spend and meaningful ROI can be derived from the right small or even regional
events strategy that hypertargets prospects. Just because everyone else invests
in a conference doesn’t make it the right event for your business outcomes. The
more unique a strategy, the more effective it can be.
Precision and Insight: precision around individual
event investments and measuring granular ROI is possible today. Anecdotal or
experiential reasoning for keeping an event on your annual plan is no longer
sufficient. Numbers matter to everyone inside of an organization now more than
ever, and with greater precision will come greater respect and, with it,
potential budget.
Room for Improvement: Top brands in the study maxed
out at a score of 7.2 out of a possible 10; to derive greater ROI from events,
enterprise brands should focus on gaining a better understanding of where their
strategies fail to ensure they stand out from the crowd.
The 100 enterprise brands included in the Index were
selected based on an analysis of the events they invested in or attended and
factors of their presence at those events including: volume of a brand’s
potential customers attending, volume of competitors attending, on-stage
speaking opportunities, ticket costs, sponsorship costs, attendee seniority,
attendee industry, number of employees attending, event budget, and more.
Vendelux’s machine learning models were used to analyse personas/predictive
attendees and normalize those across factors like company size.
Written By
James Lancaster
AMI editor James
Lancaster is a familiar face in the meetings industry and international
association community. Since joining AMI in 2010, he has gained a reputation
for asking difficult questions and getting lost in convention centres. Proofer, podcaster, and panellist - in his spare time, James likes to walk,
read, listen to music, and drink beer.
