In recent years, the availability of digital tools such as web analytics and marketing automation has provided greater visibility into marketing performance. As a result, today’s CMO is under increasing pressure to deliver ROI and that extends to their investment in sponsorship and event marketing.

Studies by trade show marketing firms have shown that up to 50% of business owners and marketing managers don’t measure event ROI. Overcoming this requires a disciplined approach to your event marketing.

For sponsorship and event marketing professionals, demonstrating ROI begins with tracking lead capture and attribution from events and sponsorship all the way through the sales pipeline to revenue.

Here are some tips that we recommend to get started:1. Set clear, quantifiable goal(s) for each field marketing event2. Involve your Sales leadership early and often in the goal setting exercise for shared

buy-in (after all, Sales will need to attend the events to network for sales leads)3. Ensure your event and sponsorship marketing team(s) and your motorsport partner

marketing team understand the goals and that a reporting structure is established4. Since the focus of any field marketing event is making connections, capture every

interaction in a CRM database (pre-registration conversations, registration data, at-event conversations, post-event communications)

5. Use your phone’s voice recorder to summarize key takeaways from sales conversations and input these insights to your CRM records

6. Be sure that your CRM Lead Source field (standard in Salesforce.com) is configured so that the pick list values in the field to reflect your unique event types (it is critical to use a consistent event naming taxonomy for reporting accuracy)

7. Consider creating an additional custom field that allows additional data to be captured about the specific event (year, location, etc.)

8. Use your CRM mobile app to capture real-time event conversations to avoid losing business cards or conversation details days after the event

9. Aggregate event leads from individual events by use of tags (standard in Salesforce.com) to track aggregate performance tracking and ease of reporting

10. Establish a reporting process with your Sales team to track the progress of event-sourced leads through the sales pipeline (e.g. conversion rates to opportunities won)

11. Measurement is key to success. Consider customer lifetime value (LTV) to determine customer profitability from your events as compared to other marketing tactics

12. Collaborate with your Sales team to calculate sales close rates, average revenue size, and average profit margin between events to compare results

13. Use the sales close rates, revenue, profit data to help you determine where to allocate your funds to maximize ROI

14. Use LTVs calculation to guide how much you can afford to invest to acquire a new customer

15. Get predictive - group all of the leads from one event using their tag, then divide the total profit by the amount of leads to predict how much each new trade show customer is worth

16. Avoid the last-click trap - measure assisted attribution where your events or sponsorship were a contributing touch point to a lead or sale (remember: your event was one of many touch points that led to capturing a lead and converting them into a customer)

17. Use campaign tracking (such as Google UTM tags) to track registration landing pages 18. Compare results across different field marketing events 19. Test different event formats to determine which works best for a given business goal20. Regularly solicit feedback from prospects, customers and your sales team for

improvement

A New Age of AccouNtAbility

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Motorsport Marketing Checklist:

20 Tips for Delivering Event ROI