In the latest Next Gen Edit, Amy Weir, marketing executive at Broadsword, draws on her degree research and experience of organising the agency’s Be Inspired series to explore how marketers can demonstrate the long-term value of events.
Experiential marketing is about standing out, cutting through and making a memorable impact in a crowded marketing landscape. As part of a multichannel approach, event marketing is emerging as an antidote to declining advertising effectiveness and a leading channel for marketing investment.
As a marketing professional, I took the apprenticeship route into events with Broadsword, which supported me through a three-year degree apprenticeship in digital marketing alongside my full-time role as marketing executive at the events agency. The experience will soon culminate in my graduation, after I received a first for my dissertation exploring the adoption of event marketing strategies by digital-first brands.
Since joining an events agency, I have been immersed in the exciting world of events, with opportunities to see client work spanning everything from film awards to leading business conferences, as well as attend countless industry events that showcase just how great this sector is. Yet my first experience of taking on an event planning role came when Broadsword adopted events as part of its own marketing strategy, launching the Be Inspired series.
The event series provides a forum for networking and knowledge exchange, with our audience returning in person every quarter to explore a new topic at a different venue. So far, we’ve hosted panels on everything our audience wants to know, from the science of storytelling to the power of play.
The latest event focused on how events can deliver beyond vanity metrics to demonstrate long-term ROI and meaningful engagement. It aimed to address a core challenge for any marketer adopting an experiential approach: many of those using event marketing struggle to measure or define its impact.
Engagement is often measured through short-term online metrics, and digital marketing makes this relatively simple. You can track clicks, conversions and campaign performance in real time, with dashboards providing instant visibility into what’s working and what isn’t. But when you have hundreds or thousands of people moving in and out of an event for different reasons and attending different sessions, how do you measure its impact and attribute conversions to a single touchpoint?
Our panellists emphasised that events aren’t designed simply to generate immediate leads, but to build relationships, trust and long-term brand resonance. It is therefore up to us to reframe their importance for budget holders and prove that, as well as attracting audiences, an event has influenced customer behaviour and business outcomes.
While research shows that a brand-building approach can have a greater effect on sales uplift than a sales-driven approach, we need to focus on measuring long-term growth.
For example, using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help measure relationship growth through feedback, while customer journey profiles enable event planners to take greater ownership of leads within a multichannel approach. Implementing context-driven metrics like these alongside vanity metrics allows you to demonstrate real business impact, even when the evidence isn’t purely numerical.
Event planners often talk about the success of their events based on the buzz and authentic feeling in the room, and Be Inspired is no different. But when it comes to quantifying this behavioural data, the use of technology was a major talking point. The future of event measurement could include tracking movement and analysing emotions using cameras to understand how live experiences influence behaviour.
What I took away from planning and attending this event is that events aren’t simply a one-off activity. They form part of a multichannel campaign that builds your brand over time, creating meaningful interactions that can’t always be fully captured by performance metrics.
As marketers, we need to shift the conversation from measuring what is easiest to measuring what matters. Attendance figures, social impressions and lead numbers all have their place, but they tell only part of the story. The real value of experiential marketing lies in the relationships it builds, the trust it creates and the long-term influence it has on customer perceptions and behaviour.