How to Define and Achieve Your Event Marketing Goals

event marketing goals valoso

Creating event marketing goals and objectives is an essential step in the event planning process. Without event goals, how will you know the impact of events in your marketing strategy? Follow the tips below to establish and achieve your marketing goals for event planning.

Why You Should Use Event Marketing Goals

event marketing goals

Goals of event marketing include your objectives for using events in your marketing strategy, or in other words, your purpose for implementing experiential marketing. Have you created a plan to achieve by hosting an event? What are your objectives for marketing that event? What do you consider success?

Marketers give many reasons for using experiential marketing in their strategy. Events provide easy publicity to a business, as well as increased promotional opportunities. They open the door for partnerships and sponsorships. Above all, events boost audience interaction and get customers connected to your brand:

17 Creative Ways to Boost Audience Interaction at Events

However, every business has its own specific goals for event planning and marketing. To make your goals stand out, they must align with your mission statement and overall marketing plan. Your event goals and objectives should give an edge to your business marketing strategy.

Some event goals examples include:

  • Increase sales of X product by 15%.
  • Invite 25 targeted guests.
  • Gain 50 new Facebook followers.
  • Develop one B2B relationship.
  • Grow brand recognition in X location.

Defining Your Goals

SMART business goals can help you properly organize your thoughts and define your goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely goals. If you don’t know where to start with your goals of event planning, we recommend tackling the five aspects of SMART goals in an unconventional order—RAMTS, if you will.

1. Relevant

event marketing goals

First and foremost, you must create a relevant goal. No goal is worthwhile if the end result doesn’t mean anything to your business. What does your business need right now? What does it want? How can experiential marketing help achieve these objectives?

Perhaps your business is really lacking that human connection to the consumer. Your goal can involve growing your relationship with your customers and potential customers, as well as establishing your brand as a genuine, personal company.

2. Achievable

If your tech startup of three years wants to be the next Intel, think again. We are not trying to dampen your ambitions. However, creating an unfair, unfounded goal is an ineffective waste of your time.

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.” – James Cameron

You can certainly be ambitious in your event marketing goals, but make sure they are actually possible to achieve for your one-time, upcoming event. Aim high, and really stretch your company to make the most out of your event marketing opportunity. The more you put into it, the more you will get out of it.

3. Measurable

How will you know if you have achieved your goal if there is no way to measure it? Tracking the progress of your goal is essential to any goal-setting endeavor. If you find it difficult to quantify your goal, then they are not specific enough.

In the previous example, how could you use event goals analytics to measure your relationship with consumers? This all depends on where you connect with your supporters the most and how you define engagement.

For one business, a measurable goal may be to increase the duration of customer service chats. Another goal may be to grow responses from followers to Snapchat marketing campaigns. Or, the business may want to improve customer reviews on Yelp.

4. Timely

event marketing goals

During this part in event goal setting, you will want to set a deadline for accomplishing your goal. For the most part, the deadline will be the date of your event. However, all event marketing should be carried on after the event.

So, your goal may involve post-event marketing. Either way, set a date for accomplishing your goal within reason. This will help keep you on track and set reasonable goals for your event marketing campaign.

5. Specific

Adding specificity to your goal is what makes it worthwhile to your business. Your goals should always pertain specifically to your brand. Once you have come up with a relevant, achievable, measurable goal, tie it all together by writing it down in detail.

An example of a well-formed, specific goal is: “We will obtain 15 new Yelp reviews, each with five stars and positive brand feedback, from 15 different guests at our upcoming event.”

Plan to Accomplish Your Goals

event marketing goals

As per step #2, your goal is achievable. But how will you get there? In the example, how will you obtain those Yelp reviews? Develop effective strategies to accomplish your goals, then specify them in a list format.

To achieve the SMART goal above, your business could:

  • Have the speaker ask the audience to visit our brand on Yelp and write a review.
  • Provide handouts with our Yelp QR code asking guests to leave a five-star review if they enjoyed the event, and provide a customer support email if they did not enjoy the event.
  • Employ representatives to speak with guests and encourage them to write a review.
  • Create a contest or drawing at the event, with the entry requirement being writing a five-star review on Yelp.
  • Send customers an email with a link to your Yelp page after they make a purchase.

Consider reviewing a list of upcoming event trends to brainstorm creative strategies to implement in your event marketing goals:

11 Fresh Event Marketing Trends to Plan for in 2018

Tracking Your Success & Reevaluation Steps

After clearly defining your event marketing goals and your plan to achieve them, be sure to track your success. Reevaluation and revision is key to any dynamic company. If you want to be ahead of the game, critique your own strategy. This will improve your event marketing plan for next time and hopefully facilitate better results.

event marketing goals

We fell short of our goal. Determine what you could have done differently and reevaluate where your goals were. Was your goal too unrealistic or irrelevant, or did you fail to execute your goal?

We met our goal. Now, reevaluate your goal and decide if you reached your fullest potential. Could your goal have been higher? What did you actually gain by reaching your goal and was it worth it?

We exceeded our goal. From this experience, you can learn to set your goals much higher for next time. You can learn that your business is capable of a lot if you put effort into your marketing strategy. How can you create more challenging goals for next time?

Takeaway: Your Event Marketing Goals

Hopefully, this event marketing checklist has helped you developed a few event marketing goals to empower your strategy. The right goals can work wonders for your strategy.

If you want to jumpstart your event marketing, Valoso is your go-to partner. We can take your event marketing plan to the next level with curated data, informed strategies, and next-gen promotional content. Visit our homepage and fill out the contact form to get started.