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Hosting an event to market your business is a great way to gain publicity and connect with potential partners and customers.  When doing events for marketing purposes it is imperative to collect crucial event data, which will prove useful for future analysis.  Data analytics are becoming an important key to understanding and reaching consumers, therefore, making it a crucial for all businesses to understand.

Plan Out the Event Data You Want to Measure

Measure event data
Before you begin planning your event think about the type of event data you want to track.  Whether it’s the number of people who attend the event verses the number of people who were invited. Or a itemized satisfaction rating. Every data point can be useful.  Determining the type of data that will yield the most useful results for your business is important.  Once you know the data you want to measure, create a plan to effectively gather this information.
You should plan to collect data before, during and after your event.  Create an email, survey or social media post before the event, so you have them ready to be sent out immediately after the affair.  With each event you may modify your method of collection, so take the time to gauge which platform works best for you and which methods allow you to effectively collect the data most important to you.
 

Gathering the Event Data 

Event data people
 
Keep track of the number of people who are invited to the event and later compare it to the number of people who attended.  To those who were invited but did not attend, send out a survey asking why they didn’t come to the event. Providing specific answers like: “scheduling issues” or “I wasn’t interested in the event”, as well as open-ended questions can help you analyze what is important to the potential attendee for future affairs.
Another metric to track prior to your event is how people are finding out about your event.  You can provide a survey via email or social media to those who bought tickets to the event asking them how they heard about it in addition to asking them at the point of purchase. Whether it was through your website, social media or a third party, it is important to know in order to help hone your marketing concentrations in the future.
During the event, social media is a fast and easy way for you to gather information from your attendees.  You can create a specific social media hashtag for the event and ask attendees to share posts from the event using the hashtag.  With hashtag tracking tools such as HashTracking.com, you can see, in real time, how many people posted using the hashtag and how many engagements it received.
After the event is complete, your may send out another survey to determine the success of the event.  Ask specific questions to know what worked for attendees and what wasn’t as impressive. Be specific.  The better the question; the better the feedback. What information will be most helpful to your business? Is the customer closer to buying your product? Do they understand your business and how you can help them? Was the buying process easy and clear? Create questions that help you answer these critical questions. If you had something to sell at your event and receive feedback that the payment methods were not robust enough, you have that specific feedback to improve the attendees experience during your next event.
 

What You Can Learn From the Event Data

Monitoring event data
The previous suggestions are only a small example of the type of data you can gather. It’s a great place to start if you are wondering about the type of data to begin to collect.  Of course, the type of information that will be useful can entirely depend on your industry and the type of information you need in order to market your business most efficiently.
The method in which you gather this data will also be determined by the type of customer you want to attract.  Take the time to understand the best method to measure data at your events, as it will be well worth it in the end.  The data you collect can tell you so much about how your business or brand is received by the public and how effective your marketing strategy really is.  Take the time to gather the best data for your company’s future marketing needs and your future event objective will be met more efficiently.
 
Read More:
4 Event Marketing Tips for Business Owners
4 Ways to Effectively Evaluate Your Event Performance and Find Scopes for Further Improvement