Measure return on marketing investment (ROMI)

The Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC) offers advice and financing opportunities for small and medium-sized businesses. For over 75 years, BDC is devoted to support entrepreneurs in all industries and at all stages of development in Canada. Since 1944, over 56,000 entrepreneurs have been supported with financing or advisory services.

As an important actor in Canada, BDC attends several events as exhibitor to both promote and support the local entrepreneurial scene. However, events with large visibility and opportunities require a significant presence – like the Collision conference.

Collision is the “fastest growing tech conference in North America” according to Inc. Magazine. After three editions in New Orleans, Collision moved to Toronto in May 2019, a first in Canada. Organizers of Collision, also organise Web Summit in Lisbon and RISE in Hong Kong.

BDC’s challenge

For its first participation at Collision, BDC settled on an open booth design to facilitate talks, encourage investor meetups and welcome entrepreneurs. Evaluating the Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) of a new event is difficult as there is no benchmark for evaluation. The perception of success is mostly based on the level of expectation held by stakeholders.

In order to get an unbiased evaluation of their participation at Collision, BDC asked EATech to answer the following questions:

• What is the overall visibility for the BDC brand at the show?
• How effective is the messaging? Are these effective at getting entrepreneurs to engage with the BDC staff and invited investors?
• How long are visitors engaging at the booth?
• Are visitors coming back?

The gathered evidence is to be delivered as an in-depth report which will be used as a reference benchmark for all future events.

Solution by Event Analytics

Event Analytics Technologies was mandated by BDC to evaluate the Brand-Reach and Engagement-Reach of their booth.

To achieve this, Event Analytics Technologies equipped the BDC booth with sensors used for indoor activities. Through EATech’s expertise, multiple evaluation parameters were defined to accurately measure:

• The average time spent by visitors in the vicinity of the booth
• The average time spent by visitors in the booth
• The overall reach of the BDC branding
• The effectiveness of BDC’s staff at converting a passing visitor (aisle) into an engaged visitor spending time at the booth.
• The number of times visitors saw any BDC messaging/branding
• The overall daily traffic trends during a three day long show.

Difficulties faces

A connectivity outage on the second day rendered the Collision indoor internet network (WiFi) to become unresponsive. Although the connectivity was restored within a few hours, it shows that despite the best effort to provide reliable connectivity, there is no fail-proof solution for event organizers.

Since this episode, Event Analytics Technologies decided to provide to its clients only equipment with 4G connectivity and battery by default. This to ensure clients like BDC, that no matter what happens with the local connectivity, the monitoring equipment will continue to operate.

Results

Throughout the show, the BDC event team was able to visualize in real time their performance at Collision. In addition, EATech’s post-show report provided the team with clear insights about the effectiveness of activities, setting a company wide baseline for the evaluation of future events.

At Collision, a tech-oriented conference, we measured for BDC the total Brand-Reach accounting for the overall visibility of the brand, and the Engagement-Reach to reflect the overall interest of visitors. Both metrics are key indicators of ROI/ROMI achieved by BDC at the show.

Along with daily trends, the average time spent and traffic profile provided insights on the effectiveness of the activities to engage visitors. As a first-timer at Collision, BDC now holds metrics to shape expectations and event strategies for other and future events.

With multiple events in Canada, BDC will now integrate event analytics as part of their event evaluation process nationwide.