Are You Attending Events Out of Habit or Intention? What is your marketing event ROI?
- Brooke Daavison
- Jun 29
- 2 min read
Most businesses could not tell you, with any confidence, what their marketing events are actually worth. They know roughly what they cost, which ones they enjoy, and have a general sense of whether it felt like a good room. But the actual return on investment, contact by contact and opportunity by opportunity, tends to be a gap nobody has properly filled.
That is not laziness. It is a structural problem. Events are one of the few commercial activities where the impact plays out slowly, across months of relationship building, and through a CRM system that was probably not set up with event tracking in mind. The result is that decisions about which events to keep attending, which to drop, and where to invest more budget tend to come down to gut feel rather than data. And gut feel, while useful, is not the same as knowing.
Working with a law firm on exactly this question produced a finding that surprised even the people attending these events. When pipeline value was analysed by contact, broken down event by event, the pattern that emerged was the opposite of what most people would expect. The largest events, the ones with hundreds of attendees and significant sponsorship costs, were producing the lowest value per contact. Regional Chamber Dinner, 18 contacts, generated £13,000 of pipeline per person. Legal Tech Summit, 142 contacts, came in at £2,700. The smaller, more targeted events were delivering contacts that actually converted, and the big ones were generating volume without the same commercial return.
That kind of clarity changes how a business makes decisions. It does not mean walking away from larger events entirely, because not all value is quantifiable and there is something genuine about showing up, being visible, and maintaining a reputation in your market. Some events are worth attending for reasons that will never appear neatly in a pipeline report, and commercially mature businesses understand that. But it does mean being intentional about it, knowing which events you are attending for brand reasons and which ones you expect to generate real pipeline, and tracking both accordingly.
The practical starting point is straightforward. In your CRM system, or even in a well-maintained spreadsheet, create a tag or campaign field for each event you attend. Every contact you meet, whether they are new or someone you are reconnecting with after a few years, gets that tag added. Every opportunity discussed, at any stage, gets the same. Reconnecting with existing contacts is just as commercially valuable as meeting new ones, and it is just as easy to lose track of. The point is that when the data exists, you can run the analysis. When it does not, you are always guessing.
If you are currently attending events on habit rather than intention, the good news is that this is one of the quicker wins in commercial data. It does not require a new system, a big project, or months of work. It requires a clear process and the discipline to follow it. If you would like to talk through how to set this up for your business, feel free to get in touch.
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