Does the concept of feedback still seem abstract to you?
This article discusses the importance of feedback, which is often overlooked and underutilized by event organizers. Today, with the advent of digital technology, gathering feedback from your audience is a simple process that can provide you with very accurate information.
Unlike other marketing methods, gathering satisfaction feedback is often linked to a "post-event" strategy, which takes place after the event itself. But in this article, we will show you that there are other possibilities, some of which are more effective. In any case, the feedback you gather can be used to provide you with ideas on how to approach your next events.
Feedback from your participants will enable you to find out:
If your communication beforehand was optimal, which channel was the most effective?
If your message was well received and understood by the guests
Which sessions worked best/worst
Which topics were most appreciated/which were missing?
The power and accuracy of feedback depend on how it is presented to your audience. The content of feedback must be tailored to the pre-determined intention, capabilities, and expectations of the company's objectives. To be effective, companies must take into account the limitations of criticism. The goal is to motivate the company to improve in a healthy way by listening to its stakeholders. And AppCraft is here to advise you on the best strategy to adopt.
With AppCraft's CRM platform, bring all your tools together in one place and create a seamless event experience for your attendees, guests, and exhibitors. You can seamlessly manage registrations, attendees, and content management.
There are several ways to gather feedback. Some methods will allow you to collect qualitative data, while others will be based on quantitative data.
Gathering qualitative data
A satisfaction survey will provide you with qualitative information. This form should be used to ask for specific information about the relevance of your content, the topics covered, the quality of your presentations, etc.
What is this for? To understand your audience and potentially segment them according to the topics and content covered. There are, of course, some essential keys to understanding return on investment (or ROI) from your B2B event, and this involves several things.
• Was your event well attended? Look at the number of sessions your audience attended and the total time spent on the platform.
• Which topics interested your audience the most? Which workshops had the largest audience? Did the topics of knowledge management and awareness-raising generate engagement?
• What held your participants back: by looking at the least opened content or the least viewed pages
• Who are your most engaged participants? You can follow up with these "hot" leads later
Collect quantitative data
Although the traditional method of sending out a post-event satisfaction survey is still widely used, there are other ways to gatherdata.
Through our various events, we have found that collecting satisfaction data during the event is very effective. We have therefore developed a "Hot Feedback" module to allow the audience to rate a session, workshop, or speaker live.
Now that you have defined the scope of your feedback strategy, it is time to move on to analyzing and interpreting the results obtained. Thanks to this data, you will be able to identify areas for improvement for future events you are planning. Then create a summary table. The aim is to identify the positive points and areas for improvement in order to make progress in organizing your future events.
The return on investment/success of your event depends on a concrete evaluation of your project based on feedback. The days of purely hedonistic events and the absence of measurement tools are over. Today, this operation must be effective and relevant. To do this, you have a set of tools at your disposal to measure the effectiveness of your operation. Don't hesitate to ask yourself how your event was perceived by participants, either through:
• a simple questionnaire for guests at small events
• a satisfaction survey for larger events immediate feedback interactions and impressions of your content
By adapting your event to make it engaging and fun, you can get more feedback.
As you now know, data is key to understanding your audience and generating a significant return on investment from your event. But simply having certain data is not enough. You need to use this feedback wisely.
Here are some different ways to interpret your feedback and use it to maximize your revenue:
• Offer targeted content to build lasting relationships with your guests: To have a long-term impact, you need to connect with your audience to turn them into an engaged community. Analyzing the content most viewed/downloaded by your audience will give you an idea of the interests of each of your leads/customers and allow you to refine your message for future follow-ups.
• Adjust the topics that will be covered at your next events: Asking your audience what topics interest them most will give you two advantages. First, you will benefit from a positive brand image; you will be seen as an organization that listens to its customers. Second, you will be able to respond exactly to your leads' expectations. And this last point can become a significant advantage for you if you use it correctly. Indeed, a company that offers relevant and personalized content to its customers is more likely to convert.
• Ask them when and how they would like to meet you next time: It may be a good idea to ask your participants about their availability and preferences for the format of your next event. Are they more interested in a digital format format? Business meetings or meetings with suppliers? Communication about your upcoming innovations? We must stop seeing events as an exclusively "push" communication tool. To engage your audience, you need to establish a dialogue and align yourself with everyone's expectations.
Ultimately, feedback is a powerful tool for understanding your audience and measure the impact of your professional event. But also, and above all, to achieve optimal ROI on your next major events. This can help organizers develop a better understanding of their audience and their own actions. However, the company must be able to collect, process, and, above all, use this information! Poor selection or interpretation of feedback metrics can have an unpredictable impact on expectations for future editions.
Now you know why and how to interpret feedback from your audience. All that's left to do is put it all into practice and combine these tips with the fundamentals of event planning in 2025.
