In the world of B2B events, success hinges on much more than simply gathering people in a room. As per our trends report, today’s attendees are hyper-focused on finding tactical value at an event. Hence, the key to making these events truly transformative lies in the feedback loops you design.

In this article, Alex Temple, Senior Corporate Relations Manager at Explori and also a PADI-certified diving instructor will help us ‘dive’ into the nitty gritty of all things feedback.

This is a must-read if you’re looking to design feedback loops that can unlock the full potential of your events.

Let your event objective be your guide

One of the key factors to designing a solid feedback loop is to identify the goal behind your event. Why are you having the event? What do you want to help your attendees achieve through it?

Once you answer these questions, your approach to designing feedback will be more focused and aligned to your event.

“So I think the first thing would be to think about your objectives, design your questions around how we can understand how people have met the objectives that we want them to meet and then designing the survey from there and cutting out things that don't actually matter.” says Alex.

Analyze your event metrics from a holistic point of view

While popular customer experience metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS) are important to track, they need to be viewed with context. Firstly, getting an idea of the current benchmark can help you better understand your NPS. Secondly, it helps to dig into the score and see how many attendees have voted for a particular score - this will help you better improve your events.

Alex illustrates this point with a good example. “So let's have a look at the people who scored six, let's have a look at their comments and if we can bump them up next year into your seven and eight, you know, and your sevens and eights and nines and tens, then all of a sudden you've got this massive switch swing upwards as a positive NPS.”

Talking about having a more complete understand of feedback, he states, “Use NPS as part of a suite of metrics that measure every aspect or different aspects of the event experience and then kind of bring those together so that you can actually look at it from a holistic viewpoint.”

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How the 5-step feedback loop methodology can help you get started

For event marketers who are thinking of incorporating feedback into their event strategy, a great place to start is by following the feedback loop methodology, which Alex breaks into five clear steps.

‍Want better feedback? Always close the loop

When it comes to collecting feedback from attendees, involving them in the process of building their experience can have a significant impact on the quality and honesty of the feedback received. By giving them a sense of ownership in the process, attendees are more likely to provide thoughtful and insightful feedback that can help improve the overall event experience.

To this end, Alex stresses the importance of closing the loop with your audience. “The way to drive response rate and drive engagement with surveys and feedback is to complete that feedback loop.  Once you have decided that you're going to make a change based on what your audience said, tell your audience that that's what you're going to do, don't hide from it.”

So as you see, measuring your events isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have! By showing the value of our events, B2B marketers can secure more budget, create better experiences, and propel businesses forward. 

Prefer to consume your content via audio? Head to our podcast episode with Alex!