There is a million dollars of event growth connected to your current attendees.
In order to unlock it, you need referral marketing.
Why can referral marketing drive exponential growth for events? Because your future sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees are connected to your current event participants.
Referral marketing has many benefits — it’s the most effective B2B marketing tactic, word-of-mouth is the top recommendation method, and 81% of U.S. buyers are influenced by friends’ social media posts.
But not all referral marketing platforms are created equal and sometimes it’s incredibly hard to measure the value of new or different marketing channels and platforms.
The KPIs of Referral Marketing
We know you want acquisitions, and we all measure acquisitions, as you should. Unfortunately, acquisition metrics are notoriously difficult because it involves the assessing multi-touch attribution, last touch attribution, etc.
To really understand the value you are receiving from referrals, we recommend focusing on the KPIs and actions you want your participants to do — getting your participants to drive their connections to your event website through their referrals (referral clicks). You can easily verify these clicks through Google Analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, or other similar platforms.
By focusing on referral clicks you’ll get to know how many of your speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, and attendees have valuable connections, receive a referral and click on it.
What you can expect:
The Effectiveness of Referral Clicks with InGo
We love growing events. They are magical because we believe events bring people together, drive industries forward, help make the world a better connected, and more delightful place. Therefore, we are attuned to referral clicks because it’s the key for reaching your event goals.
As you can see this focus has paid off. In case studies from our customers, the results look like this:
Ultimately, InGo delivers 1.5-3 referral clicks per participant — a staggering number according to industry benchmarks. For an event of 10,000 participants, we’ll drive 15,000-30,000 of their qualified, valuable connections to your website — 5-10x more referral clicks than basic referral marketing software.
And, these people do become direct acquisitions. In fact, people are 4x more likely to convert when referred by someone they know. So these connections:
- Convert on-site more often because they know others attending
- Are 19% more likely to have a senior executive/decision-maker title
For event marketers looking to drive more growth, referral marketing should be a core strategy. While there are many referral marketing platforms out there making lofty claims, the key metric to focus on is referral clicks — the number of connections clicking through referral links to your event website.
When factoring in programmatic ad costs and channel management overhead, InGo’s referral clicks represent the most cost-effective way to drive high-quality event acquisitions. With an 80% increase in referral traffic over the past two years, InGo continues innovating to maximize the power of referral marketing for event marketers.
If you want to supercharge your event marketing performance, make referrals a focus by partnering with a platform proven to deliver unmatched volumes of high-converting referral clicks and visitors. The data shows the outsized impact on registrations, revenues, and ROI.
