ROI: How can you measure the success of your Hospitality Programme?

Inviting partners to a prestigious event is more than just an opportunity to spend a friendly moment in a special setting; it is also a business operation that must meet specific objectives. It’s not always easy to quantify the benefit to your company for every €1,000 invested in a Hospitality Pro-gramme… To combat this, it is important to define objectives and establish indicators upstream so that you can assess whether or not your goals have been achieved. Instead of ROI (Return On Investment) we should thus discuss “ROO” or Return on Objectives when measuring the success of your Hospitality Programme.

Here are some guidelines for estimating the success of your Hospitality Programme.

Set specific goals based on the target audience and the event

The key questions to remember when setting up your programme are:
Why? Know exactly what your expectations are: attracting new customers or retaining existing ones, in-creasing the referrals to your company, rewarding partners or employees, developing your reputation, etc. In other words, define your over-all objectives.
For who? Then determine who you will be targeting with this operation: customers, prospects, distributors, influencers, etc.
By whom? Finally, define who, internally, will manage the Hospitality Programme: general management, the sales or marketing departments, etc.

The answers to these three questions will determine the type of event (budget, schedule, services, etc.) around which you will organise a public relations operation, and the resulting objectives. As such, the Coupe de France football final is better suited to a banking group that wishes to invite its regional banks to support their teams, while the Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert held at Stade de France in July 2018 was better suited to inviting an audience of influencers for a brand that wishes to reach a Millennial target audience.

The best alternative to ROI: decide upstream on the indicators to be monitored

To assess the success of a Hospitality Programme, the best alternative to ROI is ROO.
OK, but how do you evaluate it? By creating a precise list of all the objectives you want to achieve. For each one, decide on one or more indicators that you can measure at the end of the event, for example: the occupancy rate, the company recall rate, the number of appointments made following this event, the increase in market share, the customer satisfaction rate, etc. For more specific examples, read the "Make Your Hospitality Programme a Success" white pa-per for a sample of a monitoring table that you can easily use.

After the event, assess whether your goals have been achieved!

Intuitively, we all know that these hospitality programmes can generate new sales and that they represent an opportunity to build a stronger relationship with your professional partners. Despite this fact, it is difficult to give precise ROI figures for a public relations event. However, this does not mean that it is impossible to measure the impact of these PR events on your company’s per-formance.

The objective monitoring table (mentioned above) will make it easier for you to determine which indicators have been partially or completely achieved. Of course, you can speak with the people who were present at the events to gather as much information as possible: the guests’ for their feel-ings about the event and your internal team for the customer referrals obtained, any possible con-tracts, practical actions completed, etc.

With over 20 years of experience in hospitality, Stade de France supports all its customers through its experts in the field, teaching kits, training and personalised follow-up to optimise their ROI and ROO.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with them to build your Hospitality Programme together.