Cost per meeting – the number organisers can finally put next to Google

Footfall is no longer a number organisers can sell against digital channels, according to an events leader.

Sharon Roessen, COO of Terrapinn, argues that the meeting is the only unit of event value that produces a figure a marketing director can compare with anything else they buy.

Terrapinn runs around 90 events a year – most of them somewhere between 3,000 and 30,000 attendees – which puts the matching problem at a scale no spreadsheet solves.

Sharon – who is an expert contributor to the Meetings Engine ebook – said: “It’s the one thing that AI can’t replicate – meeting face-to-face. So the more people we can get to meet and that we know that they have met, then you can get real ROI figures around that. 

“The second part of that is then it gives you real tangible ROI for exhibitors and what I call return on time for attendees. So you can get real measurable numbers out of that.”

Sharon added: “Proving ROI has always been a problem, particularly when you’re being pitched against digital platforms – the marketing spend – because we’re a marketing platform. We give access to a market. 

“So, if you go and put your money with Google or Meta or whatever and do digital advertising, you’re going to get cost per acquisition or cost per lead, or you’re going to get something off the back of that, or even just impression numbers.”

Attendee counts do not survive that comparison and rebook season is where the weakness shows.

Sharon added: “It’s better for the client and for us that we’ve got some real hard numbers behind what’s doing, where you can say, ‘You spend X and we know we delivered this number of meetings, so cost per meeting was equals this.’ How does that compare to other platforms? 

“Whereas we can do, ‘We know that this number of people scanned you,’ or whatever it is, but we have less control of that. 

“We don’t know what the conversation was; we don’t know how valuable it was. But if you sat down and had a 15-minute meeting with somebody, there’s a level of value.”

Research behind the Meetings Engine ebook shows the industry reaching the same conclusion, with 91% of organisers planning to introduce new meeting formats in the next twelve months and 82% treating those formats as a route to new revenue.

Nobody takes nonsense meetings

Sharon set out that the failure mode of a meeting programme is not too few meetings, it is meetings nobody wanted

She said: “It’s no good just getting a load of meetings either because, as a buyer, you don’t want to take nonsense meetings there. It’s got to be mutually beneficial. 

“So you’ve got to be able to tell both parties why they should meet; otherwise, the buyer is just not going to go and take a whole load of meetings because we’ve asked them to. In fact, that’s one of the biggest challenges within the meeting format.”

That is the job Sharon hands to AI – reading signals and intent to work out which pairings are worth putting in a diary, rather than filling one.

Attendee expectations have moved with it, from a list organisers used to withhold to an expectation of being told, in real time, which ten people in a hall of ten thousand are worth two days of anyone’s attention.

A total of 94% of organisers in the research identify buyer and visitor experience as the biggest prize in getting formats right and that expectation is what the figure is measuring.

Forcing serendipity

The objection to all of this is that structure kills the thing people love about live events.

Sharon said: “I don’t think it’s one or the other – I think it’s a mix of both. I think the bit that we can control is the meetings that we’ll arrange for you. The bit we can’t control, or that we can try to facilitate, is serendipity. 

“That’s through things like roundtables, meetups, dinners, or some form of curated networking that doesn’t even have to be curated. 

“But if you just took similar people in a room, that is curated but it’s not as formal as a meeting structure and is much easier to actually organise and orchestrate.”

She added: “It does sound like you’re contradicting. It’s like you forcing serendipity or tempting fate, but you’re putting the right people in a smaller room of a much bigger room and saying, ‘Hey, we think it’d be good if some of you met each other.'”

Small events inside big ones is the shape she keeps returning to – it feels accidental to the attendee and it is entirely deliberate on the organiser’s side.

Nobody tells a registration form the truth

Curation at that scale depends on knowing something real about the people being grouped, which is where Sharon has little patience for how the industry collects it.

She said: “There’s no point in asking people what they’re interested in because – I just registered for an event myself yesterday and I just ticked the first boxes going down because I wanted to get off the form, put my credit card in and move on. 

“There’s no point asking that because you’ll get nonsense. But AI can really help enrich and augment that data, find good signals and then suggest groupings to put people together.”

Her fix is to stop treating registration as the data-gathering moment at all.

Terrapinn is building towards a fast registration followed by a SaaS-style onboarding that learns about somebody as they go, rather than a black-box form that rewards whoever escapes it quickest.

The honest answer is we don’t know

Sharon set out that there isn’t one rule to establish which format actually performs and why.

She said: “I think the honest answer is we don’t know. We do 90 events and we haven’t got a set format across the whole business. We’ve got lots of ideas and we don’t have a way currently of looking at that.”

What she does trust is the roundtable, on 25 years of evidence rather than a dashboard – easy to sell, getting easier to run and genuinely liked by the people in the seats.

The reason it beats a one-to-one schedule is a matter of how failure looks.

One-to-one programmes work, in her reading, for events built around them from launch with the patience and budget to match and are punishing to retrofit onto a legacy show.

A total of 88% of organisers in the research point to exhibitor experience and lead generation as what formats have to fix and a shortfall against a promised meeting count damages exactly that.

Unbundling gold and platinum

The commercial consequence is a different sponsorship menu.

She said: “One thing we’ve done is unbundling. We used to have gold and platinum packages, but now you create your own package and buy where you believe there’s value. If you want to meet senior people, take a one-to-one meeting package. 

“If you want to discuss a topic as a thought leader, a roundtable or keynote would be great. Everyone’s got different priorities and objectives. It’s about our sales team matching their problem with the format that delivers the best solution.”

Deliverable formats also make the outcome forecastable, which is the whole point – 20 meetings sold and 20 meetings delivered gives a sponsor a cost per acquisition to hold against every other channel.