As managers continue to tighten travel budgets, individuals are weighing the pros and cons of attending certain events. As a result, event marketers must work especially hard to prove to attendees that selecting their event is a wise decision. Even event marketers are feeling the heat from their own companies to prove ROI on an event.

To accomplish both goals, event marketers must carefully plan during pre-event stages. Making sure those attendees first choose and then find value in an event means they will come back next year—justifying to those holding the purse strings that big-event budget investments are worth it. So, before an event even begins, marketers need to survey potential and previous attendees, monitor social networks closely, establish an effective pre-event marketing strategy and institute a system to determine metrics.

Checking in with attendees during the initial planning stages will help ensure that when they arrive at your event, their experiences will be as useful to them as possible.

What that means is polling attendees pre-event, asking what they want out of the event, and then taking action, said Steve O'Malley, VP-general manager of Maxvantage, a strategic meetings company. “You have to be open to their suggestions and willing to act on them.” Otherwise, marketers risk providing unnecessary or inappropriate sessions, inviting speakers who are not ideal or generally not catering to the audience.

According to Kirsten Edmondson Wolfe, VP-marketing at Deltek Inc., an enterprise software company, survey questions don't need to be too specific. When conducting pre-event surveys, her team first decides what they want to accomplish with the event; then, they develop questions that will help them decide if their goals are the same as those of their attendees.

“From our perspective, we want to know if we are hitting the mark in terms of content. It's about relationship marketing and making sure our customers get what they want,” she said. “The questions are general. They're directional, not specific. For example: "Of these five things, which is the most important you want to learn?' ”

According to Ian McGonnigal, senior VP-client strategy and brand performance at experience marketing company Jack Morton Worldwide, one of the most important ways to plan for an event is to look at social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and blogs that follow your industry. People there who influence your attendees can be great resources for measuring the needs of the community (and also useful for dispersing information about an upcoming event).

Understanding who influences your attendees takes research, he said. “Identify the digital watering holes where your audiences are already.” Once you've done that, he said, participate in the conversation. Comment on blogs, post Facebook comments and send @ replies on Twitter. Establish a presence, and be an active member of the community.

Echoing McGonnigal, Neal Thompson, director of strategic technologies at Maritz Travel, a meeting and event travel agency, said it's important to be careful about how social buzz is allowed to influence the event. “With all feedback and input, you have to take it with a grain of salt and be wary of the context,” he said. “Are the people discussing your event decision-makers or just social participators and not your target audience? You have to weigh that to see if it's reflective of a larger perspective or is it just generating buzz that's not necessarily indicative of a larger voice.”

To help with that task, Thompson said, there are many new social measurement tools available to follow what's going on in the digital space such as Klout, Kred, PeerIndex and Social Chiefs. “There are a lot of reporting sites that you can subscribe to and monitor what's being said about your event,” he said. “Get the voice of the participant, direct surveys, research tools and monitoring to understand the perception of the event.”

Effective pre-event marketing can help in drawing attendees, said Deltek's Edmondson Wolfe. Using event marketing materials to show people the benefits they will receive from attending is important, she said.

“People attend something like this because of the content provided,” she said. “At the end of the day, they're customers and users, and you need to give them content that makes it worth their while.”

In addition to announcing the event on social networking sites and sending emails to customer and client databases, she suggested creating incentive programs within the sales team that encourage them to invite their customers to attend upcoming events. When it comes to marketing her events, Edmondson Wolfe said sales associates who invite the most customers to the event are then allowed to attend the event themselves.

Once you've convinced people to come to your event, you must continue to prove to your company that the event investment is a sound one. According to Jack Morton's McGonnigal, the focus on return on investment is even stronger now in a still struggling economy. “What gets measured gets funded,” he said. “If you can't justify through measurements, events fall by the wayside.”

In a 2011 update to its annual “Site Index,” the Site International Foundation, an association of meetings professionals, found 79% of survey respondents said the need to prove return on investment as well as return on objectives is increasing. In addition, 67% of respondents agreed that the requirements to measure both will increase over the next one to three years. (The online survey, released in August, drew responses from 73 association members.)

And that means before an event even begins it's important for marketers to have a measurement plan in place. Decide what the goals of the event are, what measurements will help determine those goals were met and how they are going to be measured throughout the event.

Deltek's Edmondson Wolfe said that, before an event begins, her team looks at historic data and metrics to see how they might affect any decisions going forward. When the metrics plan is complete, it does not consist of simply looking at how many people attended, she said. “Instead of saying, "Look at all the leads we brought in,' we look at the influence we had on the overall deal size and reducing the sales cycle.”