How to Generate an ROI on eSports Tournaments

Part Six: Managing and measuring your return on investment (ROI).

A lot is going into the planning, marketing and execution of your sports bar’s first eSports tournament. But once the dust settles and you’re assessing the results, you need to determine if your efforts brought success or did you just spin your wheels for no return. That’s why we thought a thorough review of what success looks like from multiple angles will help you stay on the path towards that success.

You must always remember that success is defined in marketing ultimately by sales, but that can’t tell the whole story. If your goal is to fight slipping sales, you might find that your sales stabilize, but don’t grow. Changing a downward trend could be seen as success, but sales growth might not be the accurate measure. The same is true if you are trying to replace an aging client base with a younger one. Your sales may remain the same, but because you are more sustainable, you have truly delivered a return on your investment.

No matter your goals, the next question must be answered first…

Is ROI Just About Making Profit?

ROI is one of the most misused terms in our industry. Successful marketing is already difficult enough to achieve, but connecting it to a measurable outcome, that confirms said success, can be even more elusive.

First let’s define what ROI means and how you measure it. When you choose to spend money on any aspect of your business, you assume there are costs and equally assume those costs will lead to an effect that will improve your business. That improvement can be in the way of increased sales, as easily as it can reduce expenses.

For example, a new walk-in cooler might be sufficiently more efficient that your energy costs drop and your food related losses reduce. These two measurements would give you the basis for determining the “return” on your investment.

Therefore we can conclude that either sales increases or cost decreases are measurements of success. However, you may measure return based on non-financial goals like developing a new demographic (young gamers) and that has to be measurable in some way. Whichever version of ROI you experience will be directly related to the program and its goals.

Ultimately, you are spending money and those goals have to be justified. Consequently, we have offered some examples of ROI explanations and suggested measurements based on achieving your goals. We have also created an ROI spreadsheet, you can use to calculate your own expected ROI and compare it to your actual.

How to Turn Goals into an Actual ROI Calculation

You may recall, in our last post, we discussed some of the typical goals that operators will cite as they embark on a new marketing effort. We will use these same goals to develop the metrics we need to prove our success, in building an eSports event program at your restaurant. Read through them for ideas on how to convert your goals into metrics that will measure your performance

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Increase Revenue. This is clearly the easiest approach to measuring success. This only requires knowing what prior sales were for both the same day of the eSports event and the overall sales at your restaurant. But let’s be real, sales here are important, but might be a longer term metric that won’t initially show much change. This is precisely why don’t want to use a defined metric early on in your program. If things to don’t go as planned, you might pull the plug when you see no measurable increase in sales.

Attract New Guests. This is likely the main goal when implementing an eSports program. This is, however, a very difficult metric to validate. Most of you don’t do a great job tracking your actual traffic numbers. Heck, there isn’t even a clear definition of what a “cover” is anymore, because the various ways guests access your restaurants. However, we can choose a metric that we do have confidence in and see where it leads.

However, you can track traffic without changing your systems by use your existing system for marking traffic. As long as you don’t change the way you gather that data, then anything you do to drive new visits will be reflected in it. From there you can take your cover average and see what incremental sales you have created. Using this method we can then calculate a variety of ROI calculations.

Stay Relevant. Sure this goal is a little nebulous, but not altogether impossible to track. It might require some extra sampling on your part or software that tracks folks based on their credit card use, like Upserve’s Guest Book product, which helps you know exactly who is visiting your restaurant. If your aim is drive younger business with tracking like that you would know how many folks in your target range are visiting. That may or may not translate into profit, but it is still a success promotion if it helps you sustain your business with the next generation.

Build Your Brand. Again, this is a fairly difficult goal to actually measure, but there are some ways that you might consider. The success of a brand is gauged as much by its sales as it is by the number of return visits they attract. A combination of these two values might represent a pretty solid look at the health of the brand, at least in a financial context. Start by considering the same type of tracking software we described above and determine if you are driving those visits using CRM. This sounds like an extra layer, but it makes perfect sense given the context impotenciastop.com.

If that sounds overwhelming, then you can also use your loyalty program as a gauge. Make a point of using it to accompany your eSports program. Identify a program you can implement just for your gaming guests and see how many of them access it with any regularity.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons to engage an eSports initiative and all of them can be measured. Choose your preferred metric and see where it leads. You may find a metric you didn’t consider actually matches your goals better than what we suggested, so mix and match them or do them all and see what you learn. Don’t forget to download the ROI calculator file included in this post and get to work proving the value of your investment.