Unless you are lucky to get a massive order directly from a customer during a show, can you ever calculate a positive ROI when participating in an exhibition? In other words, the revenue attributed to participating in an exhibition must be larger than all the costs incurred for the same event.
Sometimes it might be easy to just sign up for an event out of habit, “We always have a booth at this show,” or “Everyone is there”. This mindset often leads to all the planning carried out without bearing the most important thing in mind: What are the goals for attending this exhibition? Do you really expect to generate sales in the booth during the exhibition? Or is it primarily networking that matters? And/or brand building?
If your goals are among the latter categories, a useful measure is ROO or Return on Objectives. This is a qualitative measure and is sometimes slightly less straightforward than having a code in your CRM system attributed to sales because of the exhibition. For brand building, you can carry out brand surveys before or after the event. If it is networking, then you will have a certain category of customers and the number of these in mind you want to meet during the event.
Regardless of your goal/s, you need an engaging and interactive booth to attract potential customers. It is not always easy to stand out at large exhibitions with many booths seemingly offering the same, or at least similar, products and services. There is no point in having all sorts of weird and wonderful activities on your booth though. Think along the lines of what is relevant and attractive to your target audience. The same goes for giveaways.
While at the exhibition, if you have the time, take the opportunity to look at other exhibitors as well. What are they doing that you can be inspired by for your next exhibition?
The investment required for exhibitions can easily amount to large numbers. Once you have paid your booth space, there is the planning and the building of the booth, the shipping of exhibits, staff travel time and accommodation, plus follow-up activities after the exhibition. Sometimes I can’t help to think about all the effort and money that goes into a two, or at max a four-day show… could they be better spent elsewhere, or is it a necessary investment? This all comes back to the goals set up for the show. Look at the quality of the leads as well. How many high-quality leads do you need to justify participating?
Needless to say, it is also very important to evaluate your participation after each exhibition and consider what can be done differently, and perhaps even better, next time around. As long as you can justify the investment and also measure the marketing effects of participating, exhibitions are often vital, particularly in the B2B world.
To discuss more about ROI on exhibitions, please get in touch!