The Tradeshow Circus

Thanks COVID

December 1, 2020

stack

Who forced the shift to digital?

It’s a bit weird to think of it this way but without COVID and the cancelation of all tradeshows in 2020 I could never have proven the value of a complete shift to digital. The lead flow we generated without tradeshows demonstrated a much more cost effective spend of marketing dollars.

Tradeshows are expensive: between the booth, travel, marketing, and sponsorships, showcasing your products at trade show exhibits can put a SERIOUS dent into your marketing budget.

So why will I keep going back?

Tradeshow can have value you just need to make sure you capture it and set the expectation of what your goals are very early on.

ROI – The Challenge of Calculating Revenues

Calculating ROI is easy enough: just plug the numbers into this formula and you have your answer: (Revenue – Investment) / Investment The problem, of course, is calculating “revenue”, that is the revenue that can be directly attributed to trade show attendance.

This might be doable in industries with relative short sales cycles but if you are selling products with long sales cycles and buying decision processes that last months/quarters and involve many people you might never get a reliable answer. You will never sell your products to somebody who walked by your booth, saw your demo for the first time and signed a PO.

Typically the trade show contact was only one of many contacts during that customer’s purchasing journey. Given those multiple touchpoints, what portion of that revenue gets attributed to the trade show, to the ad in the trade magazine, the testimonial on your website, the tweet about a big deal, or to your sales professional who followed up with the lead umpteen times? At this point calculating the ROI of your trade show becomes more art than science which is why many companies use additional metrices to answer the question “Was it worth it?” Let’s look at 2 other metrics.

ROO - Return on Objectives

Return on objectives is the most popular alternative metric used to assess trade show success based on marketing rather than sales objectives. ROO captures harder to quantify goals and objectives such as product and brand awareness and favourability. Unlike ROI, there is no mathematical formula for calculating ROO but a list of objectives which generally include:

  • Generate x qualified leads
  • Meet with x prospects
  • Build brand awareness measured in number of social media followers/likes/mentions
  • Increased traffic on your website
  • Grow the number of attendees visiting the booth
  • Attract x participants to a product launch, talk, poster presentation, instrument demonstration, or networking event
  • Planning and preparation are critical to calculating a meaningful ROO. Identifying relevant objectives and defining realistic success criteria is just the beginning, you also have to have tools to capture and analyse the data.

Scanners help you keep track of the visitors to your booth that were interested enough to want to be added to your mailing list, analytics tools let you assess the impact the show had on website traffic and social media footprint, attendees at a product demo or workshop can simply be counted and their contact information recorded.

Not everything is easily measurable, though. How many of the booth visitors you scanned are really interested and how many came for the candy and politely stayed for the scan? How many of those attending your talk were there for the content and how many just wanted to sit down to check their emails?

Answering these questions will never be easy which is why it is so important to establish objectives and metrics and then use them across different conferences and over time to keep things comparable. If you doubled the number of booth visitors year over year, you have done something right – unless, of course, you offered vastly superior candy this year.

ROR - Return on Relationships

With the move from ROI to ROO we have moved from counting dollars to counting Likes and people stepping into our booth. While important, ROO metrics still don’t tell us much about the value of an interaction: when counting booth visitors, the person who came for the candy and the happy customer who came to propose a joint application note count the same. In terms of value, however, they are worlds apart and this is where ROR – Return on Relationship - comes in.

The term “ROR” was originally coined by Ted Rubin to capture the value of relationships.

Conference Planning Maximize