Should we attend fairs? Which fairs? Was all the effort and investment worth it? What should we do and what should we change next time?
These are the big questions that most exhibitors formulate before designing the exhibition schedule and also once it has ended. The answers to all these questions would be much easier to find if we knew, in advance, how to answer to the title of this post: How can we measure the success of a show?
Unfortunately, it is usually a question without a thoughtful answer. Generally, if there's an answer, it comes from the "intuition" or commercial data from short-term objectives and, in both cases, the risk of error is very high. But... Why does it happen?
From my point of view, there are two main reasons and they're closely related:
- Because the goals haven't been clearly and correctly established. If there are no goals, there's nothing to measure. If the company's objectives are poorly fixed, the measurement will not help at all. If there are unidentified goals, the measurement will be wrong.
- Because the measurement process is complex, since generally we have to combine qualitative and quantitative parameters, short-term and long-term parameters and commercial parameters with image parameters. Because of this complexity, many times the company chooses skip the measurement process, or only measures what is simple. This way, the measurement will be quite incomplete and therefore, wrong.
Let's consider these two points and try to find solutions.
How should we fix our participation goals?
The first thing to consider is that a fair can cover a wide variety of objectives, depending on:
- the type of products or services you sell.
- your company’s general marketing & communication strategy.
- the tactical actions of that particular moment, the marketing plan.
- the characteristics of the event.
- the team engaged in its development.
This means that we can have many different goals and scopes to be coordinated.
Basically, we'll almost always have:
- Corporative/brand goals
- Market opening goals
- Conversion goals
- Loyalty goals
To these commercial goals we can add three other categories that can also make you profit from a trade show: the partnerships & alliances goals; intern public goals; market research goals.
We must define exactly and really specifically all these goals and we have to weigh the degree of importance of each, according to the event and the “vital” time of the company.
We must always bear in mind that the general objectives can be repeated in different events and / or in different editions but each case is "unique" and the weighting of each objective may vary when it comes to measuring the results.
Once we have clearly defined our objectives, we turn to the second problem.
How do we measure the results?
To correctly measure the results we must take into account the specific characteristics of the fairground marketing:
- A fair is not something that lasts 4 or 5 days and takes place in an enclosed area: a fair is a "milestone" key in the market and its influence extends from several months before to several months after (or even years!), and its “space” covers the entire geographical area of influence of the event and even more, if it is properly managed (social networks, for instance, can make any event break its geographical boundaries). Therefore, when measuring, it is important to pay attention to our general influence outside the fairground.
- Each fair has specific values and risks that must be taken into account in order to maximize our effectiveness. It is a professional environment where supply and demand are concentrated in the same space and time; this is quite positive because, in this way, for example, you can have access to influential decision makers that otherwise would inaccessible, and make them try your products. However, this means that the competition can do the same. This is why in ELYC we always takes good care and measures the fair’s work with our client’s real clients (and we start before the fair even starts!)
- During the fair we’re going to interact with many different stakeholders (decision-makers, influencers, end-users, etc) and different types of companies (large, small, domestic, foreign, etc), that are at different stages in the buying cycle (studying new solutions, comparing products, interested in purchasing, etc).
These are three variables that must be considered, because it means you can get a lot of possible combinations. Therefore, it is essential to have a trained staff, capable of identifying and acting in the most appropriate way in every case; this is very important to maximize the return on the fair.
Given these points, when the fair comes to an end, it is time to measure its success. At this point, we’ll basically find two types of goals that work differently but ultimately we have to be able to "unite" them in order to make the final assessment of the outcome: qualitative objectives (we will not have exact figures to start working with them, for example image issues), and quantitative objectives (about which we have numerical data, for instance, the number of contacts achieved).
In both cases, when measuring, we must include a correction factor determined by the importance we give to each of the goals, so that the achievement of the strategically most important goals are higher than others when making a comparative valuation.
For instance, if our main goal at the fair is to introduce a new product and get the target audience to try it, when assessing a new level A contact (for which we have a value) we can multiply the value assigned for 1,2 if it going to try the new product. Thereby, we give a higher punctuation to that contact, because it fulfills with a key objective, apart from its assigned value as a potential customer.
Qualitative measurement objectives
Many of the settled goals will be qualitative, so if we’re only looking for direct ROI, we would be leaving out the process of measuring a very important part of the benefits that are brought by our presence to the fair. In order to measure these objectives we have to be capable of quantify, somehow, the results. To do so, we have the general data of the fair and the data registered by our team at the booth, as also in our communication actions before, in and after the fair. In ELYC we work with parameters such as brand exposure, the relevance of the public, the impact achieved against the competition and the direct and indirect exposure to the media or the level of response to our communications (in important fairs we complement this information with official market researches that help us refining the data).
With such information we can put a rough monetary value to what was achieved in these qualitative fields, comparing it with the cost of getting the same results in other advertising areas and/or communication areas that can be quantified.
Quantitative measurement objectives
To do the measurement of quantitative data (usually commercial) of the event, it is necessary to take into account the buying cycles of our actual and potential customers and the purchase funnel phases of our products/services, so that we can measure the real impact of the fair in the commercial development of the company in long term, always weighting each result based on the importance of every single objective.
We have to measure “everything” that happens in the booth and in our corporate communication channels and see how these interactions evolve later, to classify and evaluate such informations based on the goals settled to economically evaluate it (to do so we need to know the economic and commercial values of our market data, such as the value of a customer of a given type, the percentage of contacts of a certain level that convert into sales, or the time that a specific client takes to travel across our sales funnel). Ideally, every interaction produced in the stand must be reflected in the CRM (if it is an existing contact) or marketing software (if it is a new contact) and from these tools work, study and assess their evolution.
Once we’ve measured the achievement of both type of goals, and have been the targets to a theoretical economic valuation, it is time to compare these figures with what was spent. We must have a thorough and complete disclosure that includes all items of preparation, implementation and management of the event (including the expenses made during working hours of those that were involved, directly or indirectly, in the process) and draw relevant conclusions.
If this process is systematically done in all fairs that we attend, the company will eventually have a record that will facilitate decision-making in the future and an analysis tool to optimize investments by checking the actions of more success in each campaign, and the points that must be improved.
So far, in short, this is the methodology we use in ELYC to measure the ROO (Return On Objectives) when attending a fair.
Finally, if you use other methods for measuring the success of your presence at fairs I invite you to share in the comments sections - together we can enrich this article and help each other with new ideas.