Speaker 1: Welcome to the Blue Atlas Tradeshow Marketing Podcast. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. Today we're talking about measuring the success of your trade show and the key metrics that we recommend and some of the ways that you can up your data collection to really see how successful your trade show was. First, let's get started with some of the key metrics for measuring your trade show effectiveness. First thing is lead generation versus quality leads. There are trade shows that you can go, that you can come back and say with 1,000 leads. You've collected all kinds of business cards or you used the business card scanner they provided and you can scan all kinds of things and say we got a lot of leads from it. But number of leads versus qualified leads are two completely different things. I do recommend utilizing some metrics to track your overall leads, but also consider the actual qualified leads. And you need to define that before the show starts. What's gonna make a qualified lead? If you define that before the show, you can start identifying people as they come into your booth because you have an engaging booth that brings people into the booth, that gets their attention, creates a little bit of a conversation, establishes some rapport, right? But if you have all of those things and you have people coming into your booth, you still want to be able to identify who that qualified lead might be or who that qualified prospect might be as you talk to them. So you kind of already have them identified. So make sure you're tracking all of your leads, but also track the qualified leads that you got into it. When it's all said and done, another thing to track your effectiveness is your cost per lead. You should already have a show budget together and as you spend things and you acquire expenses to do your trade show, you should be tracking that in your budget versus actual. But you should have an overall cost. Like my trade show X cost me this much to get everybody there for everything that went on, all the different fees and everything else that comes up involved with the trade show because it gets expensive. Track all of that cost, then go back to your qualified leads and it should give you a list of, you should be able to compare your total cost to your leads and give you a metric of cost per lead. How much did it cost you to generate those qualified leads? Then as things go on, which you can do this pretty quick after the trade show, say 30 days, but you're probably in a lot of B2B situations, you'll have to do it many months later so you do need to have plans for coming back and doing a post-show analysis probably six months, nine months, 12 months later because then you also want to check the sales conversion rate of this show. If you have some way of tracking your leads, say in a CRM and you know where the source came from, then you can go through and put that data together to say, okay, we had so much cost but we generated this many leads, we generated this many qualified leads and now we've generated this much in sales to really start telling you how effective and what kind of positive ROI you're getting from the trade show. Now there's a lot of steps and things that you can go into, make sure you're increasing that positive ROI, but these are the main metrics that you need to utilize to say, is it even worth doing the trade show? Now our next thing is getting into a few more metrics that might bring in that maybe not the value of the trade show as far as leads and sales, but here's a couple of other metrics that might be important to you that you'd want to track as well. One is overall booth traffic. What was our total impression? In some instances, even in B2B situations, it's not necessarily that we're trying to generate leads, we just want people to come by and know that a product exists. Some of the bigger shows with a lot more traffic and you have a lot of people coming by, you're probably gonna have a more engaging booth because maybe you're doing a product demonstration and your main goal with that is just to demonstrate the product X number of times and that could be your metric for, okay, what kind of booth traffic did we get by? How many demos did we do? This gives us a little bit of our kind of impression and reach from this show. Another element that you can track is your social media engagement, especially during the show. Social media activity that you're doing while you're at the show that you say, you know, we're gonna do some lives here, we're gonna do some special posts, we have show-specific offers and opportunities, we're gonna push all that through social media. What type of engagement did we get? Did you boost your traffic with that? It's still, there's gonna be engagement rates and things like that, so that'll give you another metric to utilize to be able to track the effectiveness of the show. And another one that is a bit challenging to track, but I do recommend that you consider it, and in a lot of instances, this is really what you want, is brand awareness. You may already know the, say, 250 accounts that you really should be selling to. You know those are the companies that you want to sell to, they're really the only customers that make sense for you, so you already know them. You're going to a trade show that you know a good majority of those people are there. Creating brand awareness just that you exist and the offerings that you have sometimes may be your main metric. The sales cycle, that sales conversion, that might be a two, three, five year process. And so can we measure the sales conversion of a trade show in that instance? Probably not. We'll probably go to the trade show three to five times before we can actually say we made a sale. So we have to utilize some other metrics like brand awareness. You can utilize some of that, say, booth traffic, you know, product demo, and that type of thing, but you might also measure the people that came by based on your account. Say, out of that 250 accounts, how many of them came by? What type of recognition do we have after the fact? Sometimes, with some of our clients, they go to trade shows because all of their clients are there. In that instances, you may want to use, say, a survey afterwards. You know, some type of way to say, hey, did you see us at the show? So that you can track your brand awareness of what you did. So it goes beyond just the lead generation. I like to look at, always, I like to look at, can we generate leads, can we generate business? I really want that to be my number one metric, because otherwise, I think there's other opportunities for brand awareness that we can be a little bit more exact and direct, but there are all kinds of instances, especially in the B2B world, where you might need brand awareness, booth traffic, and utilize social media engagement to really see how effective the trade show was. Trade shows are not only lead generators. Trade shows are an avenue and the vehicle for you to stay in front of clients, stay in front of people, even utilize for some testing, product testing. You say you may have three or four new products that you're rolling out. Which one's gonna be our real flagship? Should we really lead with? We don't know. Take it to a trade show. Get a lot of booth traffic, get a lot of demos, see what kind of responses they get. Before they leave, you may be doing just a quick survey. Out of the four products, which one do you think is the most effective? Which one do you think is the least effective? Doing a little bit of a survey, you can utilize trade shows for things like that, not just lead generation. A lot of our clients are looking at it from a lead perspective, but not all, and some are really just looking at it as a vehicle to have a lot of people and a lot of traffic to it. All right, let's talk about a few more, I'll call them advanced metrics that just require a little bit more effort to figure out, and a little more in-depth analysis. One is cost per qualified lead. Same thing we were talking about earlier, but you get a little bit deeper into the qualified lead, and sometimes that qualified lead may not come until a little bit later. You may say from the beginning, well, we had 1,000 leads, we're not sure if they're qualified or not. But as you go and you do follow-up and you've got your post-show nurturing processes in place, they start to raise their lead scores. So after, say, six months, you can come back and say, well, out of the 1,000, we found 250 of those are qualified leads. Now we can compare our cost of a qualified lead to the overall trade show. I'd still compare it to all the leads that you capture, but make sure those are really considered leads and not just somebody dropped off a business card because they were putting their business card in for a drawing that you have, or something like that. Make sure they're actually leads if you're gonna count them as a lead, but then go ahead and dig a little bit deeper into the qualified lead. And then, I mean, this one's, we always talk about this, is return on investment. The return on investment's something you're gonna have to constantly come back, dig a little bit deeper, and get more information as you go because what was the actual positive ROI and that return on investment based on number of leads and sales, or are we looking at brand awareness? What did that do for you? In a company that has, say, three to five year, long sales time, lead time on sales, you're gonna have to find other things that would contribute to that positive investment. Are we getting closer with our pitches? Are we sending out more samples now? Are we speccing some particular product or service, or something of that nature? You'll have to use other metrics that can then relate to the effectiveness and the return on investment. Because I hate it when I see customers that say, well, we go to these trade shows because we know we're supposed to be there. I don't know what we get from it, but I'm just scared if we don't go, somebody won't buy from us anymore, or we're supposed to be there because everybody in our industry says be there. That could be the case, and that is the case a lot of time in B2B trade shows, but sometimes just doing it because you're supposed to is not a great answer. Let's at least have some type of data to say, I think this is at least pushing us in the right direction. If you can't link it from lead, qualified lead to sales, at least find other ways to link it too. Is this positive investment? Are we getting a return on our investment for the progress that we're making to get us closer to where we wanna be with our sales? And then the other thing is projected business value. This basically takes, all right, well, we can make a sale, but after that, how much is our projected business value? A lot of B2B trade show instances, we're not doing this because we're trying to close the sale. We're not selling shoes or the latest TV. Sometimes you are, but most times, it's not a consumer good, for instance, like the CES show or something. We're more of laying the groundwork for something that's going to happen in the future, and when we do make a sale, it's often not just a one-off sale. So what is that projected business value when you consider all of that, especially for the ones that are gonna be longer term? It might take us 12 months to get the sale, but once we do, they're gonna be a recurring client from us because they're gonna be invested in our process and we're invested in their process and they're part of the manufacturing, for instance, and so they're gonna buy from us for three years. Well, what do those orders look like? If we can estimate their X number dollar value per order, what's our projected business value for the lifetime of the client? I like to look at clients for lifetime of client. I also sometimes feel like looking at lifetime value and things like that can exaggerate the value of a client sometimes. You know, I think, oh yeah, they're gonna buy from us for five years, and then a year in, they go, you know what, I'm just, I can't do it, and I quit, or they go out of business, or COVID happens. There's a lot of unknown variables, so be careful with this when getting too excited about a projected lifetime value or projected business value that you calculate, but it's definitely worth considering because sometimes these trade shows are gonna be very expensive, and you just, man, I'm just, you know, I didn't convert enough sales just to cover the cost of that, but will we have enough sales to cover the cost of that over the next two to three years because they're gonna be recurring clients for us. So consider going a little bit deeper beyond and making sure, especially if you start to look at it and go, you know, from the first things that we've looked at with our sales and leads and things like that, I'm not sure this trade show really makes a lot of sense, you know, and if that's the case, you can stop there and look and say, okay, this amount of money, if we spend it somewhere else, will we get the same type of business or return? Will we get the same number of leads? Would we get this much value or more from it? That might be a good conversation to have. Often, that's not necessarily where you need to go with it. It's more of, all right, well, we're not getting this immediately in the first three months, six months, maybe 12 months, but after that, this will continue to roll and compound. And next year, when we go to the show, we'll reinforce with the ones that became clients, but then we'll see the same ones again. We had a client years ago working in credit unions, actually, but the process, the whole kind of marketing plan was that the reinforcing of seeing the same people at the same shows from year to year. And our client, main contact, sometimes took three or four years at a show to see the person before they were ready to do business with them. Once they switched and said, you know what, I think I need to do business with you, they were worth a good amount of money. So there are times that you might have to go to a trade show several times before you close a lot of that business. So if you're looking at the most immediate return, it may not necessarily yield the right results, but if you can put a lot of these metrics in place, you won't be guessing. You won't be going on a gut feeling of, well, you know, it felt like a good show, so we're gonna go again. You'll have some numbers for yourself, for your team, for your leadership, for anybody that needs to know why we're doing this trade show. Well, look, we've seen these metrics. Year one, we were here. Year two, we're seeing it grow. We got some business from it. Year three, we expect that to grow even more. So that's why we do this trade show. All right, let's move on to our next section of implementing effective measurement strategies. So there's a thing of having metrics, but how are we going to actually measure that? And what are our strategies in this whole measurement process? Well, and sometimes I feel like this might be a little overused, but I am gonna come back to the same old thing of SMART goals, the Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. A lot of these metrics will probably already link to that, but if you think about, can I answer all the questions for each metric, it'll force you to think about how your trade show process is working to create, for one, to track those metrics and make sure those are the right goals. They may not be the right things for a trade show. Those metrics might make sense, but you might have something different that works better because you can link it to, one, it's very specific to this goal. It's very specific and it's measurable against this product or service, something like that. It's achievable. We can actually accomplish something from this trade show with these specific and measurable goals. Obviously, it's relevant. We don't want these metrics just because they exist and because we can track them. We wanna make sure that they're relevant to our business goals and they're also time-bound. Now, that might still be a long length of time. Like I said, it might be three to five years, but you want things that, in a smaller set, give you something that's time-bound and that's still relevant. So you may say, all right, in 12 months, we need this kind of response. In 12 months, we need to be doing sampling over 10 companies that we met there. In 24 months, we need to be doing sampling in 24 companies and we might need to be already rolling out complete specced work, for instance, going out. So set some things that are time-bound, that are measurable, that allow you to make adjustments. What do all these metrics even matter? That you want to be able to make adjustments instead of just, well, this is what we do and we go because the metrics kind of seem like that I'm supposed to do this and this is where I'm supposed to be. You want things that will tell you if this is working or not and you can adjust. You may go to the trade show for the third year in a row and you say, well, we just keep doing our product demos. Maybe they're not working. Maybe they're not getting enough. Maybe that's not the right thing. But if you don't have data to prove that, you'll either, one, keep doing what you've been doing and hope that it works or you'll start making adjustments but you don't really know why. You say, well, I need it to work better but let's change everything. Is that really necessary? Without metrics in place, you won't know and having those goals along the way for each of the small metrics that are specific and measurable, annotatable and they're relevant and time-bound will help you make adjustments based on your metrics. Next thing is capturing those things. Use technology for data analysis. One of the things that we recommend to a lot of our clients is we talk about how to be an engaging booth and capture more leads. We like to use a digital tool. Often you'll hear it may be called a lead magnet but it's a calculator or maybe it's a buying guide. It's something of value that you can provide to somebody and yeah, you can provide that right there in the booth and hand it to them by hand. Let's say you're doing a buying guide. You can hand them a printed buying guide. Is that ever gonna make it back to the office? There's a good chance it won't. If it does, it stays in the bag with all the rest of the promo products in the closet and then next year when they get ready to go to the trade show they go, oh yeah, here's that bag and pull out everything. It doesn't go anywhere. We wanna use digital tools to one, capture qualified leads, two, get them into our system to where we can do further nurturing and three, we wanna be able to follow up with them and remind them after the show. The show is overwhelming for an attendee. It's overwhelming for all of us. It's overwhelming for the exhibitor, everybody involved, it's overwhelming but the show's pretty overwhelming for an attendee. There's probably workshops they're going to, there's speakers, there's lunches, there's drinks, there's drinks and there's happy hours and there's drinks. I mentioned drinks. They usually help cloud people's minds. There's all kinds of things that are overwhelming at trade shows that will make it really tough for attendees to remember everything and if we capture it digitally with something that we provided value, it gives us a couple of things happening there in the booth but now we've got data to work with. How did they answer some of the questions? You don't wanna pile them up with a 24 question survey before you give them the value but you could ask two or three more questions in something like that, bring them into the booth, explain to them the value of it, say a calculator. Say, look, come in, as they stop by, this is what we do but by the way, I don't even know if it's a good fit for you. Look, we've got this calculator. Scan this QR code real quick and you bring it up or give them a tablet, have it in your hand so they don't even have to have their device. Hand them a tablet and say, look, if you fill this thing out real quick, just put in a little bit of your data about your company, then we can show you what kind of things that we can do to save, see if it even makes sense. We may not be a good fit but this will tell you at least if it's worth the conversation. When they fill that out and hit submit, before they're gonna be able to submit, name, email, phone, company name, those kind of things should be in there. Now you're capturing all the viable information. The fact that they're filling it out is probably an indicator that they're at least a qualified lead unless the information they put in just says no, they're not at all. But now you've got something engaging, you're talking to them and you're capturing more of your data for these metrics. So use your digital tools, use digital assets to be able to be more engaging within the booth and capture your leads better. Next, make sure you're constantly getting feedback so that you can do continuous improvement. This is what I was talking about earlier where the whole point of these metrics is so you can improve and make adjustments even if you're not seeing the end result happen because it just takes too long or you're just not quite getting there. We always want the business to happen so that's why we're doing it. But what if out of the five steps that it takes, steps all the way through three are just awesome. We're just dropping the ball at four. How do you know? And without the metrics in place and constantly getting feedback from the different areas and tracking these things, that's what tracking does, it gives you data feedback, without getting that type of thing you can't do any kind of continuous improvement. So make sure you're measuring that. Use post-show feedback. Use feedback at the show. Ask the attendees as they're talking. Like, so what do you think? Is there something I could do better? Is there something I didn't explain to you? Make sure you're getting feedback at all times. You can get continual feedback. You know, if it's a multi-day show, you get feedback on day one, you can make some adjustments for day two. You don't have to wait for the whole trade show to be over before you decide it's time to make adjustments. You can use that immediate feedback. As soon as the show's over, you get immediate feedback. All right, what did we drop the ball on? Well, we have these leads, let's follow up with them with some new content we weren't even planning on, and we just didn't realize we were missing that. They didn't know what we were talking about. These are kind of things that you can get with instant feedback that you can then make continual improvements and improve your measurement strategies. So I've got three key takeaways for you here in just a second, but I wanna conclude before we get into that just to remind you kind of what, the whole thing that we're talking about here is you've gotta plan from the beginning what your metrics that matter are. You've gotta plan how you're gonna capture that. You've gotta plan how you're gonna engage in order, because most of these are all, it's a trade show. We want to engage people. We are physically being at a trade show to engage people. So all of this requires planning, the planning of the engagement, the execution, and then analysis. Most of our clients, when they get started with us, they are not doing all of these different pieces. They're not planning much. They're booking it, saying, all right, I got the booth, I got new flyers, we're ready to go, and they're doing no analysis afterwards. Unfortunately, a lot of teams, they're already having to think about the next trade show, but because they don't plan, they're scrambling to the next show, so you're constantly just barely getting there, but you can't do any of the analysis afterwards. Have a plan beforehand. You'll hear plan from us a lot, because we really think that's extremely important to allow all of this to work and to go hand-in-hand and be very systematic and fluid and easy, but have a plan beforehand of how you're going to analyze a follow-up post-show. Automate as much of it as possible. Use your digital tools to make all the data collection easier. You don't want your sales guys having to come in there and go, all right, everybody sort out your business cards and your accountant business cards for your qualified leads, those kind of things. You don't really want to deal with that and put everybody through that manual process if you can keep from it. In most cases, you can. Use digital tools to do that. All right, so three key action items takeaway from today. One, set those SMART goals for upcoming trade shows. Set the objective. What are we trying to achieve and what are the metrics behind it? Make sure they're specific and measurable. Let's say, we need to reach more people. Okay, what does that mean? Is that people coming in to booth? Is that demos? Is that leads? What does that mean? But set some SMART goals for your upcoming trade shows and do it now. If you don't have a trade show around, even if you do have a trade show right around the corner, but regardless, right around the corner or in six months, start now. Plan now, set those goals so you know what you're trying to achieve with your trade show. Start considering leveraging technology for enhanced engagement. How can you use a piece of technology, some type of resource, like I said, that lead magnet we were talking about, how can you use that to capture better leads, engage better in your booth, and give you more data? All of this is gonna give you a ton of data. You're getting people to interact with you. And then from the engagement perspective, if they're sitting there filling out something, they're in your booth. You're gonna be talking to them. You may let them fill it out, but you're probably gonna be having a conversation. They're probably gonna be asking you questions. You get to build a little bit of rapport. They get to build a little bit of relationship with you. And really, all we've done is say, hey, you wanna fill something out. We're not trying to sell them anything just yet. We're really just giving them something and say, hey, we will provide you some value when you fill this out. And then maybe we'll talk a little bit more afterwards. So leverage technology for data collection, lead generation, and really just making your life more automated and easier when it comes to trade shows. And finally, that comes up to our implement, a structured follow-up process. With all of the metrics, all of the data, all the tools in place, one of the last things you really need, and where all of this comes to play, is the follow-up. We can go to trade shows. We can get the business cards. People say, hey, you know, I mean, unless you were selling at the trade show, and that's your only goal, is we're gonna sit down with them, and we're gonna close business right here. There are a lot of clients of ours that can do that. And they actually have meeting rooms. And you pull them in, we're gonna do it. We get the order. They've done that. Most B2B trade shows, that's not necessarily the case. It is purely for lead generation. So how are we closing the deal? It's the follow-up. And I don't wanna rely on my sales guys to have to come back, pull the business cards out of their pocket, and do all of the manual phone calls, manual emails, and hope that they close business. After a certain point, they're gonna get tired of it. And a lot of that can be automated. Use automation. Do some, use these digital tools to do your follow-up process for you so that your sales team is always on the phone closing versus trying to continue the prospect and continue to do the nurturing. That's expensive nurturing. When you've got high-paid salespeople that are sending the fourth or fifth email when that all could have been automated, it gets expensive. So implement a structured follow-up process. Thanks for joining us today on key metrics and key ways to measure your trade show effectiveness. I'm Nate Stocker with Blue Atlas. We'll see you next time. ♪♪