How to Measure Trade Show ROI Effectively

The truth is, when you’re exhibiting at trade shows and conferences, gut feeling isn’t really enough to go on. Setting up a stand and staffing it can be quite a serious outlay for most businesses, on a par with other sales, advertising, marketing and PR expenditures.

So it’s useful to get a better feel for the direct and indirect benefits of exhibiting. In most cases, it will let you work out how to get the most out of each exhibition, but at the extremes, it could inform you that you need to seriously increase your exhibition count, or perhaps to give it up for now while you reassess the potential gains.

Why trade show ROI is hard to measure

Trade shows are almost always B2B ventures, and one result of that is that there’s no such thing as a snap decision. Representatives of business A will meet with businesses B, and then go back to base to discuss their findings with the board and with any other relevant parties. They are probably weighing up offers from businesses C, D and E before coming to a firm decision. All that takes time. Months or even years can pass between that all-important face-to-face meeting and signing a deal. 

It’s also important to note that not all benefits of trade shows are tangible. Sometimes it’s just a case of raising brand awareness, for example. A visitor to the show might not even set foot in your stand, but just see it from afar, and recognise the name. You might talk to a visitor who shines a light on a blind spot in your company’s offering that you would have overlooked without that conversation. 

The “I” part of ROI can be quite difficult to keep track of too. Can you be sure which event you met a particular contact at? Did you factor in your staff downtime while they were attending the expo? Is your stand a work in progress, which gets modified after every event? While it’s possible to keep on top of every expenditure, in the real world, it’s probably an underestimate.

With all this considered, measuring ROI on exhibiting can become something of a “big picture” effort, with the possibility of errors and guesswork on both sides of the equation. If you overestimate your investments and underestimate your benefits, you’re more likely to end up with more useful figures than if they’re the other way round, but don’t expect pinpoint precision. If you feel there has been an uptick in business 12 months after starting to exhibit, with all else being equal, there’s a good chance it will be responsible.

Set clear, measurable objectives before the show

Now we’ve got the caveats out of the way, we can start to look at the things that actually are measurable. If you focus on these items, you will start to see a picture developing that will indicate your direction of travel.

While some of the objectives here might seem minor, just remember that they all feed into the sales funnel. The way things generally work, if you can boost your numbers at the start of the funnel, that small percentage of contacts that go on to become sales or regular clients should also grow. Here are some of the things you can measure:

• Number of qualified leads. It’s easy enough to get hundreds of email addresses and business cards, but once you’re back at base you can enter them into your CRM and work out which ones are the highest value. Assign scores to those that match your target customer base, are interested in your offering, and have the capacity to make a purchase. Some of them might have performed additional actions after first contact, such as downloading a brochure, and they should be your sales team’s prime targets. (Just a note on “qualified” leads – there’s no universally accepted definition for what lifts a lead to this status, so you should work out where the threshold is, or what markers are acceptable, before you start the process.)
• Sales. A relatively straightforward one is making a sale. In B2B, it’s pretty uncommon to make a direct sale in the exhibition venue, but it does happen, more in some sectors than others. Still, it’s a good indication that your stand, staff and offering were all giving off positivity and credibility, so in-event sales could be a good indication of business after it.
• Brand awareness. You can measure the impact you’ve had on the guests at the stand simply by the number of visitors you attracted. This is a metric that you can measure over several events too, and you can use the information to identify the best events, and to fine-tune your stand and your training. It’s a good idea to keep tabs on your social mentions in the run-up to the event, and see if there’s a spike during or after it.
• Meetings and follow-up calls. If someone calls your company or arranges a meeting, make sure you ask where they found out about you. You probably have multiple channels like directory listings, a website, word of mouth recommendations and so on, so it’s good to know you got a direct hit from an expo.
• Newsletter sign-ups or subscriptions. If you’re signing up subscribers at the stand, that’s a definite attribution. But if you’ve got an online form to sign up for emails, make sure you ask where they heard about you in the sign-up form.
• Demos delivered. If you’re sending out samples or demos, that could be an important metric in your sector, which can also be directly linked to your attendance at an exhibition.

Calculate your total investment accurately 

Calculating how much you have invested makes up the other half of the equation, and this one is usually a bit more straightforward if your business has a firm grip on its accounts, which of course it should do. In a nutshell, they are:

• Direct costs. These expenditures will probably make up the largest portion of your investment, so it’s important that you get them right. They include things like the design and construction of the stand, the space costs at the venue, all your graphics, shipping, utilities and such like.

• People costs. If the trade fair is far away from your business’s base, the costs of transporting, accommodating, feeding and possibly entertaining your team can be quite significant. Don’t forget that many exhibitions will require labour outside of normal working hours, so if you have a specific overtime payment policy, that could well kick in.
• Marketing costs. This includes any advertising and PR you do ahead of the event to drum up visits to your stand, but also things like giveaways, hired on-site technology and lead capture tools like badges.
• Post-show costs. Whether you can attribute these costs to a single event can be a little less clear cut, but there are costs involved with following up leads and getting feedback, although they could also merge into your everyday sales expenditures too.

Quantitative vs. qualitative metrics

You can split your benefits into two overarching categories: quantitative (measurable) metrics, and qualitative (soft, intangible) metrics.

Quantitative metrics let you graph out your stand’s performance from event to event, and also allow you to measure its success against predetermined goals. They include things like:

• Total leads (qualified or generic)
• Cost per lead (total cost divided by number of leads)
• Meetings booked at or after the fair
• Revenue attributed directly to the event
• Conversion rate from lead to opportunity to customer

Qualitative, or soft, metrics are a bit more fuzzy, but they can be counted and compared with other events, even if it’s more difficult to place a financial benefit on each one. They are certainly worth measuring in terms of your sales funnel, as they all add to the big numbers which filter down to more valuable outputs. They include:

• Brand awareness change (perform awareness surveys before and after the event)
• Press coverage and social engagement (before, during and after)
• Competitor and market insights gathered
• Customer feedback on products

Capturing and following up

Gathering visitor data is all well and good, but it needs to get to work for you. The gold standard is feeding contact information into a CRM, so that each individual, and the organisation they represent, can be recorded and used by the sales team. In the past, visitors would toss their business cards into a bowl, and you’d have to enter the details manually and chase them up blindly.

Today, you can capture data on the fly, through QR codes, badge scanners and forms. The team at the event can register details of visitors’ conversations, which can help jog the memory when they are called days or weeks later. 

It’s usually considered best practice to follow up in the period 24 to 48 hours after the event, or the next Monday if the event was late in the working week. The more information your team has collected at the event, the more the sales caller has to work with.

Calculating ROI

When the dust has settled after your event, you can start to drill down on specific figures and calculate its actual return on investment. The basic formula is:

ROI = (Revenue attributed to event − Total cost) ÷ Total cost (× 100 for a percentage)

So for example, if you do an event that costs £40,000 to put on, and it brings in £160,000 in directly attributed revenue, your sum would be:

(160,000 − 40,000) ÷ 40,000 = 3, or 300%

Since these things can take a long time to realise, you can make educated assumptions of the attributable revenues from your pipeline projections.