(Levin, 2017)
However, let’s stick up for trade shows for a moment, as they can become a very easy target for dismissal in comparison to more ‘measurable’ tactics such as those mentioned above. Quite often social media or email campaigns are measured on a return on an objective, such as number of re-tweets, opens, click-throughs or likes. Where an organisation does not have a direct e-commerce platform there is no way to judge how those metrics have converted to actual cash purchases. Equally, television or radio advertising can drive awareness and approximate numbers for how many viewers or listeners may see or hear an advert can be measured. However, again it is difficult to measure how many of the eventual purchases of a product have been influenced by the media that the consumer has digested. And be honest, how many of us just store TV programmes and fast forward through the adverts these days? Finally, in respect of promotional discounts, these may be the most transparent in judging the effectiveness of a marketing tactic by driving additional sales but without investing in deeper research around customer metrics, it is difficult to identify how many consumers were going to buy the product anyway, how many are cupboard-filling and won’t buy for several months and how many are impulse purchases driven by the promotional activity. However, in all these instances it is easy to measure achievement of objective, for example:
Brand A deploys a social media campaign to drive awareness of its new product. The overall campaign is intended to:
a. drive interested buyers to the website to learn more about the product and
b. convert this interest to a purchase in their local store.
The campaign will consist of:
• Sending a targeted email to 50,000 customers on its mailing list.
• Upweighting Tweets to five a day, increasing two-way conversations and investing in Twitter advertising.
• Starting an Instagram account, posting two images a day and running some sponsored content.
• Creating a weekly blog post about how its product is being used by consumers in unusual and interesting ways.
The social media campaign will run in parallel to consumer sampling activity, the retailer’s own marketing activity and promotions and general PR.
In this example, it would be straightforward to attach measurement metrics to the objectives such as number of opens of an email, click-throughs to the website from Twitter ads or views and shares of blog posts or Instagram. What would be much harder to calculate are the resulting sales of the new product based on the social media campaign on its own, as it isn’t being run in isolation. As we have already discussed, trade shows shouldn’t be run in isolation either but as part of a fully aligned marketing campaign. Therefore, what can be measured accurately and effectively is the cost of achieving objectives that contribute to an overall return on investment. Assumptions can be made on the number of consumers who subsequently go on to purchase a product and this can contribute to a deeper discussion about return on investment, but it will be based on a number of hypotheses based on possible consumer behaviour.
No doubt a number of highly skilled marketers will argue that there are very many platforms, software and expert resources available that can measure the effectiveness of campaign activity very accurately, which is a fair point. If you run no marketing activity at all and sell ten widgets a week at £10, then spend £100 on some activity that increases sales to 30 widgets a week, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out a return on investment – every £1 invested has earned an incremental £2. But will those buyers who bought it once buy it again in future? Is it reaching a new audience or people who bought it anyway? Why did it only increase sales to 30 and not 50? Much ROI analysis can tell you what happened in relation to a limited number of direct elements but fails to look deeper into the why or how and implications for the future. We’re not here to argue the merits or otherwise of measuring different types of marketing activity, it’s simply to say don’t let someone fob you off with an argument that trade shows aren’t worth investing in because you can’t measure ROI when so many other marketing tactics get away with measuring objectives achieved and not actual ROI.
How do you measure a trade show?
Phew, now we’ve got that out of the way – there’s absolutely no excuse for not setting some SMART objectives for your trade show activity and there are most definitely ways you can measure whether your event has delivered what you set out to achieve. When we ask exhibitors, ‘What’s your objective for attending a trade show?’, we so often get the response, ‘To meet people’, and that’s about as much thought as goes into it. If that is genuinely your objective then undoubtedly, you’ll achieve it, just through meeting security when you arrive, the bar man at the hotel, a bloke in the toilets who’s at a different event in the same venue and the cleaner who tidies up your stand but can any of those people contribute to the delivery of your overall business objectives? Getting SMART about your objectives focuses your mind for every subsequent decision you make about how to spend money on a show and how that contributes to achieving your overall business strategy. But how do you get SMART in the context of trade shows?
Looking back to Chapter 2 remember why you decided that trade shows were even the right tactic for your business in the first place – what is it about a trade show that makes you confident it can contribute to the overall delivery of your plan?
Some of the big marketing ideas (macro objectives) for exhibiting at a trade show might be:
• Entering a newly identified market with an existing product or service
• Launching a new product or service into an existing market
• Entering a new market with a new product or service
• To drive brand awareness in a current market with existing and prospect customers
• To be part of the industry conversation
• To collaborate or initiate a conversation with partners who could be useful
These are not so great examples of objectives for exhibiting at a trade show but ones we have heard before:
• Because we always have
• Because the organiser is a mate of the boss
• Because it was cheap
• Because I fancied a trip to Spain/USA/Birmingham
• Because the competition exhibit there (that’s a tough one – see below)
The first step in setting SMART objectives that actually mean something to your business plan is working out specifically why you’re exhibiting and that should be fairly obvious from the thinking you did in Chapter 2. Picking up on exhibiting because ‘the competition are’, it is admittedly a tricky argument. There is some credence in the suggestion that if your competitors are exhibiting at a show it is likely to attract the same visitors who you could do business with and that provides you with an audience. It is equally worth noting that you may be conspicuous by your absence and as shows impact the buying decision of 91% of visitors (GraphiColor Exhibits, 2017), by not being there, the only decision a potential customer can make is to buy from someone else. However, exhibiting just because a competitor is doesn’t make a strong enough objective on its own. What if your competitor is much bigger than you, with more money to invest, making you look inferior by comparison even though you know you have a better product? Is there a more creative and less comparable way you can engage with them to demonstrate your quality? What if your competitor is only exhibiting because they always have without thinking about whether it’s right strategically for them – it’s a bad reason for them to exhibit and a doubly bad reason for you just to copy. So there might be a good reason to exhibit if your competitors are, but you probably need to explore more deeply if there are other reasons