Measuring Event ROI

Trade Show ROI – The Virtual Truth
During a down economy, participation at trade shows and exhibits - for both exhibitors and attendees - is among the first budget items to shrink. However, they remain an essential tool in an effective marketing mix. Physical events provide a concentrated medium to interact one-on-one with existing and potential clients. On the upside, however, while companies may be sending fewer attendees, the ones they do send are likely to be decision makers.

Measuring results from an event is more important than ever. Skip Cox of Exhibit Surveys, Inc. offers some best practices for measuring your ROI from events both live and virtual.

• Speak management’s language. In other words, develop metrics that align with and measure the success of the event in meeting overall corporate marketing objectives and initiatives.
• Use consistent metrics and methodology to measure across all event types to:
  • Develop a cost-effective, efficient process for measurement
  • Develop normative data over time to create benchmarks for all key metrics
  • Directly compare one event to another, or one event type to another (e.g. live vs. virtual)
  • Summarize data periodically, by market segment, etc.
• Develop a scalable and flexible measurement program that is practical to use for both large and small exhibits/events and that can be expanded or modified over time without losing comparability with previous data.
• Develop a database to house all key metrics that will allow easy entry of, and access to, the event results.
• Provide flexible and multiple reporting tools to communicate results to multiple levels of internal stakeholders (e.g. dashboards and executive summaries to upper management and more detailed findings to event managers).