• To get more information on a specific product or service
• To reinforce or confirm existing buying decision
• To buy something
• To keep up to date on industry trends and innovations
• To make more industry contacts
(GraphiColor Exhibits, 2017)
When to start planning
It’s never too early to start thinking about how you will exhibit at a show, even if you don’t even have a trade show in mind yet. If you’re a first-time exhibitor and wondering whether trade shows are the right strategy for you, take the time to imagine what your trade show stand might look like, the sorts of conversations you would want to have, the type of potential and existing customers you might want to meet there and the outcomes you would want to achieve. This initial thinking will help contribute to a clear, strategic plan for your event, that informs a number of decisions you will make as you move through the planning process. Keep that vision and those conversations in your mind, write them down to keep yourself grounded in the reasons why you’re investing all the time and money that will be needed to deliver brilliantly. If you’re a seasoned exhibitor and you’re wanting to generate more effective results from your events, think about the previous events you’ve delivered. What worked, and didn’t for you? Which elements do you recognise you’re weaker in? The more you can pinpoint the reasons why your trade shows aren’t working as hard for you as they could be, the better chance you have of being able to understand how you can execute them more effectively next time.
To put a more specific timescale on when to start planning, ideally give yourself 12 months ahead of the show dates to plan effectively. This might sound like a luxury, especially if you’re a business owner with responsibility for every aspect of operations, or if your role as trade show project manager is just one element of a hybrid responsibility. The word we use here is ‘ideally’ and 12 months is a fantastic lead time if you have it. If you don’t, whatever the length of time before your show, you can still plan and improve your outcomes. Even if it’s only two weeks until your event, you can still take the ideas in this chapter and put them to good use to enable you to deliver a more impactful and effective show. In fact, we’ve run Exhibitor Bootcamps on the morning of a show opening and exhibitors have told us they still learnt something that changed what they did during the day that impacted positively on their results. In short, start as early as you possibly can but never think it’s too late to start either.
3.1 SMART objective setting
We so often hear that exhibitors have no way of evaluating trade shows and therefore they can earn the perception of being a money pit with no measurable return on investment. It’s certainly true that trade shows can be harder and longer-term to evaluate than the effectiveness of other tactics such as pay-per-click via social media, discount promotions or television advertising. However, harder and longer-term does not mean impossible, it just means it requires more effective planning up-front to ensure that you’re clear about what you are trying to measure.
(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,
