Track and Improve these 7 Trade Show KPIs for Real-World Impact
How do you determine the success of your trade show?
For most, the trade show booth is seen as an obligation, but it can be leveraged for so much more. With a little planning and help from technology, your space can serve as a powerful source of learning and a serious driver of revenue.
The following pieces of data and event-based metrics can be used as KPIs, or key performance indicators, that can be tracked and compared, and as a force to influence your operations, marketing spend, and sales strategy outside of your trade show booth.
Entries
The more visitors coming into your booth, the better. Straight-foward and self-explanatory, tracking this metric can give you a great overview of how attractive your booth was to trade show visitors. Accurate data on entries is best achieved through technology (link). Tie this number to pre-show messaging and marketing initiatives, new product launches, and press releases to determine what is and isn’t working to drive more traffic and interest into your booth and to the same extent your organization.
Contacts
While getting traffic into your booth is great, getting people to share their information with you is even better. If visitors like what they’re hearing and seeing, they’ll want to stay in touch and start a longer conversation. Record how many visitors swipe their badges, leave their business cards, or write down their information and compare this metric with your overall visitors to get a rough “conversion rate” on your booth.
Engagements
Your trade show booth is likely featuring several products, displays, kiosks, and more in different areas of your space. The ability to track specific traffic to these spaces (and potentially how long people are staying) is an effective way to determine what products and messaging is drawing the greatest interest in your booth. Accurate and actionable data surround engagements of require deeper technology like smart flooring but is worth the investment.
Conversations
Hearing first-hand feedback from potential customers, partners, and the public is one reason trade shows continue to be a must-attend event. While this metric is more intrinsic than hard-data and a little more difficult to track, it is worth it to track your conversations on a laptop or even a pen and paper to ensure you don’t forget what your future customers are saying about your offering.
Leads
New contacts are great, but potential customers or partners are even better. Along with storing your new contacts, be sure to identify which and how many of your contacts turned into leads. Take it one step further and compare those results to your events to determine what shows, messaging, and products lead to the most leads.
Meetings
Again, new leads are great, but those that want to take the time to set up meetings with you are even better. Just like your leads list, identify which ones have potential, and add them to your comparisons to identify what drove those conversions.
Sales
The ultimate goal of investing in and transitioning your trade show booth from a static promotional space to a dynamic arena of market research and testing is to drive sales. By tracking the metrics above, adjusting, tracking more, and adjusting more, you’ll see an increasing hard-dollar return that can be compared directly to your trade show spend.