It’s no secret that trade shows are an effective marketing strategy for B2B companies. In 2023 alone, investment in this channel was expected to increase 70% year over year, with marketers planning to spend an average of 1.4 million. That momentum has continued and isn’t slowing down any time soon.
Despite its popularity, a trade show requires a heavy investment of finances and time. Understanding how to calculate trade show ROI is, therefore, crucial before you decide to commit your resources.
Why Measure Trade Show ROI?
Measuring trade show ROI has a number of benefits, including:
Cost Justification
Trade shows can be expensive—from booth rental to travel and accommodations. You can determine if the cost is justified and profitable by measuring your event ROI or ROO (Return on objective).
Performance Evaluation
Tracking KPIs like leads generated, sales closed, or brand awareness can help you measure the effectiveness of your participation. You can also analyze what’s working and what’s not in your trade show strategy and fine-tune it for the future.
Budgeting
With trade show ROI, you can compare the trade show’s profitability with other marketing activities. This is key to making smart decisions about allocating your resources and marketing budget.
What are Key Trade Show ROI metrics?
Here are five trade show ROI metrics to consider:
- Number of qualified leads
- Percentage of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)
- Percentage of MQLs that are Sales Accepted Leads (SALs)
- Percentage of Closed-Won leads
- Total revenue from the event
In addition to these absolute numbers, you should also measure other non-sales metrics such as:
- Preshow promotions: Invest in preshow promotions to get people to your booth and give them a reason to visit. Measure the success of your promotions by tracking who mentions them or uses the special offers.
- Cost per opportunity: Calculate the cost per opportunity by dividing the total event cost by the number of leads that are converted into opportunities. This will help you determine your trade show ROI.
- Website traffic: Check your website traffic before, during, and after the event to see if there’s an increase in organic searches and direct traffic. This will show how much interest and impression you made on potential customers.
- Social media engagement: Track new followers, likes, shares, and comments during and after the event to understand the reach and impact of the event.
- Budget vs. actual cost: Compare the exact cost to your initial budget to see the accuracy of your projections. You can include pre-show and post-show trade show marketing and booth costs, display accessories, banners, travel, and shipping expenses in your calculation. This will help refine your budgeting process for the future and provide more accurate numbers.
- Customer and attendee feedback: Get feedback from customers and attendees to see how they liked your booth, products, and overall trade show experience to identify areas for improvement and enhance your strategy.
How to Calculate Trade Show ROI: 5 Easy Steps
Calculating trade show ROI isn’t hard, but gathering all the revenue and expense data does take some time. This is especially true for businesses with longer sales cycles, as it may take some time before the revenue from the trade show is realized.
The formula to calculate it is:
Revenue - Investment / Investment
In this section, we’ll discuss the steps to measuring your trade show ROI in more detail and break them down into a step-by-step process.
1. Define Your Objectives
You need to define your objectives before calculating your ROI (and even before you go to the trade show). This will determine if you’ll use ROI, ROO, or both for your analysis. Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll use to measure event success, such as revenue, sales, leads, social media followers, or website traffic.
To set realistic goals, use the SMART, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound framework. It’s especially important to quantify your goals, such as a target revenue amount or number of leads generated.
2. Add Up Your Revenue
Add all the revenue generated from the trade show to calculate your ROI. This is easy if you only have on-site sales and purchase orders. However, it may be more complicated if you’re a B2B company; you need to consider sales, vendor contracts, partnerships, and even leads that may not close immediately.
If your sales cycle is longer and it will take time to see the full revenue from your trade show efforts, consider using predictive analytics to estimate your ROI. Using past close rates and deal sizes, you can estimate how many leads from the trade show will close and how much revenue those deals generate.
To track your trade show revenue, you need to have a way to identify which sales and leads came from the show. You can do that by:
- Tracking codes or UTM codes
- Creating unique landing pages for attendees
- Using tags or specific pipelines in your CRM
If you’re measuring ROO, your calculations may not be as precise, but you can still estimate it by totaling non-sales wins. The steps will depend on your objectives. For example, if your objective is brand awareness, you might measure foot traffic, social media interactions, website visits, and email addresses collected.
You can also put a dollar value to your objectives. For example, if one in five new social media followers becomes a customer who spends $100 with your company, each new follower is worth $20.
3. Add Up Your Costs
Next, add up all costs related to the trade show. These can vary but typically include:
- Trade show passes
- Booth rental
- Booth design
- Trade show solutions or technologies
- Display materials and giveaways
- Travel, accommodations, and meals for employees
- Marketing campaigns to promote your trade show presence
4. Calculate Your Return
With your total revenue and costs calculated, now plug in the ROI formula:
Revenue - Investment / Investment
For example, if you spent $100,000 on a trade show and made $160,000, your calculation would be: $160,000 - $100,000 / $100,000
This would be a 60% return.
Remember, if your sales cycle is longer and not all revenue is immediate, you can estimate your eventual ROI using predictive analytics. Adjust your calculations as more deals from the trade show close.
5. Measure Your Long-term Success
ROI is a great tool to measure the value of attending a trade show and what it brings to your business. But remember to consider other factors, too.
You may have had other objectives beyond revenue, and achieving those goals may be worth considering even if the trade show performance wasn’t great. That’s because ROI is usually a short-term view. Incorporating customer lifetime value can give you a complete picture.
Finally, consider opportunity costs—the opportunities you gave up by attending the trade show. Can your team generate more value at the trade show or by focusing on other activities? Ideally, the trade show should result in more sales or overall value than if your team had stayed in the office.
10 Strategies to Maximize Trade Show ROI
Here are some strategies to get the most value for your business:
Before and During the Event
1. Showing Products and Services: Set up an attractive and engaging booth to showcase your products and services. Use interactive displays, demos, or videos to grab the attention of attendees and encourage them to learn more about what you offer.
2. Networking and Partnerships: Before attending or hosting any trade show, research the attendees, exhibitors, and speakers beforehand. Identify potential partners, customers, and suppliers and contact them to schedule meetings during the event. Communicate your value proposition and look for opportunities to collaborate.
3. Brand Awareness: Develop a clear branding strategy and ensure your booth design, marketing materials, and messaging are consistent with your brand. Use branding elements like logos, colors, and themes to create a memorable visitor experience and increase brand recognition.
4. Engage with Visitors: Train your booth staff to be knowledgeable, approachable, and friendly. Ask them to proactively engage with attendees, answer questions, and provide valuable information about your business. Offer swags, contests, or exclusive offers to incentivize booth visits and generate leads.
5. Social Media: Promote your trade show participation on social media before, during, and after the event. Share updates, photos, and videos to create buzz and get attendees to visit your booth. Use event-specific hashtags to reach a wider audience.
After the Event
After the trade show, measure its success and identify areas for improvement by comparing it to industry benchmarks, assessing strengths and weaknesses, and gathering feedback from attendees and staff.
6. Follow-up: Follow up with the leads you’ve generated. Send personalized emails or phone calls to continue the conversation, provide more information, and nurture relationships. Track your interactions and progress using a CRM for effective and efficient follow-ups.
7. Evaluate and Improve: After each trade show, evaluate your performance by reviewing metrics like leads generated, deals closed, and ROI. Identify areas to improve and adjust your strategy to get the most value out of future trade show opportunities.
8. Compare to Industry Benchmarks: Count the number of leads, sales, and revenue generated and compare to industry benchmarks to see how you performed.
9. Assess Strengths and Weaknesses: Evaluate the effectiveness of different marketing tactics, such as booth design, marketing materials, and staff engagement, to see what worked and what didn’t.
10. Gather Feedback and Insights: Conduct surveys, focus groups, or one-on-one interviews with attendees and staff to get attendee feedback and areas for improvement.
Unleash Your Trade Show Success
Measuring and maximizing trade show ROI is key to your business if you want to optimize your marketing and grow your revenue. To boost trade show ROI and influence, set clear goals and metrics, collect leads quickly, and review the insights from the data.
Remember, trade show ROI is more than just lead generation and sales. It’s about brand awareness, building relationships with existing and potential clients, and getting valuable market intel. So, a holistic approach to measuring and improving trade show ROI is crucial.
You can use various technologies and methods to measure your progress, identify improvement areas, and change your strategies for future events.
Success and higher ROI from trade shows require planning, execution, and analysis. Following the tips in this article and staying updated with the latest industry trends and best practices will quickly maximize your trade show ROI.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still wondering about how impactful measuring trade show ROI can be? Check out some common questions and answers below.
How Profitable are Trade Shows?
Trade shows are profitable when executed properly. Businesses expect a four-to-one ROI ratio. This means that the leads and sales generated at the show will be higher than the overall event spending.
How Do You Track Trade Show ROI?
At its core, measuring ROI involves using the following formula:
(Revenue - Investment) / Investment
However, it's essential to recognize that there's more to ROI than just the numbers. Take a more holistic approach to ROI to better understand the true value of your trade show participation and make well-informed decisions about your future events and resource allocation.
Up next, read everything you need to know about virtual trade shows.
