How to Defend Trade Show Budgets to Your Boss!
As a marketing or sales professional, you know the stakes of attending a trade show are high. Whether it’s to build brand awareness or showcase a new product, attending this type of industry event can help to make or break your company.
The potential financial reward of attending a trade show is enough to tempt any business owner, but trade shows are also laden with enough sizeable risk to make justifying your expenditures to decision makers a real uphill battle. So how do you defend your trade show budget to your boss? How can you measure the success of a trade show?
Defend Your Trade Show Budget
The first thing you and your boss need to agree upon are the mutual expectations for attending, which means quantifying your business goals. Is the purpose of attending to generate leads that can then be turned into sales, or is it to launch a new product and create some buzz around your brand?
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Remember that success is not always measured in of dollars and cents, so it’s not always an easy endeavor to convince your higher ups of the benefit of attending a trade show.
There are two basic ways to measure your success as a tradeshow attendee (the findings of which can be used to justify the investment in digital signage or tension fabric displays); you can either examine your ROI (return on investment) or your ROO (return on objectives).
Using ROI as your metric, you simply subtract the costs associated with attending from the amount of revenue generated and divide the result by the costs. Unfortunately, it might take several weeks or even months to determine a trade show’s ROI, especially if you’re unable to convert your leads in a timely manner.
Measure Return on Investment
To properly measure the ROI, you’ll need to make sure that you use a CRM (customer relationship management) tool that will be able to track the performance of that lead as well as the funnel when that lead becomes a customer.
Your CRM system can also help you to determine your lead conversion cost (which you can do by simply dividing the total cost of attending a trade show by the number of leads turned to customers).
Over time, you’ll not only be able to determine whether or not attending a trade show results in lower than normal conversion costs, you’ll also be able to determine which shows are correlated with the highest number of converted leads.
This will allow you to show concrete data to leadership in your company that legitimizes your desire to attend show X instead of show Y.
If you’ve decided to use the ROO metric to determine the non-monetary success of a trade show for your company, you might be inclined to examine things like the increase in organic traffic to your company’s site, or by measuring the increase in the number of followers of your social media platforms as a result of attending the show.
Metrics and Data to Measure Success
In either case, having irrefutable data to support your company’s attendance can help tremendously in justifying your costs to your boss and increase the likelihood they’ll sign off on future shows.
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While all this information might sound great, there is a caveat that should be considered. It’s important to remember that like everything else, trade shows are constantly evolving, as are the methods used to engage prospective clients, and the ways in which marketers and businesses as a whole measure the success of a particular show.
Essentially, the strategy employed last year may not be as successful this year. For example, in years past, companies vied to attend the biggest industry events. These days, more and more companies are deciding to scale back, attending smaller events that are more conducive for building a connection with the leads.
Some marketers prefer to alternate between attending a trade show and hosting their own event. The point is that historical data should not be taken as gospel when projecting future performance – so be sure to avoid offering any performance guarantees.
By striking a balance when presenting your boss with historical ROI (or ROO) data with reevaluating goals and expectations on an ongoing basis, justifying a trade show’s expenditures is not that difficult of a task.
