There are many benefits for companies that participate in live events such as trade shows and conventions. If your customers are other businesses, it allows you to meet customers face-to-face, network with vendors, and check up on the competition. However, as with other time and monetary investments, a cost analysis will help determine how beneficial it is to your business to attend certain events.
Why Track Analytics?
Tracking the success of participating in trade shows, conventions, and other live events will help your company discover where they should be spending their money. There are hundreds of such events held all over the world for different industries and it is impossible to be at all of them. By reviewing the analytics for events that your business has attended, you can discover which were successful for your company so you can book space for them again.
What Information Is Important?
When tracking the information from past events, you can determine profitability by examining several factors. You will want to research to find out:
- How many new contacts were made.
- The number of qualified leads received.
- How many contracts were signed at the event.
- How many leads turned into sales after the trade show or convention.
Being aware of this information will help track the live event ROIÂ for your company.
Calculating ROI
To choose which events your pounds are best spent at, you need to calculate your company’s return on investment. There are several ways to do this, with the simplest being to measure the sales revenue from the event versus the costs of going to it. This measures all the variable costs involved in attending so you get an overall view of its success for your business.
The equation for calculating the ROI would be: Sales Revenue/Event Expense x 100, which is expressed as a percentage. So, if your company spent £15,000 to attend an event and made £150,000 in sales, then the calculation would be: £150,000/£15,000 x 100 = ROI, which would be 1,000%. In this hypothetical case, your company would get a ROI of 1,000%, which would definitely make it worth attending this event again.
Other Ways to Measure ROI
There are many other ways to measure the ROI of an event aside from measuring revenue from it. Other analytics include:
- Tracking a hashtag for your company’s appearance at an event on social media.
- Administering surveys about your company’s presence at an event.
- Creating games to attract attendees and tracking participation in them.
- Creating a mobile app for events and tracking its use.
While there will be some investment required for many of these methods, they can give you an accurate way of measuring your company’s success at events and help determine in which your company’s money should be invested.
Using analytics to measure success can help you determine if the investment to attend live events paid off for your company. To find out which events your business should attend, start measuring your event ROI.
