While digital marketers now have a wealth of data to mine, extrapolate, and analyze, the job is still just as complex and confusing for trade marketers and in-person sellers. For marketers who want to measure trade events, gauging the footfall their exhibition generated, the engagement and interest they cultivated, and the actual conversions that occurred, all seem too "all over the place" to measure.
That is why most trade marketers are satisfied with a degree of complacency in their approach. No matter how big, engaging, or popular the exhibition they presented was, trade marketing teams always seem clueless on the trade show metrics they must be aware of.
A big budget and a fancy exhibit are not the only parameters for success. Success requires anticipating visitors' needs and requirements and tailoring your approach to better please your target audience.
Here are five top metrics to evaluate the success of your trade event and how FastSensor can help you achieve them.
Booth Visits, Impressions and Engagements
The number of booth visits can be a crucial indicator to track when generating leads for your brand. However, booth visits and engagements from sales-qualified prospects who are in a position to buy are more important. It's vital to remember that lead generation can be improved by taking a few optimization steps ahead of time.
Many trade exhibitions provide a database of registrants ahead of time; take advantage of this and contact potential buyers to set up meetings.
The primary reason to obtain these metrics is to generate leads. By monitoring and understanding the total number of impressions and engagements your booth generated, FastSensor can help you drive additional leads based on the pattern of footfall in your space.
Close Rate (Outreach Funnel)
This is the proportion of leads your company made money or took action on during a trade show or event campaign. There are two methods for calculating this:
Number of Customers Closed / Number of Opportunities
Number of Customers Closed / Number of Leads Generated
One calculation considers the percentage of leads that are won out of an overall number of leads. The second examines the percentage of opportunities won out of a total number of opportunities (or leads with active opportunities).
With FastSensor, improving your close rate begins at the top of the conversion funnel through data-driven optimizations and improvements, including floorplan changes, messaging adjustments, and more.
Time-In-View and Average Visit Duration
A recent addition to the more popular trade event management metrics is time-in-view.
Attention is the lifeblood of most industries. For events and experiential marketing activations, you exchange the attention of your audience for your brand's trade show budget. Time-in-view is known as the average time a viewable impression stays in view. The average time does not include impressions that could not be viewed.
With the time-in-view tool offered by FastSensor, trade show managers can now see how engaged the footfall traffic was throughout their exhibit, and can quantify the total amount of exposure - and therefore their full impact.
Customer Dwell Time
While your fantastic trade show sales team is busy making new business connections, who is looking after your existing customers? If your key competitors are also at the same trade show as you, your existing customers and clients are already attracted to them. That's why, no matter how strong your existing relationship is with a customer, you have to treat them like VIPs.
Regular monitoring of how long each customer spends in your booth, also known as visitor dwell time or average dwell, is a terrific way to gauge your brand affinity, engagement and continued success.
The world might be changing at a breakneck speed, but superior customer service will always give you the competitive edge to win over any client, and now can be quantifiably proven through advanced analytics such as dwell time.
FastSensor can identify which portions of your booth or show generate the highest dwell time, as well as which portions can use some additional attention.
Average Deal Size
An in-person interaction at a trade fair would indeed result in higher orders. However, you need to know the average size of each order placed, the revenue you earn, and which trade show presenter or employee played the biggest role in making the sale.
The average deal size, very easily calculated by the FastSensor, can help you make sense of your inventory turnover and compare the performances of the different trade shows you have done.
If you have the patience, you can also calculate consumers' average LTV (lifetime value) based on the lead source. This will assess their worth beyond the first purchase and instead concentrate on their long-term spending.
With FastSensor, you now can determine the exact, data-driven value of your event efforts like never before. This allows you to build better budgets, prove return on investment (ROI), and ultimately increase your average deal size.
Conclusion
Setting up an exhibit at a trade show or arranging an entire trade event is no easy task. If you plan to invest in this type of marketing activation for your company, you must first determine whether or not these events are effective.
With FastSensor, you can put yourself in the right position at the right time by analyzing your performance and gaining more value from each trade show event. If you know the best metrics to measure to evaluate success, you can achieve whatever you have set out to do.
No company makes it big by thinking small. There is quite a lot of untapped scope in the trade event industry, and FastSensor is here to help you collect critical foot traffic analytics, customer data and important metrics to achieve your goals.
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