Holding a successful exhibition at a trade show takes careful planning, trained staff, and good exhibition design. Even if you have allowed for every element in the design of your trade show stand, you will not know if the show has been a success, unless you can effectively evaluate the success for your business.
Obviously, one of the best measurements to evaluate the success of your exhibition is the number of new customers who have come to the business directly from the trade show. Collecting business cards from prospective customers at your exhibition stand does not necessarily turn these people into customers.
Following up with the prospective customers is essential to convert the prospect into a sale. People will visit a trade show for information, not necessarily to buy on the day. A follow up phone call or email could make the difference between trade show success and exhibition failure, especially if the evaluation method focuses on how many new customers, or new sales, the business makes within a month of the trade show.
Ensure all contact details gathered from the trade show are entered into a database, with the trade show name and dates as the meeting point. Even if these contacts become customers in the months following the trade show, the exhibition was a success.
Debriefing the trained staff who manned the store after the exhibition has closed may render further contacts than first thought. After all, these people actually spoke with the prospective customers and can give opinions on how interested individual people were at the trade show. This can give a good indication as to whether the passers by were attracted into the stand by the banners, signage, product displays, and pop up displays, or whether the majority of people just kept walking past the stand. If this is the case, better attention to the design of the stand may improve the success rate of future trade show exhibitions.
Other ways to evaluate the success of a trade show exhibition may include how many samples, products, or brochures the staff manning the stand gave out. If you catered for 1000 brochures to go to customers, but came back with 700 of these, then the trade show exhibition was probably not a success. Training of staff will ensure brochures or samples were given only to those customers showing a genuine interest, otherwise this measure may not provide an accurate evaluation.
You may even measure how many in depth conversations the staff have with prospective customers about the product, as opposed to people who simply pocket a brochure and move on to the next exhibition stand.
An evaluation of the trade show success should also consider how well organised the trade show was overall, ease of setting up the exhibition stand to meet your business’ custom design needs, and importantly, how many people came through the doors of the trade show. If there were 50,000 people at the trade show, this will give you an indication of your ‘hit rate’ at the exhibition, by comparing how many customers were attracted to your stand.
Whatever methods you choose to evaluate the success of the trade show and the exhibition stand, you should plan to evaluate the success at intervals following the trade show. Some measures of success will be taken directly at the trade show itself, but others, such as total number of customers from the trade show, may take several months to gather the data.
Tags: event marketing
