Two plus decades ago, when my measurement company launched our event measurement product, Delahaye/TS, we offered analysis of media coverage around trade shows and an online survey of show attendees. The service was designed to determine if a company’s messages were coming across. The concept of ROI for the show was never mentioned.
Today, everybody wants to know the ROI, but it’s not an easy thing to calculate properly. There are, however, many elegant and creative ways to show the value of your event without getting bogged down in accounting. Here are 5 ways:
Option 1: Show the value of projected sales
For your next trade show client, take the percentage of leads who are very likely to purchase within six months and multiply it by the number of visitors to the client’s booth. (Do visual counts every hour to estimate traffic.) That gives you the number of booth visitors who are likely to purchase within six months. Now look at the profit margins and pricing of the products the visitors say they plan to purchase and calculate a net potential profit from the projected sales. By using the budget for that show, you can provide your client with an ROI number.
Option 2: Cost per minute spent with prospect
Most sales organizations know what it costs to get a salesperson into a prospect’s office for a meeting. Let’s say it’s $500, and the meeting lasts 15 minutes. That’s about $33 per minute. A tech company we worked with sponsored a cruise that put their top salespeople in conversations with their top 50 customers for an hour and a half. That was 90 minutes with 50 customers (or a total of 4,500 customer minutes). The cruise and sponsorship cost $5,000 so the cost per minute spent with customer was $1.11. That’s almost 30 times more cost-effective than a salesperson’s office visit.
Once you have expressed value in that form, you can compare trade show efficiency to other marketing efforts. So, for example, if a 20-second underwriting spot on NPR costs $5,000, and assuming it communicates your key message and reaches 500,000 listeners, that’s $.01 per opportunity to hear a key message and $0.03 per minute spent with a prospect.
Option 3: Future cost avoidance
I once met with a major auto manufacturer who was spending many millions sponsoring car races, golf tournaments, antique car auctions, and a variety of other events. The company wanted to know how effective these events were. According to the event organizers, attendance (and therefore results) every year were always better than the year before.
I asked them what they were trying to achieve by these efforts. The first response was essentially: “We are always a major sponsor of these types of events.” After about two hours of discussion, we agreed that their business objective was to drive potential customers into dealer showrooms.
We began a series of surveys at each event to determine if the attendees remembered the sponsors, and also if they were more or less likely to test drive or buy the sponsor’s car. We collected names at the event itself and called attendees two weeks after the event. Our results showed that, on average, 50% of all attendees were more likely to test drive one of the sponsor’s vehicles after attending the event.
After we had measured three different events, we were able to compare and contrast the cost effectiveness (in terms of dollars per person reached) of different events and different tactics. It turned out that the historic car race, which was a relatively low-cost sponsorship, was far more effective at boosting loyalty than the golf tournament. Furthermore, at the golf tournament, a car suspended on top of a lake turned out to be far more effective at generating awareness than all the signs, t-shirts, and other gear combined. And at a fraction of the cost.
In the end, they settled on the metric “percentage of attendees more likely to go to a dealership” as the universal metric by which they would evaluate events. They took that percentage and multiplied it by the total number of attendees to get a sense of how many people were likely to go to a dealership after each event.
They then multiplied that number by the average profit from the sale of a new car and subtracted the cost of the sponsorship to determine a projected ROI from the event. The results enabled the sponsor to better understand the relative value of each event, and of different tactics within each event. And they could stop wasting money on those that didn’t work.
Option 4: Increase in customers
The key thing about whatever measurement tool you use is to make sure that you are tying results back to the desired business outcome. Awhile back, Country Music Television (CMT) decided to sponsor country music concerts in Walmart parking lots. They used big tractor trailers to set them up. Their first measure of success was to ask the truck drivers how many people showed up. But their goal wasn’t to attract listeners in the parking lots. Their goal was to increase demand in local markets for CMT, and specifically to convince attendees to call their local cable company and request CMT or to take some other action on behalf of CMT.
We used a sweatshirt giveaway at the events to collect names and addresses of attendees, whom we called two weeks after the event. We agreed that the common criteria against which we should measure all events was an ad hoc “level of engagement.” Specifically, we asked people to rate how much the event experience affected their relationship with CMT, and then we established the mean level of interest for each event. We further defined the success criterion as the percentage of people willing to take action on behalf of CMT.
Our surveys showed that 93% of attendees were willing to take some action and 89% were willing to make a phone call to their local cable company. We then compared results between different cities so CMT could determine where to expand the program the following year.
Option 5: Increase in knowledge by employees
To measure the impact of an employee event, one company we worked with “gamified” their measurement. After years of low participation in post-employee-meeting surveys, they were looking for ways to re-engage employees and get better data.
They wanted to test employee knowledge of key policies and messages, so they staged their own “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” game. Employees were given “homework” ahead of the meeting that included key facts and principles the company wanted them to know. Then at the event they held a public quiz. The winner got to designate a charity to which the company would donate $1,000.
Results showed that the competitive nature of the game drove greater knowledge and understanding of company goals. And at far lower costs than other employee communications efforts. ∞
