5 Planning Factors for Tradeshows ROI Success Read

As an SMB, we are extremely purposeful about how we spend our cash. We aim to be incredibly focused on our efforts, and where we spend dollars, and we use metrics to determine where to invest our not-unlimited marketing budget. That doesn’t mean cutting out marketing activities which are critical to our growth (in terms of brand awareness, customers, and revenue growth), but means that we are ultra-selective about spending on any of the marketing activities that we decide. This includes attending industry tradeshows, and conferences that are sometimes not easy to measure an ROI for.

There are many benefits from for a business to go to conferences and or tradeshows. These benefits include gaining more exposure for your brand, generating leads, meeting with prospects, qualify opportunities, connect with customers, and promoting your solutions. We’ve been to a fair number of trade shows. In addition to meeting a lot of potential customers we also learned a lot about just what it means to participate in a trade show.

From Optify’s experience, we’ve found the biggest benefit from the shows we’ve gotten to is increasing our exposure and generating leads. We’ve found that the leads we acquire at tradeshows and conference are usually more qualified and targeted, and tend to have a higher average deal value than leads we acquire from other sources.

We learned that it’s essential for businesses to carefully select the best trade show for their specific business and stage of growth. To be sure, there are a lot of trade shows out there, but you need to find the right fit. As a result of our experience, we’ve put together a list of key issues to think about before you sign up.

We found the most value out of attending shows by planning an integrated marketing strategy before, which includes creating a floor plan, leveraging social media and developing a follow-up plan to maximize the touches and connections we made while on the floor.

Here are 5 planning factors we’ve considered when deciding what trade show is best suited for our business: