Are you relying on badge scanners to measure the success of your trade show?
It can seem like a solid plan. If you can hit your target number of visitors, isn’t that a sure sign of success?
The truth is that badge scanning is a false economy. Discover why in this blog, and what you should be doing to accurately measure your expo performance.
Inferior data
With badge scanning, you have no idea how engaged your attendees are.
This is a big problem. You’re potentially filling your database with leads as cold as Antarctica. Because badge scanning isn’t an indication of how meaningful your conversations were. Or how interested attendees were in your products or services.
It’s like measuring how many impressions your post has delivered on social media. It doesn’t tell you how many people are engaging with the post or clicking through to your website. All you get is meaningless data that says nothing about your potential customers or how to improve your lead generation strategy.
What you really need to capture
Face-to-face engagement is a critical measurement of success. It gives you information on the quality of your conversations rather than quantity alone.
You can learn how:
- interested attendees are in your products or services
- effective your lead generators are
- well-received your stand is
- many leads you can realistically convert into a sale
In a moment, we’ll discuss the ways to measure face-to-face engagement. But first, you need to know how to drive meaningful conversations.
Customer-centric conversations
Too many exhibiting businesses focus on blowing their own trumpet. Or they take a hospitality-style approach, spending a large part of their budget on cool freebies and free drinks. This is a great way to make some noise and generate footfall. But it doesn’t ensure you’re attracting people who are generally interested in your offering.
Leaving a lasting impression and priming leads for conversion after the show starts with making the customer the focal point of your conversations.
Expo Stars Founder and Managing Director, Lee Ali, discusses this further in Tech Manchester’s FastForward podcast:
“When you go to an exhibition, you’re surrounded by people with buying authority who are looking to discover new solutions that can help them do their job better. And they have given you permission to market to them. Essentially, you get to bypass two or three steps of the sales process.
“Jumping on this unmissable opportunity starts with getting in front of these people and arousing their curiosity. Don’t do a ten-minute speech. Learn about your target audience before the show. Who are they? What are their challenges? What are their priorities at board level? This valuable information will help you qualify leads and spark meaningful conversations.”
Using this personalised approach, you can ask qualifying questions to filter through attendees and ensure you’re spending time talking to the right people.
You can then use your audience information to have compelling conversations that plant the seed of intrigue and make your business memorable. This encourages leads to voluntarily come back to you with a request or opportunity. So you don’t have to hammer them with follow-up marketing.
As Lee Ali also explains, expos are great opportunities for doing “live market research”. This is a prime time to get in front of your ideal customers, uncover their evolving needs and priorities and inject this insight into your future marketing efforts.
Learn how to start, maintain and close meaningful conversations in this blog: 6 Minute Trade Show Lead Generation. You’ll also discover how to create enchanting booth experiences. Sharing this info with your lead generators ensures your team are equipped to execute quality conversations with attendees.
Measuring face-to-face engagement
Measuring face-to-face engagement opens up a variety of unique performance indicators rather than just ‘leads captured’.
Want to understand how exciting your booth experience was? How effectively you built your brand awareness? Whether or not you qualified the right leads? Engagement performance stats can paint a realistic picture for you.
Some simple stats you can use to measure engagement are:
- Follow-up appointments
- Completion of engagement tools such as demonstrations and quizzes
- Satisfaction scores from feedback forms
- Email sign-ups
- Social media follow
Capturing this information typically takes place at the end of your conversation. This is explained in more detail in our 6 Minute Lead Generation guide.
Level-up your insights using technology
For example, you could use face detection tech to track eye contact connections and provide a mood evaluation for the attendees you interact with.
This data helps you understand which products or displays attendees are looking at and how engaged they are on an emotional level. Information you can leverage to improve your displays and methods of igniting and maintaining attendees’ attention.
Discover the different ways innovative tech can transform your trade show performance: How to Measure Exhibition Engagement.
Adios Badge Scanners
And hello effective face-to-face engagement. Incorporate a solid engagement strategy – including how you will measure engagement – into your trade show marketing plan.
Doing so ensures you’re not wasting precious resources on bygone ways of measuring success. Instead, you gain accurate data on the effectiveness of your booth, lead generators and product demonstrations. Empowering you to improve every aspect of your exhibition efforts.
Think you might need more help nailing your face-to-face engagement strategy? We can provide one-on-one consultancy to help you:
- Identify and engage your target audience
- Compel your prospects to want to do business with you after the event
- Measure your exhibiting results
To find out more, call us on 0161 834 9478 (UK) or +1 702 608 8362 (USA).