"What is the best way to quantify my trade show exhibit results?" This is a question our 3D Exhibits measurement team answers fairly often. And this is our response:
Currently, the most thorough way to quantify your trade show booth results is through a combo of tablet technology and staff interaction. Ideally, a tablet carrying brand representative greets each visitor, scans them into the system and escorts them through their experience.
Meanwhile, on the back end, data is collected—with an option to view what's being collected in real-time via an online dashboard. (see image above)
This system delivers a multitude of measurement opportunities:
Measurement Opportunities:
- Capture contact and demographic information about each visitor.
- Identify visitor interests by recording which demos they participate in and which documents they view—as well as what follow-up materials they request. Use this information to quantify overall attendee interests and to provide customized follow-up outreach.
- Quantify the duration of each visitor engagement. Use this data to quantify visitor dwell time and to assess individual visitor interest level—as well as to quantify ideal interaction time benchmarks for future shows.
- Identify and quantify which visitors make return visits.
- Record the staff member who spoke to each contact. Use this to correlate dwell time with individual staff performance. Use the online dashboard to view this information in real-time and coach individual staff members to lengthen or shorten their typical engagements.
- Quantify the total number of visitors and the number visitors engaged by each staff member. Use this data in real-time to coach underperforming staff members and congratulate top performers.
- Review dwell time statistics to compare the activities of current customers versus new prospects.
- Assess booth traffic by day to calculate staffing needs for next year.
- Incorporate an exit survey to quantify visitors' quality of experience and agreement with your message.
- Track and graph results per show or create whole-schedule comparisons to identify top performing shows.
- Track long-term to view correlations between types of interaction and eventual sales, specific reps and eventual closed sales, reps and length of time to close of sales,
Plus, you can download your data to a spreadsheet to slice, dice, crunch and analyze it in any other way you can think of.
Our customer, Dell Computer, won a 2012 Event Marketer Magazine Event Tech Award for Best Use of Hand-Held Technology for implementing this sort of system. From its system, Dell knows the customer demographic present at each show, which stations each type of customer visits, how many times every visitor returned during the show, what literature is requested and how much total time is spent in the exhibit. This information makes it much easier for the sales reps to follow-up and move toward a sale.
That system is now four years old, and while technology has evolved, that type of approach is just as relevant now as it was then. (Read what Event Marketer magazine had to say about that program here.)
What is your preferred trade show exhibit measurement technique?
