After your company makes an appearance at a trade show, you must determine if it was worth your time. To do this, you’ll need to measure your results. Let’s explore some of the best ways to evaluate your leads and effectively manage your trade show attendance.

Direct Traffic and Organic Search

One of the easiest ways to tell if you had a successful trade show is by measuring the direct and organic traffic of your website. Direct traffic refers to how many people type in your company’s URL into their browser. Organic traffic means the number of visitors who arrive at your site by searching for related products and services in search engines.

By attending a trade show event, you can increase both types of traffic. Create a landing page to send trade show visitors to. This way, you can look at how much traffic you have on a normal day and compare it to how much you have after attending a trade show. This will tell you if your marketing efforts were successful.

Social Media Followers

Another way to evaluate lead quality is by analyzing your social media goals. After attending a trade show, you should get more followers on social media. Thanks to a number of analytics tools, you can track new members and determine which channels were most effective.

The channels make a difference because you want to invest your marketing dollars into the most effective ones. If your audience is more likely to be on Facebook, you’ll want to put more of your budget into this channel for maximum engagement.

New Submissions

One of the main goals of attending a trade show event is to generate leads. If you’re using a marketing software program, capture the data and identify new submissions in your system.

As you know, not all trade show leads are created equal. Some of your leads are not in a position to buy from you, so you don’t want to waste time and money pursuing a conversation with them. To separate quality leads, you will need to set qualification criteria such as:

• Authority
• Budget
• Timeframe
• Need
• Contact history
• Potential sales volume
• Account characteristics

New Customers

New leads are great, but new customers are even better! Fortunately, you can determine how many new customers you’ve gained by looking at event registrants and whether they made a purchase or not. The best way to do this is by incorporating closed-loop marketing, which can be found through your analytics program. This way, you can look back at your registrants and their life cycles. How many people visited your landing page? How many people converted?

Trade shows can bring massive rewards to your company, but they can also end up costing more than what you bring in. To ensure that you’re managing your trade shows effectively, take the time to evaluate the quality and quantity of your leads after attending each event.