ROO – RETURN ON OBJECTIVES

The trend amongst exhibitors and organisers alike seems to have been an obsession about measuring your ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI) – and why not? Exhibition organisers have realised that for our medium to be taken seriously and to deserve a decent slice of marketing budget, some tangible return must be demonstrable. Historically when evaluating an event, exhibitors would consider such factors as numbers of visitors and . . . well that’s it really. Often it was a ‘cost-per-thousand’ justification. X thousand visitors over Y days generated a number that was used to wave under the financial director’s nose by way of justification for the same or slightly larger budget the following year. Their more enlightened colleagues would even consider such matters as the number of business cards collected, sometimes the number of brochures dispensed (ouch!) and the overall ‘gut-feel’ of the personnel manning the stand. They might have factored in the list of competitors also exhibiting and the amount of column inches the event generated in their trade publications or other media.

It stands to reason that using the above metrics, exhibitors with high value goods and services would often find the exercise rewarding whereas those selling a low cost item or service would rarely be able to ‘justify’ their attendance using such evaluation measures. People exhibit for a whole raft of reasons and therefore their criteria for measuring success should vary to a similar degree. Go back to your original objectives for attending the show. What were you trying to achieve? If your intention was to generate a set number of new leads and see a certain number of your existing customers and make contact with a dozen overseas buyers you suddenly have your criteria for measuring your success – Return on Objectives (ROO).

As we have discussed earlier, focussing on the overall number of visitors is usually a waste of time. If you got to meet the people you planned to see you were successful. It doesn’t matter whether the one hundred leads came from an audience of one thousand or ten thousand – you still have one hundred leads! You can make your evaluation as complex or as simple as you like – the important thing is that you have some way of knowing that the event you attended was worth repeating or best avoided. Most good organisers will also go some way to helping you as it is as much in their interest as it is yours. Remember, a happy exhibitor is a re-booked exhibitor and ornagisers are quite partial to those!