A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO TRADE FAIRS: PLANNING & SUCCESS
It’s time to conclude the Beginner’s Guide to Trade Fairs with the final article on the subject – one where we talk about planning your activities further and having a clear idea whether you have succeeded in your endeavours. The last article will have helped you maintain your current workflow and integrate all the communication with clients and partners you’ve met during the trade fair or exhibition.
But there are another few aspects you have to keep in mind when you return to your office
Doing the math, revising your goals to gauge your success and making the first steps towards planning your next outing are among them.
BUDGET CONCERNS
We’ve made the case for the importance of budgeting when you’re well in the early stages, but once you’ve returned to your headquarters, you have to take out all the receipts and calculate whether you’ve kept within budget. It’s equally important to do this after-event budgeting and know your actual costs. Learning from your spending habits is valuable to understand where you can spend more wisely next time and exert better control.
HAVE YOU SUCCEEDED?
The easiest way to answer this question is if you’ve followed our earlier advice and made yourself a handy list of goals. If your goal was to generate sales leads, then look at how your stand has performed against this metric. Have you hit your goals and if so, by how much? If your goal was to just extend your networking, then how many of the matchmaking events have you attended? How many business cards have you collected and how many calls and emails have you returned? These are the simple metrics that allow you to see the bigger picture, because after all during the thick of the action, it’s hard to gauge the overall result.
A tip: Regarding your reach at the exhibition, a simple way to calculate your effectiveness is to look at the ratio between the visitors you’ve gained as contacts and the total visitor number. It may take some time before that information is released, but you can count on the organizers to boast about their attendance rates and that’s a valuable resource to utilize.
Insight: Not always can you fully deem a particular event a success, because not all benefits are immediately present to take into account. Effects can be easily long-term and sometimes looking towards the future is the best rather than focusing too much on the present moments after an exhibition as those can be frustrating to evaluate.
PLANNING
As you go through the first months of evaluation, recalibration and taking in all that you’ve learned at an exhibition, you should also keep an eye out on the next event that is beneficial to your company development. What you’ve learned here can be applied there – the stall design, personnel organization, budgeting, placement and contact recording system. This allows you to continuously improve as well as spread out the work evenly, so it’s not hard to attend the next industry event.
Remember, the earlier the better! This applies to your accommodation as well. Go Fair ltd has all the good deals no matter your budget restrictions. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us at either [email protected] or + 44 20 3846 1502. This brings our Beginner’s Guide to Trade Fairs to an end. We’re glad you’ve spent these months reading and if you have any specific questions, we’d be happy to answer them!
