Do you have a set of clearly defined, easily measurable goals for each of your tradeshows regarding your social media marketing efforts?
If not, here’s where to start.
First set down your show objectives.
What metric are you most interested n moving during your tradeshows when it relates to social media? Yes, you want to move the sales needle, but as you add on social media components, you are putting more people into the potential sales funnel.
There are myriad tools available for tracking your social media interaction, but your measurements should be driven more by what you want to learn.
Need to know how many visitors you had this year compared with last?
Want to find out if people respond to a series of tweets inviting them to your booth to get a great deal, meet a famous person or win a contest?
Need to know how many people see those photographs you posted on your Facebook page from the show, to gauge interest in your products or services?
Once you determine what you want to learn, start focusing on the various ways social media lets you do that in the realm of event marketing.
Some of the metrics you might be interested in:
- Facebook page ‘likes’ – perhaps not as good as adding someone to an email marketing list, but by having them as a Facebook friend they are giving you permission to engage with them.
- Booth traffic. If you have a rough count of booth visitors from last year’s show, you can compare to what you get this year. If not, start counting anyway – it’s a good metric to have.
- Direct response visitors, which will come from contests or other come-ons sent out via Twitter or Facebook.
- Getting more followers on Twitter. If you have show-goers following you on Twitter, chances are they’ll come to next year’s show as well, which means it’ll be easier to find and track them to your booth.
- QR Code responses. If you invite people to download documents or sign up for a newsletter, track the number of people that have used the code. Compare the percentage that actually followed through on your offer.
- Blog post views
- Photo views
- Video views and possible click-throughs from your YouTube channel to a specific landing page.
- Want to take a survey in the booth? Here’s a great opportunity to do a little market research. Just make sure to ask respondents how they interact with you online (or if they do at all). Offer a small reward for taking the survey. Capture contact information – at least a name and email so you can follow up. Put them on a newsletter if you publish one.
- Length of Facebook thread, to show you how much a particular topic or post resonates with your audience (of course, it might be the responses that they’re responding to, not your original post!).
- Impressions and other opportunities-to-see you.
And of course the sales information that you should be tracking from show to show:
- Number of leads
- Number of registrations for demos (or other)
- Number of appointments made
- Number of proposals delivered
- Number of sales
- Amount of sales
- Average amount of each sale
- Comparison of different shows and year-to-year same show results
Yes, there are a lot of moving parts and your particular goals will of course be unique to your company and product or service. The more you are able to track social media metrics and compare those numbers with the more traditional sales tracking metrics and see how they work together (or not), the more informed you’ll be and the better positioned you’ll be to adjust your direction or jump in a new direction when the signs point that way.
