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Choosing the right event
Prior to deciding which event to attend, you should to be clear on why you're attending, what you hope to gain and how you will know if you have succeeded.
Don't get me wrong, many people are there with good intentions, aiming to do business and generate sales, but their objectives are too vague and either non-measurable or unrealistic.
Broadly objectives can include:
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Sales generation Direct sales, leads, database building, registering interest, current and new relationships |
Customer relationships Sales, confirmations, incremental or additional business, referees, re-vitalise lapsed |
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Brand building Awareness, positioning, education, demonstration, expansion to new markets, investors/city |
Product launches Interest, prototypes, design studies, feedback data acquisition, timing and sales |
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Market research Awareness, perceptions, surveys and opinion data, targets, budgets and campaign robustness |
Channel building/support Partners, dealers, distributors, agents, support for current agreements/channels |
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Media relations Coverage, titles, press, editorial and Jjournalist relations, investors/city |
PR Audience, coverage, profile, methodology, VIP profiling |
It is important, however, to be more specific with your objectives.
For example if your objective is to generate sales, then you can ask questions like:
- New or existing accounts?
- How many?
- Leads by order value or number of accounts?
- Demographic splits?
- Sales conversions or enquiries?
- What timescales?
Most people use some system for establishing good objectives and will ensure they use something like S.M.A.R.T. to test them.
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Comments
Hi Neil, What you say is of course quite correct in isolation but as you know, what matters is to see the event in the context of all marketing activty. The totality of marketing should be expressed in a marketing in strategy. Sometimes therefore an event can fail the tests you express but make sense in context. That makes it quite difficult to measure outcomes though. Marketing is such an inexact science!!
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