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Before spending thousands on a tradeshow, know the metrics needed to calculate your tradehsow ROI; and get a few tips on how to maximize your success.
We just returned from the Search Marketing Expo in New York City last week where we launched our new SiteJuice™ product. We brought a big team of 9 people to help manage the expected crowd of 2,000-3,000 people.
To calculate your tradeshow ROI, you first need to define your goals, and that has to coincide with what your spending and what you are currently paying to acquire a new customer. That means if you are currently spending $100 to acquire a new customer, and you plan to spend $20,000 on the tradeshow, you need to get 200 new customers out of the show, which is 2,000 leads at a 10% conversion rate. If that sounds too high, you need to spend less.
OK, so now that you have a rough outline of some goals based on expenses, what is your strategy? Our strategy was people. The more people we had, the more people we could talk to about our product and sell its benefits. We maintained folks in the booth, and other consistently roamed around not only talking to people and driving them to our booth, but also scoping out the competition. This seemed better than blowing a few thousand bucks on some lame bag stuffers that everyone throws away, or an over-priced sponsorship for lanyards or Wi-Fi access. Brand awareness is fine, but it doesn’t sell your product, particularly if nobody knows who you are.
So here are a few tips that I hope you will find valuable the next time you search out the next tradeshow:
Tip #1 – Make it uber-simple to sign up for your product. We created special landing page for folks to sign up for our product that had only 4 fields. Also, we did not require an email verification, and once they entered their info, they were logged straight into their account and we showed them how to set it up. Normal sign up processes won’t work for a tradeshow. Even with this simple process and 3 laptops ready for signups, we still had lines forming.
