After a week of bringing together radiologists and hospital executives from all over the world, RSNA, the country’s largest medical tradeshow, drew to a close Friday.

Attendees participate in RSNA to get an “up close and personal” look at new & current products in the field of Radiology. It is an event where more than 50,000 attendees visit because all the major suppliers in the industry are present. Attendees perform side-by-side product comparisons by walking the show floor. At the same time, this powerful industry group is exactly the target audience large exhibitors such as GE, Philips, and Toshiba Healthcare are looking to meet and sell their multi-million dollar equipment to.  

What’s new and exciting for exhibitors this year in reaching these booth visitors? Intelligent RFID. RFID has been used at the RSNA show in previous years, however this year a marketing intelligence solution was utilized to pair buyers with sellers in real-time on the show floor. The result, the largest number of exhibitors in RSNA history utilized the RFID solution. RFID stations were completely SOLD OUT.

 Exhibitors benefit directly from RFID technology

Booth product demos are often haphazard as staff members demo to anyone wanting to listen to their pitch. Exhibitors often misdiagnose attendees’ specific interests because of an inability to discern attendees’ purchasing power, interests and preferences. Intelligent RFID is able to diagnose purchase intent and level of interest to help identify buyers.

With the use of Intelligent RFID visitor tracking, exhibitors were able to see attendee interests in real-time and understand how long attendees spent in front of a product area, how many days they came back to see the product, and which additional products they were interested in learning more about. Combining product interests, leads and time in the booth with visitor demographics, paints a powerful picture of who really is likely to make a purchasing decision. In the world of real-time information, Intelligent RFID enabled exhibitors to identify a higher-quality lead, which helps shorten sale cycles and increases revenue opportunities.

More tradeshows will be asked to incorporate Intelligent RFID as booth exhibitors start to demand more value and ROI for the shows they participate in.

According to a recent MarketingSherpa survey, generating high quality leads is the top challenge for B2B marketers.

Clearly it is no longer enough for tradeshows to generate leads and simply pass them on to the sales team.  Tradeshow professionals need to help sales be more effective by identifying the leads that are most likely to convert.  Sales needs to know which leads to act on first and in what context (i.e. what are the prospect’s primary interests and needs with regards to your offering).

By collecting more than just contact information from each booth visitor, you can assign the lead to the appropriate sales person so that the lead gets acted on quickly and enthusiastically, and the prospect gets the best service.

Industry reports show that up to 80% of tradeshow leads are ignored when a lead qualification process is not put in place.  And it’s no wonder – without a robust lead qualification solution, the sales team is faced with a daunting list of seemingly random contacts that they must call on.  They quickly lose motivation because they cannot distinguish which leads are most likely to “cross the finish line.”

Here are some progressive steps to advance from lead collection to lead prioritization:

1. BANT – Add a few profile questions to your lead retrieval solution and you are well on your way to helping qualify leads. An accepted way to qualify leads is to ask four simple questions, known collectively as BANT:

• Is there a budget allocated for my offering?
• What authority do you have in the purchasing process?
• Is the need for this solution well defined and does it match our capabilities
• What is the timeframe for purchasing and implementing a solution? Is it in the next 6 months, 12 months, or over a year?

Make sure that the lead retrieval system you use at tradeshows includes the capability for booth staff to enter this data into the system along with contact information.

1. BANT + B -  Add attendee behavior data to the BANT information, via an RFID solution, for indications of intent to purchase.  Imagine how much more effective your sales team will be if they know which leads are both highly qualified in terms of profile and purchase intent.

1. Lead prioritization report – Now you have much more information on each lead.  But for sales to take immediate action, the data needs to be organized in a way that makes it easy to view and understand which leads are most likely to convert quickly.

A lead prioritization report takes the contact information and the BANT + B data for each lead, converts it into a lead score that takes into account your organization’s sales objectives and areas of success, and delivers a list of the leads, ranked by priority from highest to lowest.

Here’s an example of a lead prioritization report provided to a Fortune 500 healthcare organization:

The lead priority column shows the key leads, obtained by analyzing BANT + B data and using an algorithm customized to the healthcare company’s sales objectives.

1. Visitor cultivation reports – So far we’ve discussed leads generated at the tradeshow booth.  But how about booth visitors who did not exchange contact information with booth staff?

If you are capturing attendee behavior data with RFID, you can also compare these booth visitors to your lead retrieval data.  Even though you have not captured their contact information via your lead retrieval system, you can still cultivate these new leads based on their behavior and interest when in the booth.  Include them in lead nurturing marketing campaigns so that when they are ready to purchase, you’ll be on their short list of preferred vendors.

Lead qualification strategies and solutions not only help make the sales team more productive and efficient, they also provide better measurable ROI for  tradeshows and give you more data to answer the question “Are we participating in the right tradeshows?”

Philips Healthcare invests a substantial portion of their trade show budget on the RSNA show.  In 2008 their 32,000 square foot booth featured 11 distinct product areas.  Some of the objectives for their event:

• Shorten sales cycle
• Learn more about visitor interest in products
• Determine visitors’ message retention
• Understand booth resource requirements
• Provide compelling event measurement and analysis to continue to show that events are strategic

Using Alliance Tech’s RFID solution to measure traffic and duration, they determined:

• Total unique visits to the booth, by day
• Average number of visits per visitor
• Average number of minutes spent by visitor
• Visits and duration for each product area

Combining these behavioral metrics with lead capture data, registration data and survey responses, they collected the following insights:

• Number of organizations represented by visitors
• Number of  leads captured compared to number of visitors
• Familiarity with Philips’ offerings as a result of visiting the booth.  This data was also segment by booth product area, to determine differences in performance.
• Percent of visitors with high purchase intent

With their measurement solutions and strategies at RSNA 2008, Philips reported:

• 23% of visitors returned to booth with a colleague to evaluate the same product
• 52% of visitors had a high purchase intent
• Purchase intent correlated highly with duration in booth
• 96% of visitors reported higher levels of product knowledge as a result of visit to Philips’ booth

Given this insight, the Philips team concluded that their booth at RSNA 2008 achieved objectives and was highly successful.  The insights from behavioral, lead capture and survey metrics also revealed areas for continued improvement and efficiency.  The quantitative analysis shared with senior executives not only gained them praise for their achievements, it increased executive enthusiasm for event measurement.  The Philips team is planning on making an executive dashboard available for the VPs at the event to continuously monitor progress at RSNA 2009.

Relevant links:

Philips Healthcare presentation at TS2 2009

Carestream Health’s use of RFID at RSNA 2008 – press release

Exhibition strategies in today’s economy – Exhibit Surveys whitepaper

Just as world class retailers understand the customer traffic patterns at their physical and on-line stores, event and tradeshow professionals need to understand how an attendee “consumes” their event.  Specifically, :

1. Where do attendees go? Attendance at sessions, networking events and exhibit halls, as well as traffic patterns throughout the event.
2. How often and for how long? Number of visits and duration of each visit to sessions and exhibit booths.
3. How active are they? Participation and contribution in social media, audience response, survey response rate

For event and tradeshow professionals, the data will reveal:

• What activities are of most interest and deserve the most attention and resources? Conversely, which have least appeal and may be considered for down-sizing or elimination to decrease costs and increase event satisfaction.    This type of information is critical to improving ROI.

• What does traffic flow from activity to activity look like?  Are attendees flowing through from room to room, booth to booth or are they exhibiting “boomerang” behavior (i.e. going to a few sessions or booths, then exiting early or shortly after entering the exhibit hall).

• Is the traffic pattern at the exhibit hall flowing smoothly or are there bottlenecks or physical impediments that are blocking attendees from visiting booths in certain areas of the hall?  By monitoring flow, you may be able to identify problems early on in the event and correct them, for higher satisfaction and to motivate higher purchase intent.

• Who are the most important attendees in your target audience?  These participants will tend to be more influential, more satisfied and/or have higher purchase intents.  By identifying these evangelists, you can ensure that they are given special attention, and are supplied early on with information about your upcoming events, offerings and company.  They can then continue to evangelize within their networks and via their blogs and other social media channels.

For exhibitors the data answers:

• How do attendees traverse the exhibit floor and the booth?  What are the traffic patterns?  This will show you ideal placement of booth within the exhibit and product placement in your booth.
• Is booth layout ideal for attendees to find the section/products they are looking for and to let them stroll around and linger?  Research shows that purchase intent increases for attendees that spend the most time at your booth and who visit multiple times.
• Do we need to bring every product we offer or can we achieve the same (or higher) ROI if we exhibit fewer offerings?

When considering booth layout, logistics and what to measure, it is important to relate behavioral metrics to business objectives.  For example if a key objective at a trade show is to have a successful product launch, then you will want to place and lay out the booth to drive traffic towards the new product area, and implement ways to measure and monitor that traffic.

Data collection methods and options for attendance and duration:

• Researchers observe attendees and take notes on all behaviors for later analysis.
• Video cameras record behavior at key locations for hours on end and researchers analyze the tapes in their labs.
• RFID tags on attendees’ badges track attendance and duration automatically and unobtrusively, usually at lower costs.  Data is available in real time allowing for additional ROI measurement during the event.

Event Intelligence – Merging Behavioral Metrics and Demographic Data
For deeper levels of insight, event professionals strive to collect and analyze multiple data streams:

• Behavior:  attendee interest and participation levels
• Opinions:  session and event satisfaction surveys
• Lead capture:  interactions with booth staff and request for information
• Demographics:  geography, job title, industry, etc.

By combining these, you get a much deeper level of knowledge of your attendees and can use this to further influence purchase intent, uncover opportunities and improve ROI.

Here are just a few insights made possible by viewing all data streams:

• Who are your attendees with the highest purchase intent?  Do they belong to a particular industry or group?  Where did they spend most of their time, what sessions did they attend, and which booths did they visit that resulted in their overall high satisfaction?  Compare this data with the behavior and demographics of attendees who were not satisfied.  Can you convert dissatisfied attendees into happy attendees by changing the event design or are they a group that should not be a target market for your event?
• Which sessions performed poorly in terms of attendance, duration and satisfaction?  Did all attendee types/groups share this behavior and opinion, or is there a niche attendee group who attended and was highly satisfied?  This information will tell you if you should eliminate certain sessions and/or if there are some that merit a smaller room and should be targeted to a specific audience.
• How many visitors came to your exhibit hall that were not captured by the lead retrieval system?  Do these visitors closely match your exhibitors’ target markets, representing an opportunity for exhibitors to contact them after the event?

Armed with this market intelligence, you not only improve your event, you  also demonstrate to senior executives that your team and your events are focused on strategic objectives and that your decision-making is backed by comprehensive, quantitative analysis.

In the next post, we’ll look at a real world application for just one example of the power of event intelligence.

Traditionally we rely heavily on surveys to determine if our events, conferences and tradeshows are successful.   Surveys are great for getting positive or negative opinions about aspects of your event, but don’t provide enough information on the reasons behind those opinions.   For a complete view into our events we need to understand attendee behavior.

Behavior Is Truth

Retail guru Paco Underhill and his company Envirosell rely on methodical observation and measurement to identify problem areas and opportunities within retail stores, and have applied this analysis very successfully to increase revenues for their Fortune 500 customers.  In a recent case study, Envirosell analyzed attendee behavioral metrics for a mass merchandiser – what were the shopper traffic patterns, where did the customer find it difficult to get assistance, how long did they have to wait to cash out.  The merchandiser redesigned the store layout and achieved a 30% increase in the number of products sold per customer.

After almost 30 years of observation and research, Paco Underhill concludes that behavior is the most important indicator of purchase intent.  He has also shown that behavior can be influenced to motivate higher purchase intent.

Behavioral Metrics at Events

This powerful methodology can be leveraged at your event. With empirical data on attendee behavior — which sessions and booths were well attended, where attendees lingered longest, which groups of people they networked with most, which products retained their interest, where they encountered problems, traffic flow impediments and wait times — you could confidently redesign your event or booths to improve ROI.

Event professionals at Philips Healthcare, SAS, IBM and Computer Associates have taken advantage of behavioral metrics to eliminate aspects of their events that received lukewarm interest and to increase the presence of elements that led to higher levels of purchase intent.

Whether your event goals include shared learning, revenue generation, motivation or all of the above, behavioral metrics can play a key role in achieving success.

In my next post, I’ll share details on implementation, reporting, analysis and types of recommendations made possible by attendee behavioral metrics.

Relevant Links

• Envirosell article
• Harvard Business School article
• Alliance Tech Case Study

 
You can’t improve what you can’t measure.   So the saying goes, but how do we measure a dynamic face to face event?  Let’s take a page from the Google playbook to help us make better decisions, increase effectiveness, and demonstrate how trade shows add value that can’t be duplicated by other marketing elements.

Specifically, we’ll look at the components of Google Analytics and see how these can be applied to trade shows.  Where Google Analytics tracks visitors’ IP addresses, RFID technology tracks booth visits.

Number and Types of Visitors

Web metrics track IP addresses to determine:

• Number of visits to the site by day/week/month
• Geographical location, type of browser and language preference
• First time visitors versus return visitors

Booth analytics via RFID technology, provides

• Number of visitors to your booth by hour/day
• Any demographic data available, such as geographical location, title, company, level of purchasing influence and more.
• First time visitor versus existing contact (by comparing data to your CRM system)

Duration

Web metrics show:

• Average time spent on the site.
• Most popular pages and duration of visits to these pages

Booth analytics lets you track:

• Average time spent at the booth
• Most popular sections/elements of your booth, which of these generated the longest visits.

Setting Objectives, Analyzing Results

Web metrics allow you to:

• Set quantitative goals for your web pages
• Monitor visits regularly so you can compare goals to results and make any necessary changes
• Adjust your goals and expectations as needed, set up realistic benchmarks based on historical results

With Booth Analytics you can:

• Create your own goals for the event
• Monitor visits regularly so you can compare goals to results and make any necessary changes
• Adjust your goals and expectations as needed, set up realistic benchmarks based on historical results
• Share executive dashboards and results with team members, senior management

The Key Benefits and Importance of Booth Analytics

By monitoring results regularly, you can identify problems at an early stage and make necessary changes.  You essentially have multiple opportunities to adjust and achieve success during the year.

With numbers to back you up you’ll make better, more confident decision-making.  Since you have more information about the attendees at your booth (whether they’ve engaged with your staff or not) you gain a better understanding of who they are and what they are most interested in.

When you have quantitative data, you can talk the language of the board room, gain higher respect from senior executives and improve your chances for budget approvals.  George P. Johnson’s EventView 2009 research concludes that event professionals who provide event measurement and analytics are twice as likely to expect a budget increase.

How have you measured success?  Do you have measurement tips and recommendations to share?

Relevant Links:

Examples of Booth Analytics Reports

Google Analytics blog: http://analytics.blogspot.com/

EventView 2009 Reports

The economy and emerging technology have driven tremendous change in the event industry.  Event measurement and quantifiable justification are no longer “nice-to-haves”, they are requirements.  To help you succeed in this new reality, my blog will provide actionable, timely information and recommendations, based on our customers’ experiences and on our expertise as technology and measurement solution providers. 

Blogs are most valuable when they become a two-way conversation.   Whether you’re just starting off in this industry or are a 30 year veteran, you have a unique set of experiences and perspectives that we can all benefit from.  So please share your ideas, expertise and questions by adding comments to these posts.

Here’s my perspective on current technology trends that are adding real value to our customers’ events. 

 Easier to Go Green

Thanks to the proliferation of web-enabled devices and “smart” phones, event managers can now provide surveys and conference evaluations via attendees’ mobile devices.   The benefits of electronic surveys are immediate and considerable – you’re “going green” by minimizing paper, you eliminate hours of manual tasks (distributing and collecting surveys, manually tabulating results) and associated labor costs, and you can view results in minutes rather than weeks. 

Game Crazy, a leading video game retailer, used electronic surveys to find out if their sales associates were being motivated and acquiring new learning during their annual sales meeting.  The event management team monitored results in real time and gave immediate and specific feedback to presenters who scored poorly in early sessions.  As the event progressed, these presenters made the necessary adjustments, quantifiably improved their performances in later sessions, and boosted attendee motivation and learning scores.

The Game Crazy team took their green initiatives even further, by replacing all paper agendas with real time, editable, personalized agendas on the attendees’ mobile devices.  They also took advantage of the system’s ability to poll the audience in real time, for more dynamic and relevant speaking sessions.

 Social Media

Social media / social networking software for events, when applied strategically, deliver great value.  Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms can help you start and maintain a pre-event conversation with potential attendees to determine what topics will be of greatest interest and relevance.  They can also help generate excitement for your event – and more registrants.  Oracle sent out a tweet on an upcoming conference and within minutes received 18 registrations before ever formally launching the registration site. 

 There are as many creative, successful uses of social media in the event industry as there are pointless and unproductive ones.  In subsequent posts I’ll provide best practices and cautionary tales so you can separate the truth from the hype.

 A Single Consistent Lead Management Solution

A tradeshow lead capture solution that provides contact information is only the first step in adding value for exhibitors.  To drive ROI, exhibitors need a complete lead management solution that includes lead qualification and prioritization to determine which leads have a higher probability of converting to sales.  By extending the lead management solution across all events, the event manager can identify trends, provide benchmarking stats and help exhibitors establish objectives prior to the event.

 Event to Event Metrics

Once you have obtained consistent data, you are able to provide event to event metrics.  By combining data generated by all these solutions into an executive dashboard that clearly demonstrates results versus established objectives and compares results from one event to another, you are able to monitor your team’s performance and make necessary changes to improve overall event results.  By communicating this to your organization’s senior team, you are showing your focus on creating value.

 As a result of their successful initial deployments of event marketing metrics, the Philips Healthcare event team has developed a global event measurement tool (GEMT) and is committed to consistently using this tool to measure overall results across all their events.  Moving forward, they now have historical data across multiple events, are much more confident they will meet and exceed their objectives and can justify their investment in trade shows at the executive level.

Marketing Intelligence

New technologies allow us to bring disparate sources of information together to better understand attendee interests and preferences.  In addition, managers are looking at attendee behavior and its impact on purchasing decisions.  According to Paco Underhill, renowned retail guru, it is this understanding that gives us the most reliable predictor of purchase.  By delivering corresponding metrics with an analysis of how your event affected intent to purchase, you are delivering real value to your organization.   Emerging technologies assisting with this market intelligence include RFID, tradeshow lead management,  and survey solutions.  A single reporting and analysis system combines the data stream from these solutions to provide better attendee understanding and purchase intent.

Related Links:

Whitepaper:  Metrics Are King! Event Justification in a Down Economy

Article:  RFID to Keep Tabs on NPE2009 Attendees

Article:  Jim Spellos – “What You Need to Know About Social Networking Tools”

Article:  “ROI Proving Your Booth’s Worth It”