Walk around any trade exhibition or event and there is always plenty to measure.

Through the hubbub and buzz, there are conversations happening. Meetings on stands. Product demonstrations. Familiar faces reconnecting. New introductions being made. Badge scanners or good old pen-and-paper quietly leveraged to record another interaction.

Eventually, all of that activity will be accounted for in a spreadsheet or report in some way.

Be it footfall, badge scans, leads, meetings, enquiries, or opportunities.

Looking to answer rather common questions such as: how many visitors came to the stand? How many leads did we capture? How many opportunities were generated? What did the show cost? Was it successful? Should we go again?

All perfectly sensible, and reasonable, questions.

Though, perhaps missing a single question that should come before all the others.

What did we want the event to achieve?

For if that singular question hasn’t been defined before the event, what exactly are we measuring? Are we truly measuring what matters to the business, or merely what is easiest to count?

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What do we mean by effective?

I found myself thinking about this last week while wandering around one such show.

It is only post event, when the booth comes down, everyone returns home a little more exhausted than when they left, and leads are being organised for follow up, that the questions about event success or effectiveness start to rise.

What do we mean, though, by “was the event effective”?

Effective at what. Generating leads, creating demand, retaining customers, expanding distributor relationships, building awareness, entering a market, supporting sales, changing perception….?

Something could be extremely effective in one aspect, while being totally ineffective in another. Yet we often talk about effectiveness as though the term has some universally understood meaning, or applies to all activity equally.

Questions around proving value or measuring return on investment have an interesting ability to put some marketers immediately on the defensive. I understand the frustration. To a point.

If we are asking the business to invest money, time and resource, shouldn’t we be prepared – and quite frankly expected – to understand what that investment achieves? For me as a business owner, it sounds not only reasonable, but fundamentally necessary.

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What gets measured, gets noticed

We often, however, start at possibly the wrong end. Collecting what is available, visible, and easy to count. Then we try and retrospectively attribute what those numbers mean, and how they relate to the business.

The more pressure there is to demonstrate the value that marketing brings to the table, the greater the temptation to prioritise activities whose value is easiest to demonstrate.

Sometimes we measure activity around a time frame that is convenient, rather than the time frame over which the value was created.

Some things don’t fit neatly in a financial year window.

Think of a conversation at a trade show. It begins on the booth and continues through various interactions and touchpoints over subsequent weeks and months. It only becomes an opportunity with an attributed business value a year later.

The event was the trigger. The starting point that opened the door, or validated the engagement. However, an event report conducted four weeks post-show couldn’t possibly be expected to capture it.

We often try to create and justify such value in a neat and tidy way, when the reality is so much more complicated.

I am certainly not questioning nor advocating on whether marketing should or should not be measured. 100%, it should. The question is whether what we are measuring and using to define our next activities is telling us whether it did what we needed and wanted it to do based on a predefined objective.

Measurement should be evidence, not the answer

Measurement matters. It helps inform decisions and direction.

What is easiest to measure, though, is not necessarily what matters most to the business.

What matters most to the business is not always immediately measurable.

Before we can measure success or effectiveness, we need to know what we mean by it and what we are measuring it against.

A large number on a report can look impressive. Make us feel slightly better and more justified for ten minutes. It doesn’t necessarily explicitly demonstrate whether the objective was achieved. Nor does the absence of an immediate return indicate that an event or activity was a disastrous failure.

Perhaps the value comes from looking beyond the number itself. Understanding and providing context to what it represents. Being clear in what it doesn’t.

Numbers and metrics can offer signals, patterns and evidence. Helping us determine what to keep, repeat, change, or walk away from. They can, however, only do so much. They still require context, thought and judgement before they can be used to provide meaningful direction.

After all, it is only once we have defined what success looks like that we can see whether we have achieved it.

Photo by maks_d on Unsplash

How marketing is understood rather than delivered is a theme I explore often. If that resonates, subscribe to follow along.

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