When Marketing Becomes a Badge Scan
Congratulations! We generated 200 leads at the trade show. Did we? Or did 200 people let us scan their badges? Those aren't necessarily the same thing.
Calculating ROI has always been one of the more difficult parts of event marketing. A trade show booth is a little like putting a billboard next to a highway. A lot of people might see it, but not everyone driving by is in the market for what you're selling. Some aren't your target audience. Some aren't interested. Some might be interested six months from now.
Getting someone to actually pull over—or, in this case, stop at the booth—requires a unique combination of creative messaging, a strong call to action, and the right person working the booth. The person walking past also has to be open to the conversation. That's a lot of variables hiding behind one badge scan.
Getting Someone to Stop Is Its Own Skill
I learned this long before I was setting up B2B SaaS trade show booths. I ran the Crew Club interest booth during summer orientation at SUNY Geneseo. I worked the station table at the Lollypop Farm Tails of Hope Telethon and Flower City Comic Con. Very different audiences. Very different reasons for being there. The basic challenge was remarkably similar: How do I get someone walking past to stop?
I learned to create vertical space so the table could be seen from farther away and to create low-barrier ways for someone to interact rather than requiring them to immediately commit to a conversation. The person behind the table mattered too. Someone staring at their phone isn't particularly inviting. Neither is someone waiting to pounce on anyone who accidentally makes eye contact. You have a few seconds to give someone a reason to slow down. I also learned that being unique isn't enough.
One summer, I was working the radio station booth at a local fair. At some point I found myself standing in front of the booth, microphone in hand, while hula hooping. Yes, there is video of this online. No, it is not easily found but I know where it is.
Did people stop? Absolutely.
Kids stopped because it was entertaining and their parents could sit at the food tent across the way for a few minutes. Teenage boys stopped on personal dares to see whether they could outlast the pretty girl with the microphone. They couldn't. 😁
We attracted attention. We just weren't attracting our target audience. That doesn't mean the booth was a failure, because lead generation wasn't really its purpose. We were there so the community knew the radio station existed and could put a face to the voices they heard on air. More specifically, they could put a face to our morning show host. They'd heard my voice on commercials too, but nobody knew who I was.
That distinction has stuck with me. Attention is only valuable in relation to what you showed up to accomplish. A community radio booth might be there for awareness. A university club table might need new members. A B2B trade show booth might be trying to start conversations with qualified prospects. Each could have a crowd standing in front of it and mean something completely different.
That's why booth traffic can tell us something useful, but only if we know what we're trying to measure. If the right audience is walking past and people are stopping, engaging and agreeing to be scanned, your messaging and booth experience are probably doing something right. If the wrong audience is stopping because someone is hula hooping with a microphone, you've demonstrated an impressive ability to hula hoop while talking.
You haven't necessarily demonstrated marketing ROI.
So What Is an Event Actually Worth?
This becomes more complicated when you're paying thousands of dollars to attend an industry event. At Nulogy, our VP of Sales attended a show in Las Vegas. We generated a few leads from the show itself, but some of the most valuable time wasn't spent standing at the show - it was at dinner.
A new city gave us an opportunity to bring customers and select prospects together face-to-face. I helped organize the dinner, and suddenly the value of traveling to Las Vegas wasn't limited to how many people stopped at a booth.
At another show in Washington, D.C., the team had plenty of good conversations. One of the things I found most valuable afterward, though, was hearing the questions people asked who had never heard of Nulogy before.
What did they think we did? What needed more explanation? Which problems immediately resonated? What questions kept coming up?
A badge scanner can't tell you any of that but the people can.
A Badge Scan Is the Beginning of the Story
At almost every show I helped set up, I paid attention to the conversion from people passing the booth to people who actually stopped and engaged. That number mattered. It could indicate whether the booth messaging was working. It could tell us whether we were giving attendees a compelling reason to stop. It gave us something more concrete than “the booth seemed busy.” I just wouldn't confuse that number with sales attribution.
Someone might meet us at a trade show, visit the website two weeks later, attend a webinar three months later, talk with Sales, disappear for six months and eventually become a customer. Did the trade show cause the sale? That's a much harder question. What I can say is that it may have kickstarted the conversation. That's a different kind of value.
What Gets Lost When Everything Becomes a Lead?
This is where I think event reporting can become too tidy. We come home, upload the scans into the CRM and report. Leads generated: 200. Now the demand gen and sales team are responsible for converting as many of those 200 leads into customers.
Except one person stopped because they liked the giveaway. Another was already a customer. One was trying to sell something to us. Someone else had never heard of the company, spent fifteen minutes asking detailed questions and left thinking differently about a problem they didn't realize we could help solve.
Those aren't four identical leads just because they produced four identical badge scans. The conversations contain the context and the context helps determine what happens next.
Maybe Sales follows up tomorrow. Maybe Marketing realizes the booth messaging needs work. Maybe five prospects asked the same question and we have our next webinar topic. Maybe the most valuable interaction happens over dinner three blocks away from the convention center. That makes event ROI frustratingly difficult to fit into one clean number. Before you calculate event ROI, define what return you actually went there to create.
From Badge Scan to Next Conversation
Last week, I wrote about a framework I've carried with me since hearing Lutz Finger speak about Big Data: DATA → SO WHAT? → ACTION. Events aren't exempt from that question.
A badge scan is data. So what?
Someone stopped. Why? What did they ask? What did we learn? What should happen next?
That's where the value starts becoming clearer. A booth doesn't have to close a sale to be successful. It needs to do the job you sent it there to do, and that job should be defined before anyone starts packing the shipping crates. Maybe it's generating qualified conversations. Maybe it's introducing a new company to the market. Maybe it's learning how unfamiliar prospects respond to your positioning. Maybe it's deepening relationships with existing customers.
Then you can decide what to measure because a badge scan tells you someone was there. The conversation tells you why that might matter.
