Setting Objectives for Exhibition Success

Setting objectives before your exhibition will benefit your business and your stand hugely on the road to exhibition success.

What is an Objective for Exhibitions?

Your objectives could be related to sales, lead generation, building brand awareness or networking. These categories will allow you to define what you want to achieve and therefore what your objective should be.

Here are some good and commonly used examples of exhibition objectives:

  • The number of leads which you want to collect.
  • The number of people you want to talk to in order to increase brand awareness.
  • The number of completed surveys.

These are just a few of the topics on which you could base your objective around.

It’s important to make sure all of your objectives are based around the SMART target theory; this means that your objective must be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.

How to Decide Which Objectives to Set

Ultimately, your exhibition objective should reflect and reinforce your businesses marketing goals and plan.

An easy way to decide which objectives to set is to ask yourself a few questions. The main one being, what do you want to get out of this event? There will be a reason for you to be exhibiting so use this to work out your objective.

Another way you can determine your objective is to write down all of the goals you have for this event. Goals can be smaller or be broader than an objective, for example: sell your product, collect business cards or attend a networking event.

Once you have all of these goals written down, hopefully, there will be a pattern of what you want to achieve and the relation they have to each other. Your goals help you to achieve your objective, so use these to determine your main objective.  

What are the Benefits?

The main benefit of setting objectives is that you and your team have something to aim for on the day of the show. This is proven to produce better results than if you go to an exhibition with no objective.

Having something to aim for that can be measured will motivate your team and mean that you will have something to measure your success against.

Not only this but you will be able to determine your ROI of the exhibition a lot easier than you would without goals and objectives, this is important to determine whether that event is worth you taking part in again.