News Flash: Trade show marketing doesn't work

Latest news from SiriusDecisions:

In a survey they conducted of over 1,000 buyers, they rated trade show marketing as among the least effective ways of engaging with them along the buy cycle.  Couple this info with the report last year from Sirius that indicated that trade show leads were among the costliest and least effective of all marketing tactics, along with the fact that trade shows in general are among the most expensive marketing events leads one to this inevitable conclusion:

Trade shows are just not efficient sources of leads.

Now, they may be good for some other reason (reputation/brand development) or keeping up with the competition, but for executives looking to maximize the return on their marketing spend, a hard look at your trade show budget is a good place to start.

Comments

[Heather]

Interesting... I would have to disagree with this post. We've done a lot of ROI number crunching on our trade show dollars and we've found that they DO produce leads and sales for us. One important note: we often choose smaller, niche shows. The cost is a bit cheaper and we know we have a good, targeted audience. But so far, every show we've done this year has more than paid for itself in sales. In fact, one we went to in 2005 paid for itself about 4 times over! Maybe we're out of the norm, but I thought it might be worth sharing.