How to Set Smart Objectives & KPIs For Exhibitions

Exhibitions and corporate events can be very expensive to attend. Therefore, it’s incredibly important to ensure you are attending for the right reasons and gaining as much from the experience as possible. Setting objectives and KPIs help you to do this.

What Are Smart Objectives?

Objectives are a plan of action towards your business goals that give your team something to aim for and specific event objectives give you and your team goals for each event. Smart objectives ensure that your objectives cover certain criteria to guarantee they have good business sense. Setting event smart objectives helps you to make the most of your investment at an exhibition.

Smart objectives need to be:

SPECIFIC – Being specific when setting your smart objectives means answering who, what, where, when and how. Being very specific allows you to really channel in on what is in focus for the business for an event and leaves no room for vague answers about how the event is going.

MEASURABLE – When we talk about objectives being measurable, we mean putting facts and figures into the objective to allow you to actually quantify your success.

ATTAINABLE – There is no point setting unattainable goals that are not realistic for the event in question. Not only does this lower moral within your team but it also means your attention is pulled away from the more realistic details that you need to be focusing on.

RELEVANT – Keep your objectives relevant to your overall business goals. A great objective to aim for at an event for one company might not make sense for yours so ensure to focus on your key business goals and create objectives relating to them.

TIME-SENSITIVE – Linking to being specific, setting time-sensitive objectives allows you to see an end date and measure your success precisely. Having open-ended objectives can lead to vague results and unclear findings.

What Are KPIs?

KPI stands for key performance indicators. These are metrics that measure your actual performance against your set smart objectives to make sure you are moving in the right direction towards these goals. KPIs need to be a measurable value that relates back directly to your objectives.

Using KPIs for an event or exhibition helps you to see if the event is giving you the success you planned for beforehand. You should be able to take a look at your KPIs at any point to see how you’re doing on the day to meet your smart objectives and therefore, business goals.

When you’re setting your event KPIs, you need to again be very specific to your business and even more so, the smart objectives to which they relate.

Examples of Smart Objectives & KPIs for Exhibitions & Events

Starting to set objectives and KPIs for events can seem daunting. To help kick you off, here are a couple of examples of the kind of objectives and KPIs that you might want to consider for your business. You can see how the two relate to each other and would relate back to an overarching business goal.

Smart Objectives Examples

• £X revenue from the exhibition by X date

• Secure X strong business leads by the end of the day

• Secure X pieces of industry or press coverage from the event

• Improve social media engagement by X% from the event

• Set X high profile meetings up from the event by X date

Event KPI Examples

• Number of leads and number of conversions by X date

• Track data capture for detailed business leads

• Number of social mentions, tagging images, reach of mentions and quality of coverage

• Track social shares, comments, likes, new followers, hashtags used

• Number of leads captured & appointments booked

Setting your business event smart objectives and KPIs is a crucial way to continuously measure your success. Monitoring these event KPIs allows you to implement changes and A/B test on the day to ensure you’re aiming for the best possible results and return on investment for every single event.