Conferences like Dreamforce are huge opportunities for companies to increase awareness, initiate great event marketing and gain new customers. If a recent article from the Content Marketing Institute is any indication, B2B marketers believe that in-person events are in fact the most effective tactic of all, with 67% of marketers rating them as “highly effective.”  

That’s a huge vote of confidence, but how do you know what you should be spending on such events? After all, conference participation is typically categorized into vertical tiers, with a wide variety of paid options. Is the added cost of getting that deluxe booth, paid speaking engagement or other premium package worth the cost?

With a little extra planning, you can measure an event’s impact on not only awareness, but also sales. Here are expert tips on getting deeper insight into the return on time and investment.

Track Results on Pre-Event Meeting Requests

Dreamforce is several months away, and yet I’m already receiving meeting requests from companies. It’s easy to see why. Conferences offer unique windows to get valuable one-on-one time with prospects when they aren’t distracted by the day-to-day grind. While your team may not be targeting prospects six months in advance, chances are they’ll be extending several requests for private demos and other types of meetings with key opportunities.

Typically, such invitations would be extended from regular corporate email accounts. Instead, convince your team to send these invitations from Salesforce, or a tool that integrates with Salesforce. Best practice would then be to associate these leads or opportunities with an event-specific campaign. If these leads or opportunities are associated with multiple campaigns, campaign influence is one way to handle it.

Down the road, you’ll be able to see whether these meetings resulted in revenue.

Capture and Measure Every Booth Visit

If you’ve ever used Google AdWords to run a paid search exercise, then you’ve calculated cost-per-lead acquisition, and you know how expensive it can be. You can quibble over how “sales-ready” conference leads are, but there’s no denying that industry conferences are an amazing opportunity to quickly get a lot of targeted leads in one place. Keep in mind that companies don’t spend money to send just anyone to conferences. Even if the people visiting your booth aren’t decision makers yet, chances are that they will be soon enough.

Still, I’m continually shocked by how many booth workers do not routinely scan conference badges. Handing out a business card, or connecting in social media, isn’t as instantly trackable. Every visitor that leaves without getting scanned - and then synced to your CRM - is money wasted. You can buy the most expensive booth available, but it’s all wasted if booth workers don’t consider scanning to be as automatic as saying hello.

That simple repetitive motion - which then allows you to track opportunities  -  is the single most effective way to determine whether your conference investment paid off in the long term. This advice goes double if you’re a “guest” company in a partner’s booth. Work out an arrangement to get scanned leads in advance and follow through with the plan post-conference. As a failsafe, consider using trackable phone numbers on all your booth collateral. That way, even if your marketing materials get shared with people that didn’t actually attend the conference, you can still attribute those leads to your in-person efforts.  

Create Event-Specific Web Forms & Phone Numbers

If you have a mature event marketing program, you’re already creating event-specific pages on your website, or using social media to hype your presence there in the first place. The thing you may be missing out on, however, is the opportunity to set up contact channels targeted specifically to conference attendees. That way you can instantly attribute in-person leads to the specific effort that they engaged with.

For example, ensure that every message dedicated to your conference presence includes call tracking numbers associated with an event-specific campaign. Let’s imagine that you are the main speaker in a conference session, and you’re giving out books or whitepapers at the door. Make sure that the collateral you distribute there is assigned a unique URL, its own call tracking number, and so forth. That way you can begin to discover exactly which types of conference events really drove engagement.

You’ll likely get some people calling on your main business number, but at least you’ll know that calls on the event-specific numbers are conference leads. Additionally, set up a web form that is specifically associated with your event’s Salesforce campaign.

Have Specific Goals for Giveaways, Sweepstakes & Parties

Let’s get real about conference swag & promotions. Yours has to be incredibly memorable to pay off. In the memorable words of Will.I.Am, "You can go hard, or you can go home." For example, we invested a lot in our swag phones last year, and were rewarded with some measurable social media traction.   

The same goes for parties and sweepstakes. Last year, ExactTarget created a lead generation opportunity that offered a chance to get on the guest list for their party, with an additional chance to win a gift card. Not only did they manage to hype the exclusivity of their Dreamforce party, but they also got figured out a way to make it measurable in the form of sheer lead generation.

It goes without saying that this is the sort of promotion that adds a ton of additional engagement to your booth. Even if you’re not in the position to do something this extravagant, just ensure that your investment has some measurable payoff, preferably in lead generation.