As the trade show season approaches, marketers, PR pros and business executives are bombarded by requests for sponsorship or attendance at their events.

What is the value of those conferences? Are they worth the thousands or tens or thousands of dollars in expense?

PR people should be especially wary. Competitors, journalists and bloggers are always trying to gain an edge or an interesting story.

If the opportunity arises, they may use a poor showing at a conference to denigrate you or your product.

Instead, a responsible PR executive should control the message, marketing and the client's image. In the fast paced world of technology, this challenge is greater than ever as the market changes so rapidly. New technology adoption can make a cutting edge product today look ancient tomorrow.


Conference attendance has several values. Firstly, it can help expose a client's products to potential partners, investors and future employees. Secondly, it helps you network with other professionals who can help you personally or professionally. Finally, conference attendance is a way to sell your product, or find new customers, subscribers or users and drive the bottom line.



At the end of the day, the potential gain in customers is the most clear-cut way to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of attending a conference. For example, if you believe based on attendance at the conference last year that you can acquire customers worth $100,000 in sales, it may be worth spending $20,000 or $30,000 in expenses based on where you are in the growth cycle. 



However, the decision is in the hands of the CEO to decide which part of the growth cycle the company is in.

An early stage company may be willing to spend more and lose money on acquiring customers with the intention of boosting revenue, creating a community of users and impressing investors with rapid growth.

In fact, smart executives of these small companies may skip CES for instance, but instead use the heightened interest in technology by the media to tell their story without even being there.

It is the same concept of how brands can affiliate themselves with the Super Bowl without being an advertiser. 



A mid-size company with a stable user base, good profits and good exposure may find attending a conference much less valuable.

If the company is already exposed in the market, those true potential customers may seek you out online anyways.

For mid-size companies that are not seeking to take big risks to grow rapidly, most conferences are probably a waste of money. 


For large, publicly listed companies that need to continually generate hype and interest, conferences are important parts of marketing and PR strategy. For those companies, only the largest conferences including SXSW, CES or Techcrunch Disrupt seem like events that can generate such exposure.


Companies that are seeking things other than customers can find value in attending even the most obscure conference.

Some conferences may consist of only 50 or 100 people yet have the potential investor that will propel your company to the next stage.

Your firm may be looking for a team of highly specialized software developers that can only be approached at niche development conferences.

Even though you cannot draw a clear line of the value of a developer to the bottom line, they are clearly critical for product development and growth.



The CEO should make the decision about the priorities of the firm in the case that the ROI will not be a number, but access to certain people or relationships.

In either case, choosing to attend conference must be a strategic decision that carefully examines the costs and benefits.

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Ronn Torossian is CEO of 5WPR.