From renting floor space to designing and building your booth, the costs involved in exhibiting at a tradeshow can quickly add up. Even a small tradeshow can cost your business a five-figure sum, particularly if it's located in another city.

Because tradeshows require such a significant investment, it's essential to measure not just how much you spend on a tradeshow but also how much you earn as a result of the event.

We recently surveyed business owners and marketing managers and found that almost 50% don't measure the ROI of their tradeshow activity.

Measuring the ROI of your tradeshow marketing is slightly more complicated than tracking and measuring online marketing ROI. However, with the right strategy and tools, you can get a clear picture of how much profit your next event produces.

In this brief guide, we'll break down the process of tracking your tradeshow ROI into an easy four-step system that any business—from a partnership to a large enterprise—can use to learn how much profit each of its tradeshows is producing.

Step 1: Define your metrics and marketing goals

Iconic management consultant Peter Drucker, known to many as the inventor of modern management, had a great quote about measuring ROI that far too many marketers seem unaware of: "What gets measured gets managed."

Many businesses make the mistake of setting vague, incalculable goals before tradeshows and other events. Without a clear and quantifiable goal, it's impossible to tell whether your tradeshow was a success or a failure.

Before every tradeshow, set yourself a quantifiable, actionable goal and choose the right metric for measuring it. You should be able to know whether your goal was achieved (or not achieved) using a simple "yes" or "no" question.

Good goals include lead generation targets—"generate 100 new sales leads from B2B companies"; "get 25 business cards from CMOs"—or hard sales figures. If your goal isn't measurable with a concrete "yes" or "no," it's too vague or complicated.

For your first tradeshow, set one goal for your team to accomplish. As you become more experienced at tradeshows, you can add unique goals for lead generation and branding; in the beginning, it pays to keep things nice and simple.

If you can't think of a good metric, use the same metric as you do for other forms of marketing. That will make it easier to compare the ROI of tradeshows with digital, print media, and other marketing methods to determine which channels are the most profitable.

Step 2: Track and update your leads in a CRM tool

Tradeshows are all about connections. Some connections are worth a great deal as soon as they're established, while others take months (or even years) to mature and start producing dividends. Some connections never develop at all.

Without tracking your leads after the event, it's difficult to measure which ones produce a good return on investment for your business and which don't. It's also impossible to determine what your average tradeshow lead and new customer are worth.

As you enter the leads from your latest tradeshow into your CRM software, set up a custom tag so that you can measure them in the aggregate. This is easy using "event" tags in Salesforce, which let you group leads into tradeshow-specific groups.