Are bridal shows worth my time?

We’ve been talking a lot about bridal shows and expos at The Bridal Team.  A question that frequently comes up among my artists and the partners that we collaborate with is, should I spend thousands of dollars to participate in these shows?

Before I was an agent, I worked in advertising, and the one thing that came up in every meeting with our clients was ROI, return on investment.  ROI is what marketers use to test the effectiveness of their marketing programs.  In many companies it’s the number they use to decide if an advertisement or promotion was worth the money and if they should do it again. 

The formula for ROI is simple, and as long as you are tracking where your sales come from (that’s a post for another day), you can easily calculate ROI for all your advertising and promotions.  The formula is:

ROI = (gross profit – costs)

costs

For example, if you spend $4000 to attend a bridal show and your gross profit (amount you made after your expenses) from sales from brides you met at the show was $6000, then your ROI is .5 or 50%.  Is that good or bad?  

Some marketers will tell you that a positive ROI is the sign of an effective program, others will tell you that it has to be x% to be effective.  I believe that the best way to judge if your ROI is good is to compare it to the other marketing programs you have done. That way you are spending your money on the most effective promotions. If every other event or promotion you’ve done you’ve had an ROI of 90% then I would suggest spending your money on those programs, and skipping the bridal shows. If you’ve never had an ROI above 20% then you should be spending every weekend at the bridal shows (assuming you have the same results from each show).

Now, let’s get back to my original question, are Bridal Shows worth it?  For my area of business they were not worth the money. We’ve done two shows in the last year and we ended up with a negative ROI on both of them. In the future, I will be focusing on other ways to reach brides that are more cost effective. However, if this post has taught you anything, I hope you learned that because something didn’t work for one vendor doesn’t mean it’s not going to work for you.  You have to do your own ROI on a bridal show to be able to answer that question.