Well, your answer is likely to be, “Warwick I want both!”.
But what if you must prioritize one choice over the other? We’ve all been there; what do you do? The direction you take depends upon the kind of company that you have and your event philosophy especially toward new launches.
If each of your events must make a profit within the short term then I expect you’d ratchet back your expenses and maximize revenues until you reach the profit figure that you need, regardless of the impact on your attendee acquisition efforts.
You might still pass ‘the tipping point’ in terms of the number of quality delegates that satisfies your sponsors and exhibitors, even though profit is your primary driver. And you may live to fight another day. After all, most of us are in this to make a profit; there’s nothing wrong with that.
The more enlightened approach, however, may be to focus on the number of quality attendees. I am not suggesting that you should incur huge losses to get there. As I said above, it’s an issue of priority, rather than choosing one over the other. I have learned that once you can show evidence that you have the right attendees, the sponsors and exhibitors will come to you-which is the key to making money in the long term on an event. That means you get both profits and the right attendees – eventually.
But to focus exclusively on profitability can mean that you make money one time, but with compromises in terms of attendees that hinder your ability to ever run the event again.
I submit that our successful peers will be those whose priority is getting the audience and then making the money picture work. That’s stated, while acknowledging that such an approach cannot be the total strategy for all events for those of us in the bigger tradeshow companies, since we must cover the large staff overhead associated with our events.
But, given that caveat, are you willing to try an enlightened approach for at least some (perhaps just one) of your events?