February 10, 2016

How to Develop a Tradeshow Marketing Mindset

Is a tradeshow marketing as easy as setting up a booth, smiling as visitors come by, and asking a few questions?

Sure, that’s some of it. But creating a mindset in your team for tradeshow marketing involves more.

So let’s capture a few items that are critical in creating a tradeshow marketing mindset:

Realize that all of your visitors are rushing around and want to visit as many booths as possible. Which really means, don’t waste their time.
Some thing: you have hundreds of people you’d like to see. Don’t let unqualified visitors waste your time.
Prepare for a marathon. Three or four days of standing, meeting, greeting, collecting information, giving demos and answering questions can take it out of anyone. Make sure you’re in good physical shape prior to the big event.
With the fast proliferation of mobile devices, your customers are connected to their world through the smartphone they carry. They do research, make connections, pay bills, find a nearby restaurant and more while on the move. Realize how this affects your marketing message and methods and learn how to reach them on this platform while they’re on the move at a tradeshow.
Prepare, prepare, prepare. I can’t stress this enough. Too many exhibitors think about things a few weeks ahead and try to make major (or even minor) changes without putting thought into it or knowing how much time things change. From graphic changes to booth makeovers to staff training to pre-show marketing and post-show followup, know how much time all the items take and work backwards from the show date.
While a tradeshow is a single, specific event, the online discussion around it will start weeks prior to the show and will continue for weeks afterwards. When you are targeting a show, be sure to listen to the chatter by monitoring the show hashtag, and prepare what you’ll do with sharing information, photos and videos for weeks after the show as the energy dies down.
You’re one of hundreds, or thousands of other exhibitors. There are only a few ways to stand out: have a freakin’ awesome booth that stops people in their tracks, have something going on in your booth space that compels them to stop such as a professional demo or interactive activity, create a pre-show marketing message and campaign so powerful that people make a stop at your booth one of their priorities or have a product that everyone needs or wants to see NOW.
Once the show is over, your work is not done. To make the show worthwhile, all of those leads and related information must be delivered to the right sales folks to follow up in a timely manner. Again, the race is still underway and you’ll have competitors who are following up within 24-48 hours. What’s your follow up plan?

Mindset is everything. The more you’re prepared for what tradeshow marketing and execution entails, the better your results!

May 26, 2015

Create a Memorable Trade Show Experience

This is a guest post by Madison Resare:

Whether you are new to the trade show biz or you have been around the proverbial trade show block a few times; new ideas for capturing and keeping the attention of passersby are always welcome and sought after. So whether you have heard it all, seen it all, or it is all brand new; you can always learn something new and if you truly have the entrepreneur spirit you will always be on the lookout for new and catchy hook ideas.

So, what’s the new, fun, exciting idea? Simple – create an experience. I don’t mean create something that your audience can look at or takeaway. I mean create an actual experience, something they can see, touch, taste, smell, hear, and takeaway. That is the simple answer, here are some ways you can carry that answer out into realty:

Create an Emotional Connection

According to Maya Angelou, American author and poet, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” What does this mean for trade show marketers? Seth Braverman, marketing manager at Xylem Design, said, “The experience for the trade show attendee must be understood chiefly as an emotional experience. The aesthetics and ethos of a brand and a booth all play into this. What the attendee really takes home with them isn’t the knickknacks or the schwag. It’s the emotional connection they make with a brand and a product.”

Help trade show attendees make emotional connections with some of the following ideas:

Hand/Scalp/Back Massages

A company that sells lotions, oils, and other personal care items can create an emotional – and physical – connection with trade show attendees by offering free 3-5 minute hand/scalp/back massages. Getting attendees to sit for a few minutes gives you the perfect opportunity to talk about the products you are using and why they are so amazing.

Tell a Story

Most people are affected and remember things more clearly when a moment is associated with an emotion. Tell a personal story, talk about how your business got started, and discuss how you moved up in the world. Whatever story you tell, make sure it invokes some kind of emotion for your listeners.

Create an Atmosphere

What kind of atmosphere does your business exude? Enhance the experience for trade show attendees by adding things like smells, sounds, and sights that match the overall feeling of your business. – Have a more relaxed business? Use candles, soft music, and calming scents like lavender. – have a more upbeat and modern business? Use sleek and clean displays and include new technology in your booth.

Utilize Media

You should be prepared – before the trade show – by signing up for social media platforms and putting together a marketing plan. You can utilize trade show attendees by inviting them to your booth and offering special giveaways and incentives through social networks. This is a great way for you to get more followers, make connections, and add value to a potential customer. Here are some other ways you can utilize media in your trade show exhibit:

Video

Does your company have a ‘welcome to our business’ video? Get a laptop or a T.V. to play this video in your exhibit. Sometimes people prefer to watch the videos and ask questions after it is over instead of walking up and talking to a complete stranger.

QR Codes

Use QR codes in the business cards or flyers that you hand out at the trade show and make sure they lead to something of value to a potential customer.

Music

Make your exhibit more atmospheric by using background music.

Display Your Products

So how do you create a more interactive experience at a trade show? Braverman answered, “Display your actual products/services as much as possible. People are there in-person to meet the brand and the product in-person. Allowing as fluid an introduction to your product as possible is paramount. For the small role we, as display designers and makers, play in the trade show booth, the focus is on creating a display that gets out of the way of the products. The goal is to quietly communicate the excellence of the product, and this is achieved through proper design, lighting, and high quality construction.” In other words, when a trade show attendee stands in front of your booth and is unable to tell what your products are, or what your company does – you have failed.

Snacks, Drinks, and Contests

You can’t create a true trade show experience without providing something the client can participate in or walk away with. Include things like snacks, drinks, flyers, and contests in order to draw in attendees and to keep them happy.

Madison Resare is a content creator at Xylem Design (xylemdesign.com) who enjoys writing about trade shows, marketing, and social media.

TSEBK download intivation2-rounded corners

January 7, 2011

Tradeshow Collaboration Marketing

How can you work with a partner at a tradeshow? What can collaboration do to cut your tradeshow marketing costs and help spread your company’s name around a bit more?

While there are some benefits to be gained by working with partners in any endeavor, there are trade-offs to consider as well.

Share a Booth

Let’s say you’re a small company that struggles to come up with money for booth space and exhibit rental. If this is the case you might consider contacting a company that, while not a direct competitor, is at least in your industry and would benefit from exhibiting at the same show.

By renting the booth space together, you’re splitting the cost of both the space and the exhibit. Of course, you only get half a booth. Depending on your offerings, however, that might be a good fit and a good way to get your name out into the marketplace.

Another benefit comes when staffing the booth. By paring down the booth size and splitting with a partner, you need less people overall. While you would obviously want to have your side of the booth staffed, in some shows and situations one benefit would be to spell the other guy while he’s on a break.

Promote Each Other’s Products

Here’s a promotion that I’ve seen done successfully. Find another 4 or 5 exhibitors that are complementary to your company – but not direct competitors – and create a traffic-generation promotion. Create a map of the show floor highlighing the five participating booths, print it on bright paper, give each booth a stamp. Offer prizes from each exhibitor to be drawn from all maps that are stamped by all exhibitors and submitted. This encourages more traffic to each booth. Of course it’s up to you to take advantage of the additional traffic with your own offerings.

Social Media Pumping

Whether you’re on Twitter or Facebook, you can easily work out a similar promotion. However, instead of doing it on-site, do it online. Each vendor sets up a series of tweets via Hootsuite.com to drive traffic to their own – and their collaborator’s – booth. By doing this, you’re taking advantage of each other’s community, exposing all of the separate exhibitor’s online communities to all of the others.

Team Up To Impress

If you have a partner company that you work well with, float the idea of doing a ‘team dinner/party’ to expose each of the company’s to the other’s community. Company A invites a dozen or so clients, Company B does the same. The two companies split the tab. Everybody gets to know everyone else. Imagine if you could ramp this up to three, four or five companies.

Brainstorm

With all of the various companies that exhibit at any given show, how can you leverage the event to help your company and assist another company for the greater good? Can you come up with a single product together? Can you combine two products for a single offering? A real estate company might team with a home staging company to offer a special deal at a show. A software designer might team with one of his clients to create a custom version of the software for a larger, different market.

There’s really no end to the amount of ways that you can collaborate with other exhibitors to bring both (or all) of you more business.

Get on your thinkin’ cap!

photo credit: Genista

October 26, 2009

Using Social Media at Tradeshows to Close More Business: Win One Hour Consulting

It’s our observation that Social Media is a great fit to promote events: it’s a focused time-frame; social media is extremely mobile (something like 70% of tweets are from mobile platforms) which fosters on-site interaction; and tweets and Facebook page posts can bring people to your booth in real time for contests, plugs, etc.

Putting a strong Social Media Plan into place can help you:

build your opt-in marketing lists
get on the list of ‘must-see’ show booths
create product awareness
create buzz around new products
add to the company’s sales leads
identify your company’s brand champions
accelerate the sales cycle
deepen the relationship with customers

You may recall the e-book I put out earlier this year “Twittering Your Way to Tradeshow Success.”

With minimal promotion (read: no budget) and nearly 500 downloads later, I’m ready to take a whack at updating the book to include all Social Media, not just Twitter. We’d want to include at least the big three: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and a good argument could be made to include Flickr and YouTube.

Thanks to a suggestion from a recent social media compadre I met, Steve Farnsworth, I’m launching a mini-contest to get some of your ideas for how you have used Social Media to promote your appearance at tradeshows, events or conferences – and thanks to Steve’s generosity we’re teaming up to offer an hour of consulting on how to get your Social Media plan together:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gubDZEL32wo

So…here’s the deal: submit either an idea or anecdote you may have on how to use Social Media to promote your appearance at an event, conference or tradeshow. Easy to do: either post the idea as a comment below, or join my Facebook Page and make a post there.

Then, once we close the mini-contest down on the night of Thursday, November 5th, I’ll put all the names of the submitters in a hat and draw a random winner for a one-hour consulting session.

You would be able to consult with me on a number of things:

*Any aspect of tradeshow marketing: planning, booth design, staff training, etc.
*Social Media: marketing, setting up a blog, podcasting, video blogging, how to best use Twitter or Facebook, setting up a Facebook company ‘fan’ page, getting traffic, what to Tweet about, etc.

And yes, I look to include many of these ideas into the re-vamped e-book. Naturally we would include your name and links back to your company or blog.

So…what’s your best story or idea on using Social Media with Tradeshows, Conferences and Events?

Leave a Comment below, or zip to the Facebook page and post an idea there.

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