The results were disappointing. Not a single QR Code hit on all aspects of user-friendly usability. They fell into one of the follow categories: didn’t work at all (1); didn’t scan at all because they were too small, too far away (too high) or looked weird because they were on an uneven surface (temporary tattoos) (about 15 of them); or the URL landing page wasn’t optimized for a smart phone (the remainder).
This year at Expo West I wasn’t as scan-happy, but I did find that many more QR Codes did work, and did exactly what they intended. Not all, but many. Out of about a dozen
codes I scanned, all of them worked (they took me to a landing page), and about half of the landing pages were optimized for viewing in a smart phone.
Some notable examples: Gud, from Burt’s Bees and Ciao Bello (see screen shots). Both had nice looking landing pages, which were easy to navigate, and very inviting. Both accomplished their purposes of providing a good answer to the question: why should I scan this QR Code.
Check out the Kindle version of my QR Code Tradeshow Marketing Guide here (cheap!) if you want to know how to make these puppies work right.
Your business page will move to the new ‘timeline’ appearance on March 31st, whether you’re ready or not.
The biggest change is that if you have a default landing page, it will no
longer steer new visitors to the default page. Instead, all new visitors will see the same timeline. However, you can create separate tabs (landing pages) and use that link to drive traffic. It makes sense to Facebook, because now if you want to have people land on a specific page, you might buy Facebook advertising to do so.
Of course, you can also create the tab/landing page, and send the link
out in emails, or via your social media platforms.
The list covers the main photo and profile image, highlighted and pinned posts, setting company milestones, apps, Facebook offers, insights/admin panel and advertising. If you’re involved in your company’s Facebook page, this short tutorial is worth your time. From my initial reading, the apps and offers (which roll out shortly) would be a great place to create something special to urge people to your tradeshow appearances and events. It’ll probably take a little creativity, but there are plenty of opportunities in the new Facebook look to tie in with your event and tradeshow appearances.
After walking the floor at the Natural Products Expo West for a full day, it occurred to me that a number of exhibitors I had met and talked to the past couple of years were not here. Even though it’s huge show with thousands of exhibitors, and it might be easy to overlook them, that’s not the case: I looked them up on the show app and couldn’t find them.
They had vanished. Why? I wondered.
Of course, there are myriad reasons why a company wouldn’t return to a show for a third of fourth year, or even a second year.
It could be that the marketing goals have changed; they don’t have enough money; the company went out of business, there isn’t a market for their product, they can’t establish themselves against their competitors…any number of things would affect the ability of a company to show up at a huge industry tradeshow year after year.
Then I thought of the many companies I’ve seen and met that DO come year after year. When we discuss the show, and the success they’ve had, one common theme threads through the discussion: they all build their company’s success using the tradeshow as a springboard.
Many of those exhibitors that failed had solid social media marketing efforts. They were active in luring visitors to their booth. But even a good social media effort won’t cure the overall problem. What if you get people to your booth and you still fail in execution once they arrive?
If those exhibitors that fail to return to the show are doing things right away from the show, other factors notwithstanding, it really comes down to execution at the tradeshow itself.
There is a continuous chain of preparation and execution that has to happen to ensure the success of the tradeshow marketing effort, and if any one of those links are broken, the whole effort will fail.
Starting with the actual tradeshow booth, on to the pre-show marketing efforts, the show execution, and the follow-up with leads, all cylinders need to be hitting for the full effect: tradeshow marketing success.
While walking the show, I notice things, and one of the most glaring examples I see is staff failure. Many booths seem to have it all going: it’s great looking, the graphics are top-notch, the booth is functional and accommodating…yet the staff appears to be oblivious to visitors. They’re eating, talking on the phone, standing with their backs to the entrance, ignoring visitors…it’s truly astonishing to me that a company will spend tens of thousands of dollars on a booth, travel, booth space rental, advertising, marketing – and yet the whole effort flops because their staff is ill-trained.
There are other, less obvious, failures. For instance, graphics are ill-designed, packed with too much text or not distinguishing themselves from the competition. The photographs and graphics are not catchy enough compared to their neighbor. Or they have a giveaway that’s not capturing a specific, focused group of people (anyone want a new iPad? Yes, everyone does, and that’s the problem: not everyone is a prospect). When you’re competing against thousands of exhibitors trying to catch the eye of someone walking by your booth, you have literally about three seconds to visually grab them. If the graphics are lame or the display is packed with too much verbiage, the visitor won’t respond – they’ll keep on walking. And chances are they won’t be back.
Bottom line: tradeshow marketing can be extremely successful. I see multiple examples and talk to dozens of people that claim tradeshow marketing is their best platform for company growth and expansion. Yet…if a link in the chain is missing, the marketing manager will see the effort crumble, and struggle to identify the problem.
On your next tradeshow marketing effort, do your best to ensure the chain is strong from start to finish.
Still on the track of what the heck Classic Exhibits is up to for Exhibitor 2012 (March 4-8, 2012 at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas), I made another quick visit to their manufacturing facility this week.
The result? A disagreement among the bigwigs, a rescue by a new designer, and the ‘inside scoop’ (perhaps!) from a Russian spy???
I’ve had the pleasure of representing Classic Exhibits, based in Portland, Oregon, for several years. They produce great products and work diligently with customers and end users to give excellent value. They’ve exhibited at Exhibitor in Las Vegas for years, showing off great new exhibits that lead the industry.
This year could be different. When I got wind of their exhibit this year, I just had to investigate. After all, that’s what I do.
This month marks the tenth anniversary of the release of my tradeshow industry colleague’s book “Build a Better Trade Show Image.”Marlys Arnold is marking the anniversary of her book with a promotion that not only should raise the awareness level of the book, but give you a chance to grab some pretty nice goodies.
It’s a week-long gift-fest, starting on February 19th. Several vendors are chiming in with free offerings as a way to promote the book and to enhance networking.
Marlys Arnold is a trade show marketing strategist and has worked with exhibitors and show managers in all kinds of industries, including some of the largest shows in the U.S. Her book is a tradeshow education that any event marketer should have!
Plan on getting in on the party – it’s easy, just sign up for daily emails for the week of February 19-25 that list the various gifts along with some unannounced special offers.
Social media is great for drawing people to your event, whether you’re tweeting from your booth with a contest, posting to your Facebook page or blogging.
But using social media to help people connect while at the event is easy, too. It just takes a little thought and planning, and using the right tools.
I just signed up to attend Chris Gillebeau’s World Domination Summit in Portland this July. During the process of signing up and confirming payment, I had the option of sharing some limited personal and business information so that other like-minded people can find me and perhaps connect before the event. I presume the thinking would be is that it would lead you to want to connect in person at the site. This approach seems perfectly set-up to help keep you engaged in the event a good 175 days before it kick off, and positions you to connect with people before the event. I’m curious to see what else the organizers will do to foster connectivity in the next few months, as the event gets closer.
Another way to create engagement is to offer some sort of game or activity. SCVNGR is a game about doing challenges at places, which makes it perfectly suited for events. By checking into a series of places and doing an activity, you can earn rewards (if it’s set up that way), as well as network with other people playing the same game. By setting up some kind of reward for an activity, you encourage participation.
Involve those back at home or the office. By sharing hashtags, photos and videos – even live video streaming at chosen times – you are opening the conference or show to those who were unable to attend in person. Granted, you won’t get the same kind of engagement as you will with attendees, but it’s like offering a lifeline to ‘what’s new’ and happening’ at the event to those who aren’t attending.
Foursquare is a useful tool to share tips and comments about event speakers, exhibitors and products. It also helps people find other attendees and share tips on the best restaurants of nightclubs. And by monitoring the conversations on Foursquare and Twitter, organizers can quickly step in to address concerns, solve problems or use the comments to guide a better experience with the things that are working particularly well.
It makes sense to drum up as much interest before an event as possible, even prior to any official promotion launch. In fact, social media is ideally suited for just this task. By putting a blog post or video together, for instance, on what is coming at the event (even though it may be months away), and driving traffic to that blog post or video through social media, you’ve already primed the pump to whet people’s appetites for the event.
Also, by searching for and keeping tabs on Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups and discussion boards and Twitter accounts you can slowly expand your reach and build momentum. One key to this effort is to uncover which of the social media platforms your audience hangs out at the most. You should be able to do this through searching for hashtags on Twitter, groups on LinkedIn and association or event pages on Facebook and examining the number of people involved and the level of engagement by those people.
Before the Event
Depending on the size of the event, you should consider building a small event-related blog. WordPress blogs are easy to set up and customize and domains are about $10 a year. If you’re the promoter, this is mandatory so you have a landing spot online for information related to your show. Here’s where you’ll include all pertinent info, including cost, times, dates, contact info, how to purchase a space, etc.
If you’re an exhibitor, it’s still a very useful piece of your pre-show promotion. It’s easy to share blog posts on Twitter, Facebook and relevant LinkedIn groups, and a blog legitimizes your platform more than just a Facebook event listing.
But don’t forget the Facebook listing, either. It’s easy to set up, and easy to invite people. Don’t invite everyone – although Facebook gives you this capability – because it’s a waste of time. People across the country or in another country don’t care and people who can’t relate to your event won’t bother to respond. So pick and choose.
Set up a LinkedIn event page as well. Here you can only invite 50 people once the event listing is created, but this is good in that it forces you to choose carefully who to invite. Focus on those who might actually come and benefit from the event.
During the Event
Not every exhibitor is working hard on social media to engage show visitors, although at times it seems like that. Still, you can make your efforts stand out by offering great value in your booth, such as high-profile guests, demonstrations, high-value giveaways or downloads and other enticements.
Be sure you know what the standard hashtag for the event is. While there is no official repository of hastags (that I know of) since they come and go quickly, a medium to large event should have a hashtag that is getting used by exhibitors and attendees. Once you determine what the hashtag is, use it in every single event-related tweet.
During the event, someone from your staff can be in charge of creating content for either your blog or for other social media platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook. This might also include videos for YouTube or Facebook, which might include testimonials, demonstrations of products or explanations of services.
If you’re able, set up a Twitter board. It’s easy enough to put up a large flat screen hooked up to a laptop that displays real-time tweets using the show’s hashtag. This does a couple of things: first it shows people that you’re on the cutting edge (although not so much as a year or two ago), and secondly, it gives people a reason to tweet about your booth and your company, just so they can see their tweet show up in real time. Believe me, it happens!
Be sure to shoot a LOT of video. The more you shoot, the more you have to share after the show. As the weeks and months go on, if you can still offer pertinent information via your social media outlets, you’ll continue to stay in your prospects’ minds. Even if you don’t shoot much extra video, use information from the show (comments, insights, etc) to create more blog and Facebook posts.
This is just a start – no doubt you can find more ways to promote your tradeshow, event or conference using social media. If you think of something I didn’t mention, be sure to add it in the comment section below!
Setting up a virtual tradeshow website for your tradeshow appearance is as easy as setting up a new website. Mainly because that’s exactly what it is. While I’ve seen a number of ways to do it, having a blog platform for your virtual tradeshow gives you the most control and flexibility.
There are some platforms that allow you to set up an virtual ‘booth’ which looks graphically much like a booth, replete with branding, graphics, aisles, floor sections and more. The trouble is, it looks like a website from 1998.
With a WordPress blog platform, you can customize it to no end and maintain total control over the process, look and feel and content.
So why set up a blog that’s specific to a single show appearance? Because you can funnel lots of eyeballs there, and once those eyeballs arrive, you can drive them to other useful things, such as opting into email lists, downloading branded white papers, ‘liking’ your Facebook page or more.
A well-built site that’s specific to a show will be packed with content. Some of that content would optimally be posted before the show to prep the world to the site. While this would be very useful for search engines, it is also a prime opportunity to invite your current clients and newsletter subscribers to check it out. Once the show is underway, have a plan to post videos, articles, interviews, photos and more on the site. Make it a place for people to find general information about the show, and specific information about your products and services and company.
Even though you have the virtual tradeshow website, don’t forget about Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter. Use those outlets to inform the wider population by the use of hashtags (Twitter), keywords (YouTube and Flickr) and ongoing conversation (Facebook). Those social media platforms will help raise awareness and drive traffic to your main site, even though much of the content is the same.
Two recent examples of the use of virtual tradeshow websites come to mind: the site set up for Osram Opto Semiconductor for Lightfair and the site put up by Griffin Technologies for their appearance at CES in 2010. Both were quite successful, and should be used as models for how to set up your own virtual tradeshow website.
So, the short list:
Set up a blog that focuses on one event
Register a domain and create a name for the blog that describes your company and appearance at the show
Create some content before the show, mainly teaser material
Post obsessively during the show: videos, articles, photos, interviews, product reviews, testimonials, booth guest schedules, demo schedules, etc.
Post much of the same material to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, using keywords, show and company hashtags, links back to your site.
After the show, continue to post updated material or video and information from the show for at least a couple of months. It’ll help keep the site high in the search engines. Plus, if you can keep material dripping onto the site for the rest of the year until the next show, it’s a great set-up for the next year.
Your payback for your time and energy will be much more visibility and a unique record of all the materials you took and archived at the show.
Recently I posted a video call “QR Codes FAIL” on my YouTube/tradeshowmarketing channel and here on the blog. It was meant to show that QR Codes don’t always work as intended.
Mike Vincent of FanFareMobile.com chimed in with a comment about using SMS codes, since they’re so much easier.
Since my knowledge of SMS codes is limited, I hooked up with Mike to discuss the issue…and out of that came this podcast.
