Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.
Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.

Marketing

How Personal is Your Tradeshow Exhibit?

What kind of question is that, anyway? How personal is your tradeshow exhibit? An exhibit should be the best representation of a brand, which is aimed at a broad market. Isn’t that correct? If that’s the case, it has to have the right graphics with the right messaging. Any images should be chosen to reflect the best your product and brand have to offer. And if all that is true – and I suppose it is – how can your exhibit be personal?

Selling is Personal

Except…selling today is personal. People want to know that you care about them. The challenge is that people don’t really care about your product or service. When it comes to your products, they care about themselves, and themselves only. How do your products or services affect them – personally? The messaging should relate to what they’re going through. As we slowly move back to the tradeshow world with exhibits and face-to-face meetings and larger gatherings, every person is going to have a slightly – or perhaps significantly – different perception of what they need or want. And they’ll have some level of anxiety or distress or challenge in moving forward.

So how do you help them…now? How does your product or service help them…now? What do they need…now?

Your challenge isn’t that you don’t know how to present your products or services. No, your challenge is that you need to understand what’s going on in the mind of your customers and prospects. And the only way to learn that is to ask. In a sense, your tradeshow exhibit should be an invitation to join them. An invitation to walk into their space. Make them feel safe and wanted. There are a million ways to do that. I’m do designer, but I do know how I feel when I walk into a space that welcomes me. With people around that want to see me, and not just to sell me something, but to understand where I’m coming from. And frankly, that’s kind of rare. Maybe it’s food. Maybe it’s a cup of coffee, or a warm smile. Maybe it’s an image that they can relate to that doesn’t look like it’s been chosen out of a stock photo library. Or if it has, it resonates with them.

What makes people buy?

When they finally get to a place where they feel understood. Where they feel you “get” them. Where they feel comfortable and wanted. It’s a bit like belonging to a tribe, but it’s more than that. And less.

It’s personal. What is it your customer wants?

Be creative in how you interact with people. Be creative in how you uncover what’s important to your clients. Learn from them. Then design your next tradeshow exhibit based on what you learned.

It’s not going to be easy. But it’ll be worth it.

Tradeshows Go Virtual, But for How Long?

Yes, tradeshows are going virtual. They have been for some time, and the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many shows into the digital world that might not have done so as quickly. Just a cursory search on Twitter with the hashtag #tradeshow gives you a bunch of shows that are moving to online.

The Consumer Electronics Show recently announced they’re going virtual for the next go-around. Others are following suit. In discussion with industry managers and exhibitors, the feeling is that, frankly, no one knows when “normal” will return and exactly what it will look like. There are certainly efforts to get things off the ground, like the recent Together Again Expo, a tradeshow industry event in Orlando last month.

But overall, shows are still being cancelled and / or postponed.

For example, the Snow & Ice Symposium (there’s such a thing?) has gone all virtual. Just add ice to your glass! (Click the images below: it’ll take you to the original tweet in a new tab).

Here’s another virtual expo that I’m not sure about:

The ISSA 2020 event is also going online:

Fabtech 2020 has been cancelled:

The Cultivate Agency offers a pitch on how to make sure that if the show you had counted on is canceled, how can you still use that budget to reach potential buyers?

A-Train Marketing offers several tips for an upside-down tradeshow world:

Even shows overseas are going by the wayside thanks to the pandemic:

And many more, to be sure. The state of the events, conference and tradeshow industry is upside down, but it looks like many shows are going digital as best as they can. It’ll be interesting to see how the shows unfold and to see how, even when face-to-face shows return, how virtual aspects will remain. And how many exhibits and attendees will show up. And when.

The story is still being told.

TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, August 3, 2020: Lisa Apolinski

It seems in this day and age you jump from one Zoom call to another, from one webinar to another. And you might often be called on to host or create your own webinar or other digital presentation. If that’s not something you’re comfortable with, it can create a whole lot of anxiety and challenges. In this week’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, we hook up with Lisa Apolinski of 3 Dog Write, Inc., a full-service digital consulting agency and discuss some of the digital challenges of the day.

Find Lisa’s company, 3 Dog Write.

This week’s ONE GOOD THING: the novel Island Beneath the Sea by Chilean author Isabel Allende.

Subscribe to TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee on Apple Podcasts here.

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel Tradeshow Marketing here, where the vlog version of the podcast appears weekly.

A Wrap Up of B2B Pandemic Survival Skills

A few recent newsletters that have popped up in my inbox have gotten me to thinking about B2B in the age of a pandemic. The tradeshow world is virtually shut down. Conferences aren’t happening. Events are 99.9% gone. Many of the writers behind these newsletters offer insightful observations about how business is now being done: what’s changing and what’s not.

I’ve compiled several of these thoughts and added a few of my own.

Embracing Digital

“Zoom Fatigue” has become a meme. But connecting via digital is about the only way to connect. Yes, you can pick up the phone – and I do – but a video call is more personal. Of course, there’s an extra step involved: you have to agree on a time and schedule the call and send the link. But taking those steps evinces a commitment to the meeting you might not have otherwise had.

Email: staying in touch is a little harder in this day and age. Many of the contacts I have are either working from home or have been laid off. Others are in the office only part time and their presence at work is not a given. Every company is dealing with the situation in their own way, and if an email isn’t answered in the time it typically would be, try a phone call.

Short videos

Beyond Zoom, email, and phone calls, create short videos that address challenges a typical customer might have. A recent Orbit Media Studios post examined what happened when they added video to their content strategy. It’s led me to create short videos every week to see if they get attention.

Bottom line on Digital

Be present online more than you ever have been before.

Know your priorities.

What’s important for your company? For you? For your employees? I spoke with a handful of distilleries in Oregon this week to see if they were making hand sanitizer, as many of them did at the outset of the COVID-19 outbreak. Many had made the product and were still making it but it was not a priority. A handful of them, though realized that there was a market there and it was going to be there awhile and were actually ramping up production. Others felt it was not their core business and they would rather be known for their high-quality distilled products.

Understand your customer’s priorities

Every customer is going through something different. Find out from as many as possible what their biggest challenges are. Segment them. And if you can help them, do it. Some might need to wait another month or two or three.

Find and form valuable partnerships

Partnerships can take you places you couldn’t go on your own. Manufacturers, builders, factories, processing plants. Keep an open mind to what the possibilities are and ask good questions. You might uncover an opportunity that you had no idea existed a few months ago.

Communicate clearly to everyone

It boils down to listening twice as much as you talk. Find out what’s important to other management members, employees, team members, clientele, prospects. But make sure to let them know what’s important to you as well. We’re all in this together, and communication will be the key.

Remove friction whenever possible

Just like forming a new habit, the easier it is, the more likely you’ll form that habit. It’s like saying to yourself that you’ll put on your running shoes each morning and run around the block. There’s not much friction in putting on your shoes. Once you have the shoes on, it’s easy to go around the block. After you do that a few times, it’ll be easier to run a half mile. Then a mile. Then two, five and so on. By reducing the friction to get anything done, both for you and your clients, the easier it will be to get bigger things done. Start small where there is little friction.

Acknowledge that it’s not business as usual

The final piece. We all know that, but many of us are acting as if it’s still 2019. Are you? It’s not. We’re in the future to stay. And it’s a different world. It’s not business as usual.

Here are some of the resources that helped inspire this collection:

Chief Marketer: How B2B Marketers are Embracing Digital During the Pandemic.

Marketing Profs: 5 B2B Marketing Strategies for Pandemic Survival and Beyond, by Mike Seiman.

Orbit Media: Adding Video to Your Content Strategy: The Impact to Traffic and Rankings, by Andy Crestodina

Tradeshow World Prepares to Return – if the Audience is Ready

Exhibitor Magazine just sent out a pair of reports detailing research on how tradeshow attendees view the coming return to “normalcy” for tradeshows, events and conferences.

In the first report, Enigma Research polled 2000 live event attendees to gauge their level of comfort or anxiety in the potential return to live events. ExibitorOnline’s report is here, along with a link to the full report. There’s no op-tin or cost for the report, but you may need to register at ExhibitorOnline.

Some of the takeaways include:

  • Over a third polled say they would immediately return to shows, but most indicate they’re okay with waiting.
  • Over two-thirds say they’d be likely or very like to travel to another city for an event.
  • While most attendees agree that safety measure such as hand-washing and hand sanitizer and cleaning are necessary, they’re split on other measures such as who should or must wear a mask.

Next, Exhibitor’s senior writer Charles Pappas recently discussed the World Health Organization’s recommendations for tradeshows and events in a webinar. The discussion included takes on a potential vaccine, how the virus is transferred, having asymptomatic people at shows and more. Check the article here and download the full report or watch the webinar at the same link.

TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, May 18, 2020: Jay Gilbert

The event and tradeshow industry is on hiatus and no one knows for sure when or how it will return. It’s the same with the music industry. Concert tours have been postponed or cancelled. On this week’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, I reconnect with Jay Gilbert of Label Logic, a Los Angeles-based company that works with artist management and a handful artists. I was curious to see how their company has been impacted, and how the music industry as a whole has been impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic. Take a look/listen:

Check out Jay’s company Label Logic here. Here’s a link to the first time Jay was on TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee with us.

This week’s ONE GOOD THING: Chernobyl mini-series on HBO.

TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, May 11, 2020: Dale Obrochta

What day is it? Are you counting how many days since you’ve been on shelter-at-home protocols? Or are you in a state that has abandoned all attempts to limit the spread of COVID-19 and things are getting back to normal? Which begs the question: what is normal?

This week on TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, I caught up with Dale Obrochta of PutATwistOnIt.com, who’s been a previous guest on this show. We talked about the challenges his profession is facing in the new normal.

Find Dale here at PutATwistOnIt.com.

This week’s ONE GOOD THING:

Book and Novel writing software: Scrivener.

TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, April 27, 2020: Ken Newman and Robert Middleton

We’re all in a quandary: what to do to work our way through the Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic and still work with clients in a meaningful way. For this week’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, I caught up with two busy marketers, one in the tradeshow world, and one not.

Ken Newman of Magnet Productions and Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing agreed to sit down with me one-on-one in Zoom meetings. I was curious to get their take on what to do and how to approach the current unprecedented situation.

Ken Newman’s Magnet Productions

Robert Middleton’s Action Plan Marketing

This week’s ONE GOOD THING:

Foo Fighters Live in Concert 2006 Hyde Park London

Taking Time to Review Your Tradeshow Marketing Systems

The tradeshow, event and conference industries are not dead. It’s just sleeping. It’ll awaken at some point again and roar to life.

In the meantime, time on your hands. Maybe, maybe not. I certainly have time on my hands. And I have to bring in a little income.

So, I’m driving for Uber Eats and delivering food three to four hours a day. Not bad money, actually, for the time involved. My older son, who’s in his late 20s, had been working as a cook in an upscale restaurant which had to close when the coronavirus restrictions here in Oregon went into place. When we went skiing together a month ago, he told me that he’d been driving for Uber Eats a few hours before he went to work, and then a few hours after he got off in the evening. Now that the restaurant closed, he’s doing it eight hours a day, six or seven days a week. Likes being in his car (it’s new), listening to music, and bringing food to people.

I thought, I can do this. And making a few extra bucks (it’s actually pretty good pay) was enticing. It took a short while to get signed up and approved, and now I’m delivering food from restaurants to people a few hours a day. Sometimes lunch, sometimes dinner.

It gives me a lot of time to think. And listen to rock, or podcasts. But definitely time to think.

And I got to thinking about systems. What kind of systems does it take for an Uber driver (or Door Dash or Grub Hub or any of those companies) to get an offer to drive, accept it, pick up the food and deliver it in a timely manner while it’s still hot?

The driver needs:

  • A car
  • Smartphone with app
  • Address to pickup
  • Address to deliver

The smartphone has all of those items, other than the car, built in. GPS. Mapping. Internet connectivity.

The customer needs:

  • An app to order food from
  • An address for the driver to deliver it to
  • A way to pay (credit or debit card) they can use through the app

The restaurant needs:

  • A system that receives incoming orders and gets them to the kitchen in a timely manner
  • Ability to prepare food quickly and have it ready for pickup within a few moments

As I drive from a restaurant to a drop off point, it’s common to get another offer to pick up another order before the current one is delivered.

During my drives, I keep thinking what an intricate system this is. What an elaborate dance it is to transmit an offer to a driver that’s in the area, about to drop off one order, to deliver another order. As an Uber Eats driver, it’s all optional. Don’t want that one? Don’t take it.

Photo by Matheus Bertelli from Pexels

Then I get to thinking about the systems built around tradeshows and events. About what the show organizer needs. What the exhibitor needs. What the visitor needs.

Think about the systems that must be in place for all of that to work to a positive effect on a regular basis. Design and fabrication of tradeshow exhibits. Shipping, setup/dismantle logistics. Travel and lodging. Product development and production.

As a participant, you only can see and control what’s immediately in front of you. But as a tradeshow marketing manager, you can exert a lot of control over how your company exhibits. How your product is presented, how your company is represented by the exhibit and the booth staff. Who sets up the booth, who handles shipping and so on.

Now that the tradeshow and event industry is on hiatus, maybe it’s a good time to examine your systems that hold everything in place from your perspective and see what can be improved.

After all, while I don’t mind driving a few hours a day delivering food, I’d rather get back to the tradeshow world full time soon.

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Tradeshow Guy Blog by Tim Patterson

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