November 24, 2023

Digital Marketing: The Game Changer in Trade Show Success

Ah, trade shows! That bustling hub where business cards fly faster than time and coffee is the unsung hero. But here’s the twist in the tale: digital marketing, the silent juggernaut, has muscled its way into this arena, transforming how these events are orchestrated and their success measured. Let’s dive into this digital odyssey and see how it’s rewriting the rulebook of trade show triumphs.

1. The Pre-Show Hype: Crafting Digital Buzz

Remember the days when trade show prep meant printing brochures and setting up booths? Fast forward to today, and it’s all about creating a digital buzz. Social media campaigns, email newsletters, and engaging content are the new drumbeats that draw the crowd. It’s a digital appetizer, serving a taste of what’s to come, and oh, how it whets the appetite of potential attendees!

Trade show booth with a person on the right side, reaching into a drink barrell

2. Personalized Engagement: Beyond the Booth

In this digital era, engagement doesn’t wait for a handshake at the booth. It starts earlier with tailored content and targeted ads that speak directly to the interests of your audience. Imagine a world where your booth visitors already feel connected to your brand, thanks to that cleverly crafted LinkedIn post or that insightful blog piece you shared. It’s like meeting an old friend amidst a sea of new faces.

3. Data-Driven Strategies: The Secret Sauce

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. Digital marketing isn’t just about flashy campaigns; it’s a treasure trove of data. Every click, share, and registration forms a piece of the puzzle, giving insights into attendee behavior and preferences. This data is the secret sauce in fine-tuning your trade show strategy, ensuring you’re not just shooting arrows in the dark but hitting the bullseye of attendee expectations.

4. The Power of Virtual Participation

Gone are the days when geographical boundaries limited trade show participation. Digital marketing has flung open the doors to virtual attendance, allowing people from across the globe to be a part of the event, sans the travel fatigue. Webinars, live streams, and virtual booths have become the norm, amplifying the reach and impact of trade shows far beyond the physical confines.

5. Post-Show Engagement: Keeping the Conversation Alive

The end of the trade show is not the end of the journey; it’s merely a pit stop. Thanks to digital marketing, the conversation continues. Follow-up emails, content that recaps the event, and social media discussions keep the interaction alive, turning a fleeting meeting into a lasting connection. It’s like leaving breadcrumbs that lead your audience back to you long after the trade show lights dim.

6. Measuring Success: Beyond Foot Traffic

In the pre-digital era, success was often gauged by the number of business cards exchanged or foot traffic at the booth. Today, digital analytics offer a multi-dimensional view of success. Engagement rates, lead quality, and conversion metrics – these are the new yardsticks that measure the impact of your trade show presence. It’s a shift from quantity to quality, from mere presence to meaningful engagement.

A busy trade show booth, with several people in the booth space and aisle, talking.

Wrapping Up

As we embrace this digital revolution, trade shows are no longer just about physical presence; they’re about creating a holistic experience that starts and continues in the digital realm. It’s a blend of the traditional and the modern, where each complements the other, creating a symphony of business opportunities.

So, as you sip on that trade show coffee, remember, the real buzz is happening in the digital world, and it’s reshaping the landscape of trade show success in ways we’re just beginning to explore. Cheers to the digital age, where every click, every view, and every engagement counts! 🌐✨

May 21, 2021

How to Solve a Bad Tradeshow Booth Location: Video

Yes, you got a lousy location. What to do to prevent poor traffic and lack of leads by the end of the show? Here are a handful of things you can do to bring people to your booth:

November 12, 2020

The Well-Rounded Tradeshow Marketer: Video

When it comes to being a tradeshow marketing manager, a lot of different skills come into play. Let’s take a look:

May 28, 2020

Ways to Level Up Your Online Zoom Presence

Zoom is ubiquitous. So much so that I’ve even been reading lately about “Zoom fatigue.” So many Zoom meetings!

But what’s a person to do? Many offices are closed. Millions are working from home, navigating the line between getting work done, keeping kids occupied, quieting pets and so much more. Zoom is a lifeline as well as a way of life for many people. Meeting with business colleagues and clients, and family gatherings.

I recently chatted with Ken Newman of Magnet Productions, a long-time tradeshow friend and colleague, about ways to step up your game when a Zoom call. He works with a number of clients to do the same, and we chatted about the various ways of improving the quality of your Zoom interactions.

What are your goals?

Let’s start with your situation. Are you planning to make changes to get you through another couple of months (or however long it takes to return to “normal”), or are you looking to make permanent changes to your home studio? Even when tradeshows come back, many things will be normal, but there will also be a more robust virtual element of tradeshows.

How are you using Zoom?

Zoom was built to handle speech, not music. When Zoom hears a loud sound, like a siren or car horn, it will immediately clamp down the sound to prevent it from going through at such a high level. Which means, if you happen to want to play music or some other type of sound on your Zoom calls (such as a larger meeting where several people might be in a single room, or where one person is playing music through an amplifier, for example), you’re going to have a big challenge in front of you to keep the sound at an even level. To get around that, you can go into settings and “enable original sound.”

Do rehearsals.

One of the first lessons I learned in my early radio days was to know what you really sounded like, not what you think you sounded like. It’s the same concept with a video call or presentation. Simply start a meeting with nobody else there. Record it and play it back. You can check how you look, how the lighting looks, how you sound. And when you do rehearsals, you’ll catch those little crutches that you usually don’t know about, like saying “like” all the time or “y’know.”

Check the background of your image

Don’t have an open window behind you, because your guests on the call will see a poorly lit image of you, mainly a silhouette. Use lighting at about three-quarters.

Green screen: a gimmick, but more as a fun thing, but after the initial view of Fiji, it gets boring and distracting.

Limit background noise

Close the door. Try to schedule meetings when people are doing other things (yes, that may be impossible!). Tell the others in your house that you’re going to have the call and to please assist with keeping kids and dogs quiet. Yes, I know that if you live near a train track that sometimes things just happen. If background noise is a continual problem, you might check out Krisp: recommended recently by Seth Godin, who says it is good a dampening background noise when you’re on a Zoom call.

Equipment to Consider

Ken and I discussed a number of pieces of gear, both hardware and software. These range in cost from small or modest to more expensive and are worth taking a look at depending on your level of use of video and how much your budget can handle.

Lighting

LED ring lights are mostly low-cost and add a lot of control of your image. Set them off to the side so they’re aiming at your face at about 45 degree angle. Package them with a tripod that can also hold your camera and you’ll only need the one, if that’s what you’re using for Zoom or other video. Otherwise, consider getting two of them and put one on each side of your face at a 45 degree angle.

Microphones

With a laptop or desktop, having a USB microphone will immediately take you above the sound you get from typical AirPods or earbuds with a microphone in the cord. AirPods have a decent sound, and in many case the smaller microphones on your earbuds will be okay. The microphone on your laptop or desktop computer is probably the lowest sound quality and the most problematic when it comes to background noise.

USB Microphones:

I use the Audio Technica AT2020USB+. Good sound, has a mini-headphone jack for plugging headphones in and mixing sound. It’s not a high-end microphone, but the sound is solid and it’s been a good workhorse for me.

Ken often uses a Shure MV-51, which is a higher-end USB mic with more bells and whistles.

We’ve both had the Yeti Blue mic, which is good but nor great. It’s lower cost means a lot of people have tried it. I stopped using mine a year ago when it simply stopped working. But frankly, if you can find a low-cost USB microphone it’ll be a good upgrade from your laptop or AirPods in terms of sound. Not only that, but it’ll show that you’re serious about your audio sound.

On location, and in any situation where you want freedom to roam but still get good sound, use something like a Kimafun 2.4G wireless lavalier microphone with built-in audio interface. Short-range dedicated wireless connection (not Bluetooth). It comes in a compact case that is smaller than a typical shaving kit.

Webcams

Chances are you have a phone with a built-in camera or a laptop with a good built-in camera. If you want or need something a little better, consider these:

Logitech C922 HD webcam

Logitech C270 – lower cost version

Software

OBS – Open Broadcaster Software. More for the serious webcaster who wants a full package to be able to broadcast high performance realtime video and audio capture and editing. Audio mixing, adding in recorded video scenes to your broadcast. Like having a small TV station control panel in your computer. Learning curve is steep, but if that’s what you want, this is a good piece to explore. And since it’s open source, it’s free to use.

The world was moving to much more online video even before the pandemic forced a lot of us out of the office and in front of a webcam and microphone. Since the chances are you’ll be doing more video, you might as well look and sound as good as you can!

Check this video on Quick Tips For Shooting Video At Home from Livd + Produced on Vimeo.

Thanks and kudos to Ken Newman of Magnet Productions for sharing insight and expertise!

April 2, 2020

Selling in the Time of No Tradeshows or Events

The social distancing guidelines put forth due to the COVID-19 pandemic has effectively shut off a majority of the economy, like turning off a spigot. It would be easier to line-item the businesses that are open than those that are closed: grocery stores, drive-through coffee shops and some business offices. Ten million in the US have filed for unemployment in the past two weeks.

Ten Million.

The impact of this on the nation, on the world, is unfathomable.

I know many people who are sitting at home most of the day, binging TV shows or reading books or even playing board games or sharing music online. Others are making use of the time to learn a new skill, to tackle that novel, to write music, to create.

Others don’t know what to do.

If you’re still working, whether from home or in the office, and you have to sell to keep things going in the company, what do you do? What approach do you take?

I subscribe to several sales newsletters and thought I’d share a few thoughts. Some came from the newsletters, others from just my own experience. But here we are in a time where it’s difficult to even find someone to talk to.

First, when you call, it makes sense to ask your contact what approach their company is making. Are they putting everything on hold for the time being, awaiting the end of the social distancing and figuring they’ll kick back into action when the pandemic is over? Or are they moving forward with business as usual, as much as they can?

If it’s the former, tell them, that, ‘yeah, it’s a crazy time, I get it,’ and ask if you can send a quick email with your contact information so that when we do get back to normal they can reach back out to you. If it’s the latter, move into your typical sales questions to uncover any needs they may currently have for what you’re offering.

Seems appropriate somehow… (click to play the album!)

Another part of the equation is what you’re selling. If you’re in the restaurant supply business, chances are that your potential buyers are not even open, unless they’re doing take-out or drive-thru only. If you’re selling Personal Protective Equipment for health workers, you probably can’t keep up with the demand. It all depends on the specific products or services you’re selling.

Most people probably fall somewhere in between those two extremes. Which means you’re going to have to find a strategy that keeps at least some business coming in.

With millions stuck at home, that means people are going online to shop, they’re connecting via video meetings (Zoom is being mentioned dozens of times a day in the mainstream press!), telephone and email.

Questions to ask yourself:

What shape is the company website it? Does it need upgrading? Can you add new products, new services and new ways for people to connect?
Are your social media platforms being updated frequently? With so much time on their hands, everybody is on social media.
Can you offer a digital version of your services? Lots of people are taking this time to create online learning classes or other ways of sharing their information.
Can you connect with others regularly? Sure! Some people are starting up regular Zoom meetings just to have a face-to-face connection with others outside of their home.

Bottom line: be there for clients and prospects. Don’t stop doing outreach, however that looks for you. Don’t be pushy but if you continue to think you can offer something of value, something that your clients and prospects can really use, keep doing it.

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