In the swirl of the tradeshow marketing soup, you’re working to create a potent mix of trained staff, an awesome-looking and appropriately-functional booth, interactivity, social media engagement. When all is said and done, the ONLY important thing at most shows is: bringing home the bacon.
When you get back to the office, the big question that determines the success or failure of your tradeshow marketing effort is this: did you get enough warm and hot leads to justify the expense of going to the tradeshow and planning to go again next year? Because if you haven’t, there’s something missing. But what?
When you examine the various and disparate elements that go into a successful tradeshow marketing experience, you may be reminded of the famous question attributed to Henry Ford: “I know that half of my advertising dollars are wasted, but which half?”
Make no mistake, if you can’t identify the wasted parts of your tradeshow marketing efforts, you’ll continue to leak dollars and leads and return from shows with half-empty cups of leads.
It behooves you to examine all of the elements of your tradeshow marketing to determine where the inefficiencies lie:
Tradeshow booth ‘look and feel’ and function: does your booth draw the right people and once they get there, is it set up to handle them properly?
Booth graphics: do your graphics qualify and disqualify visitors as they arrive?
Tradeshow staff training: what’s the level of knowledge of staffers on your products and services and are they properly trained in how to interact with visitors in the chaotic environment of a tradeshow?
Are you attending shows that offer the best market for your products and services?
Social media marketing: do your SM marketing staffers understand social media and the art of engagement?
By hitting all cylinders properly, you’re actually doing two things: one, you’re putting a much more effective tradeshow marketing machine on the tradeshow floor, and two, you’re positioning your company at a much higher level than most of your competitors.
Given the stakes at risk and the amount of money you’re investing in your tradeshow marketing, I have one question for you:
Why wouldn’t you want to do all of these things properly and with excellence to significantly increase the odds of bringing home the bacon?
If you’re not willing to do that, perhaps you are not yet ready for tradeshow marketing.
Oh, and if you want to know where the inspiration for the title for this post came from…
As a tradeshow manager, one of the worst things you will ever face is a booth staff that has become, well, zombies part way through the tradeshow. If you leave the booth and come back to find your staff spending time discussing politics or gossiping about business (disengagement), or if you see things disappear (employee theft), ignoring visitors (wtf? – visitors are why they’re there!), you’ve got a Zombie Apocalypse!
Zombies in your tradeshow booth don’t actually walk around chewing on your tradeshow booth or looking to dismember visitors, but with active disengagement your booth staff might as well be zombies for all the good they’re doing your company.
So, here are 4 ways to avoid Tradeshow Exhibiting Zombies.
Make sure your staff is trained. Nothing’s worse than untrained staff, expect perhaps an uninformed staff. If your staff doesn’t have the skills to interact positively with visitors or know how to answer questions, they might as well be the walking dead.
Marketing goal buy-in. If your booth staff has only the bare information on why they’re there (pick up a paycheck!), you’re doing your company a disfavor. Your booth staff, from the lowliest temp employee to the highest ranked engineer or member of management, should know exactly WHY you’re at the show, WHAT the goals are, and HOW to attain those goals. If they SEE the goal and BELIEVE in what you’re doing, chances are very good they’ll have BUY-IN and will participate with energy and enthusiasm. If so, they’re emotionally engaged. In not, they might as well be…you get the point.
Communication. Your Zombie Apocalypse is only a motion or two away if you aren’t able to communicate effectively and in a timely manner. If that means you’re tweeting about a prize giveaway or posting great deals on Facebook that will spur visitors to rush to your booth, but don’t tell all of the staff, those promotions may fall flat on its face.
Show them you appreciate them. Yup, sometimes the hardest thing for some folks is to say THANK YOU for a job well done. If your tradeshow succeeds and your staff did a stellar job, be sure to recognize them for it. Often the recognition can be nothing more than a pat on the back in front of the staff, but it can also mean that you’re buying them a nice dinner on the last night of the show and telling them as a group that you couldn’t do it without them. Whatever form of recognition you choose, you must be sincere and believable.
Follow these guidelines and the Zombie Apocalypse will likely bypass your company and instead devour your competition!
If you listen to some marketers, QR Codes are the coming thing. The best marketing tool of all time. Others say they’re hard to use and difficult to set up.
Neither may be completely true, but both have a little truth to them.
I’ve been scanning QR codes for a couple of years to see how they work, since I first picked up a smartphone app. And they’ve been, uh, mostly less than successful. In fact, I’d estimate that only about 1 in 4 or 5 QR codes scanned properly, and only 1 in 4 or 5 of those actually took me to a smartphone-optimized landing page.
Which begs the question: why should you use QR codes for your marketing?
I can think of only a few reasons. First, if you want to support your marketing efforts with a secondary channel, a QR code may be a good way to support that. Let’s say you’re offering a handout at your tradeshow booth, but you want to steer those people with smartphone QR code apps to download them as a PDF. You’re making the brochure or document available as a limited paper edition, but unlimited electronic downloads. A QR code should work just fine for this purpose – just make sure you state the purpose of the QR Code in easy-to-understand directions.
Secondly, if you want to share specific information that a smart phone user can put to immediate use, offering a QR code with a URL is a good way to steer people to that landing page. This might be a situation where you offer additional information for those that are looking for it.
As always, the caveats still exist: make sure the QR Code is easily scannable (high contrast black on white and large enough to scan), optimize the landing page so it looks good on a smartphone, and TEST the link right before it goes into action to make sure it works properly.
Yup, QR Codes CAN work. Just make sure that you have a damn good reason to use them.
When you’re tweeting and posting Facebook updates and adding photos to your Instagram or Snapchatting like a 13-year-old, do you ever get the feeling that those updates are all…er…wasted and you’re not making real connections using social media? Do you find that very few people actually respond or read them?
Do you feel that they are not really connecting to your intended recipients – those online followers of your company and products?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone. Making that connection with your audience (customers, potential clients) is probably the toughest thing you’re tasked to do.
And I’m here to tell you that it’s not an easy thing to do. Even if I gave you a shortlist of things to do on a daily basis, it’s quite possible that you may get nothing out of that list. Or it may mean the difference between making the connection and being totally ignored by your followers.
But still, if you’re on social media, you’ll have to try to find what it takes to make those connections or your time will be wasted.
So let me offer some ideas on what it might take. For every person involved in social media for their company, the approach to these ideas will be different, some slightly and some extremely different, but your approach should fall under the same umbrella. To me there are just two main elements you need to provide.
CONTENT. By providing good content, you’re telling your audience that you care. Show your knowledge; share your expertise. Give things away that are worth something and are not just rehashed. Speak knowledgeably about how your products or services can actually help someone. Answer questions; offer insights based on your experience. And don’t worry about giving away secrets – there really are very few secrets left anyway.
CONNECTION. Yeah, it’s a cliché: connect with someone! The larger your audience, the harder it will be to find anything more than superficial connections based on your online back-and-forth. But…I think there’s something to be said for making the attempt. It could mean cultivating and focusing on a handful of those people in your tribe that are engaged and responsive. You can’t connect with everyone, but for those that you do make a solid connection with, it’s worth it. Often those people will then become surrogates for you and your company, singing your praises without urging from you. BTW, the way to connect online is to get off subject: use humor; comment on photographs, share experiences that are non-business related. Connections are made on an emotional level much easier than on a business level.
And when it comes to connection, quality is better then quantity. In fact, there isn’t enough time to connect with everyone in your circle. Connect with those you are able to and have some sort of attraction to. Business happens with people you like and trust.
In your social media interactions (as in everywhere), be likeble and trustworthy.
You may recall the 1971 David Bowie song “Changes.” While it was often seen as a ‘manifesto for his chameleonic personality’ (Wikipedia), it’s not much of a stretch to say that the song applies to virtually everything in life. We live in a world full of changes, and when it comes to following the bouncing ball that is social media, we often get lost trying to keep up with the fast-paced world.
So where should you look in your attempts to follow changes? I’d love to say that this blog follows changes, but as a one-man band that’s a difficult, if not impossible task. However, there are a number of social media-related blogs and websites that I follow that do a great job. Some have dozens (or hundreds) of contributors that follow a wide variety of social media and web-related activity.
The challenge is winnowing the information down to what’s important to YOU. That’s not the easiest thing, and while I consume a lot of information, it’s difficult to read only the blog posts and articles that directly affect me. And in fact, I’m not sure that we should limit our intake to specific topics, because often a related topic or item can later become important.
So let’s look at a handful sites that have proven to be useful in tracking changes and keeping readers up-to-date.
Mashable: to me this is more of a tech-related site, but they do a darn fine job of tracking news and changes in all related spheres, from business and tech to lifestyle and fun watercooler topics, including a lot of social media. It started out on a much smaller scale, but as it’s popularity and readership rise, its horizons have expanded. They have smartphone apps and of course RSS feeds which make it easy to follow.
Social Media Examiner: Much more focused on social media that Mashable, the Social Media Examiner is often my first stop when I want to research any social media-related topic. Founded by Michael Stelzner a few years ago, the SME is the best at following trends and giving you countless how-to’s along the way.
Social Media Today: covering social media from blogging to tweeting and all points in between, Social Media Today casts a wide net.
Blogs:
Soshableis not high on my list, but the few times I’ve landed there I’ve come away impressed. Lots of good articles and a ton of tech and social media-related infographics make this very interesting reading.
Scott Monty: he’s the global head of social media for Ford Motor Company and knows his stuff. Scott is a fun read and you’ll always pick up some good information and tips when you land here.
Forbes on Social Media: surprisingly, or perhaps not, this is a great resource of articles and information.
Peter Shankman, the founder of Help Out a Reporter, is a globe-trotting writer, speaker and author. If you want cutting edge, read his blog.
Finally, this round-up from Hubspot is worth a look. There’s a list of 36 ‘don’t-miss’ social media blogs that they claim you should check out. I haven’t checked them all out, but cursory look at a handful of them shows that you can’t go wrong here.
I know people who hold back from doing things because they feel that if they don’t do it perfectly, they would rather not do it.
Excuse me, but you’re human. You will never be perfect. So don’t let your fear of not being ‘perfect’ out of the box on your social media tradeshow marketing hold you back.
Perfection DOES exist. But only in the eye of the beholder. For instance, a rose can be perfect. Or an outdoor landscape in the desert or mountain. Or a night out with your significant other.
You can’t see the perfect forest for the trees!
But social media? Don’t hold your breath. All of your competitors and colleagues are still scrambling for the best way to do something. They’re trying to tweet at the right time to get more people to their booth. They’re looking to use Facebook to brand their appearance at the show. They’re hoping that Pinterest will hold someone’s interest enough after the show with photographs that those viewers will learn something or remember a bit or piece of the show.
But that’s all they’re doing: they’re just trying.
Don’t worry about perfect. Just think about the next step and take it.
On, no! Not another list post! But they’re so fun to write! Not only that, but putting thoughts into a numerical list makes it much easier to digest.
Here are a few ways that you may be coming up short, er, uh, sucking…at your social media tradeshow marketing.
You’re not taking and sharing photos. People love photos and love to spread them around. Next time at the tradeshow booth, have your smart phone handy, or a digital camera. Take photos of visitors, get their names, post on Facebook, or if you have a lot, put ’em up on Flickr. Then share them throughout your social network.
You’re not consistently tweeting. Just one tweet about your special tradeshow booth guest or author isn’t enough. Get it out several times a day. Post ahead of time by a few days. Use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule your tweets.
You’re not shooting video and sharing it. Videos can be extremely useful, especially if you’re shooting videos of customers talking about how your products can help them (testimonials). Don’t worry about professional quality. Just keep it short and to the point – two minutes or less – and you should be fine.
You’re not mentioning anything about your tradeshow appearance on your blog. Yes, your blog isn’t supposed to be rife with tons of posts about your company. It’s not a place for press releases and company awards your CEO just won. It’s for helping readers solve problems and answer questions and gain insight into your industry and products. But there’s nothing wrong with mentioning upcoming events you’ll be involved in, especially if there’s an opportunity for visitors to get questions answered or see how your products and services can solve problems.
You’re spending too much time reading goofball posts and not actually creating good content. In other words, it sucks because you’re allowing it to be a time-suck. Be thoughtful and conscientious about your approach to social media marketing and the time you spend, and you’ll do a lot better.
Thinking that each tweet, Facebook post or video that you post will translate to a sale. Social media and sales will probably never converge the way that marketers and sales teams wish they would. But if they understood how social media could build a tribe of followers and like-minded people, those connections may eventually ring the cash register. Not only that, it can create a tribe of people that will go to bat for you and help spread the word about your product or service. Face it; social media connections are generally fairly weak. Believing that each ‘like’ on your page means you’ve just gained a great friend or customer is wishful thinking. Instead, think of it as an introduction during a busy party. Once that introduction is made, look for common ground, offer useful information, respond to questions and engage without looking like a stalker. And DON’T try a hard sell – if you do, those casual connections will vanish.
You’re not involved at all. Yes, it would be easy to write off social media as a weak marketing effort. If you do, though, you’re letting a terrific opportunity to meet and greet with no pressure slip through your fingers. Instead, look at social media as a way to continue to make connections, and even though they’re weak at the beginning, if you are a real person behind a brand, those connections will strengthen as you spend time working them.
Here’s a replay of last week’s webinar that was sponsored by Total Displays of Minneapolis. We had a great time, gave out some great information. Enjoy!
As a first time attendee at the World Domination Summit over the weekend in Portland, I had nothing to compare it to. Oh, sure, I’d read the blog post on Chris Guillibeau’s blog last year that attracted my attention and ultimately led me to grab a ticket in a very short window. On opening night during the street festival/carnival in northwest Portland, several people I spoke to tried to explain why they loved the first year and came back the second year.
The most memorable description of the event came from Cynthia Morris, whom I met on Friday evening at the street fair and opening party (and who later gave a workshop on creating a book-writing map) said that we’re all on a fool’s journey in this life, and this conference is here for all of us who recognize that and want support for that journey.
Of course it’s much more than that. The World Domination Summit is the brainchild of blogger, author and intrepid traveler Chris Guillibeau, who’s made a name for himself (and what caught my attention) by attempting to visit every country in the world (he’s still about 20 countries from completing the task). He’s created products and written books around the idea of being remarkable and non-conforming in an increasingly average world. The WDS is a gathering of people from more than a dozen countries: bloggers, authors, software writers, photographers, cubicle workers and more. The thing that I think drew them together (and ultimately led me to commit to return in 2013) was that all of them had a palpable generosity of spirit.
Hence, the World Domination Summit. Version 2.0 doubled the attendee list, and tickets still sold out five months in advance.
While I could go on at length about the various speakers and breakout sessions and the countless attendees I met, I was curious to look at WDS from an event execution standpoint.
Non-commercial: WDS had no branding whatsoever except its own. No corporate sponsors, no branded spaces, no onstage interruptions to thank some company for ‘helping to make this possible!’ This gave the attendees a feeling of togetherness that kept the outside world at bay for the weekend. More on this later.
Staging: the main stage at Newmark Theater in downtown Portland was sparse but effective. The design team created a unique, identifiable and effective onstage statement.
Interactivity: WDS created an online smartphone connectivity platform at WDS.fm that encouraged attendees to find, indentify and connect with each other. They created an online task list called ‘The Unconventional Race’ which awarded prizes to the top three finishers. While I gave up after several hours after realizing that my phone wasn’t quite capable of easily completing the tasks, I followed the regular race updates and was interested to see how others reacted. Some folks really jumped on it and others said it didn’t appeal much to them. The portal also gave individual attendees an updated schedule that – once you logged in with your user account – was unique to you. If you needed to know where to go next, the easiest way was to pull up the portal and find the info at your fingertips.
Variety of speakers: Since the speaker line-up was the biggest part of the event, Chris and his team brought a remarkable array of known and unknown presenters. Some were authors, bloggers and successful business people. Others were world travelers sharing tales. Others yet shared amazing stories of extreme life changes and the creation of powerful and effective non-profits. Each speaker, whether an experienced presenter or not, brought passion, uniqueness and touching and inspiring stories.
Crowd-sourced workshops: Months before the event, the 1000 attendees received an invitation to offer their expertise in smaller workshop breakout sessions. Once those submissions were gathered and filtered, the attendees then voted online for the ones they wanted to attend. As a result, several weeks ahead of the event, some 80 breakout sessions were offered on a first-come first serve basis. Once you made a selection, that workshop would then show up later on your personal schedule on the WDS.fm portal.
Loads of networking opportunities: Time was set aside each day for attendees to just talk. And talk we did! I forget how many people I met or how many asked me for a card. The first two most common questions seemed to be ‘Were you here last year?’ and ‘Where are you from?’ From that starting point we’d learn about each other’s reasons for showing up, the projects they are involved in and the dreams they’re chasing.
Powerful close: at the end of the second full day of speakers, Chris got back up onstage to thank everyone for coming, to spread his appreciation around to all of the (unpaid) speakers who volunteered their time to show up and share their experiences. Then he reminded us that he did say there would be a surprise at the end. At which point he discussed the economics of the event. Chris reminded us that last year’s event lost about $30K. But this year, with twice as many attendees, and thanks to an anonymous donor who wanted to support the World Domination Summit, they had quite a bit of money left over. And, as he put it, it turned out to be about – on average – $100 for each attendee. So instead of keeping the money, they decided to give it back to the attendees. As we left, each one of us was handed an envelope with a $100 bill and a small card instructing us to ‘start a project, surprise someone, or do something entirely different- it’s up to you.’
Bottom line: the World Domination Summit is unlike any event I’ve ever attended. Its uncommon lack of convention created a huge demand: 5000 people were on the waiting list for tickets in January with only a few hundred available. Its pleasantly surprising lack of corporate sponsorship creates a welcoming community that says ‘hey – we’re here for you, not to make money. Please join our family of like-minded individuals. We want you to learn and enjoy!’ It’s near flawless execution made it extremely easy for attendees to willingly partake, meet people, soak up the atmosphere and information and engage.
Sometimes you have to see the information graphically to really grok the substance of what you’re viewing. With that said, here’s a look at One Day on the Internet, thanks to MBAOnline.com.
