If you got a chance to see the webinar I did recently with Handshake, thanks! I hope you got something useful out of it. I’ve had a handful of requests for the slide deck so people can review it closer. Here’s the deck:
If you’d like to see the replay, click here.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Make your exhibit more atmospheric by using background music.
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.
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.
This is a guest post by Sarah Leung
Looking at your trade show strategy, you may already be doing a lot of things right: a perfectly designed booth, a well-trained staff, high foot traffic, and the ability to build great rapport with customers and prospects.
You may also be part of the shrinking majority of trade show exhibitors still writing orders on paper. If this is the case, it’s likely that you’re still not getting the most out of your trade shows.
For anyone who’s ever attended a trade show, it quickly becomes apparent that they can be extremely hectic. In a sea of competition, both vendors and buyers are looking to maximize their time on the floor. Customers often have a long list of booths to visit, while exhibitors need to work quickly in order to see as many buyers as possible.
In this environment, the slow, tedious process of writing orders on paper can result in lost business due to queuing, distracted buyers, and smaller orders. More and more wholesale brands are realizing that this inefficiency is hurting business, and that the solution can be found in technology.
Sales order management software, for instance, allows brands to store product information, images, customer details, order history, and sales reports on a mobile device. Orders can be written with just a few taps and swipes, and sales reps see more customers on the trade show floor. Read on to learn how technology can expedite your customer interactions at trade shows and yield big results.
Building the Case For Technology At Trade Shows:
Any sales rep knows that flipping through a paper catalog and sifting through a pile of samples isn’t the optimal way to sell. It’s a time-consuming process, and it can be overwhelming for the buyer.
Technology can expedite this process in significant ways. Imagine that your entire catalog is available digitally on an iPad and organized in easy-to-navigate categories. You can browse the catalog with just a few swipes, zoom in on high-resolution product images, and add products to an order with a quick tap.
If the customer sees a physical product that they like in your display, you can scan the barcode to add it to the order. Think about how much faster (not to mention cooler) this experience will be for the customer.
If you’re writing a lot of business at trade shows with existing customers, having their information available on your digital order-writing interface is invaluable. No one likes to go through the tedium of answering questions like “What’s your shipping address?” and “Can I get your phone number?” for the umpteenth time.
By having access to contact details, shipping and payment preferences, and order history during your face-to-face meeting, you can just pull up their record, check out their past orders and preferred products, and start writing the new order.
If you’re meeting with a new customer or prospect, you can just type in the details, or snap a photo of their business card for later.
For a customer that simply needs to place a reorder, you can use order management technology to just pull up the past order and duplicate it. You can use the saved time to share new items from your line, and hopefully increase that order size before it’s processed.
Accurate, up-to-date inventory information is extremely valuable on the trade show floor. Customers may ask about inventory availability, and calling your back office to confirm quantities before placing an order can slow down the process.
Order management software can give reps access to inventory information in real time. Having a reality check on your inventory numbers can also allow you to sell more strategically. If you’re low on inventory for certain items, you can notify the buyer (and avoid unpleasant surprises later) or simply steer them in a different direction.
Remembering customer specific pricing can be a major thorn in a sales rep’s side. In the craziness of a busy show, having to remember those details can be a nightmare.
With sales order management software and mobile order writing, vendors can store those customer-specific discounts, so that there’s no need to do anything more than choose products. The correct pricing will be automatically applied. If you’re negotiating with customers in real time, one-time discounts can also be added.
Ultimately, what all of these features add up to is major time savings—for both you and your customers. It’s time that can be used to have more high quality conversations with buyers, and to ultimately increase your return on investment at each and every show you attend.
Author Bio:
Sarah Leung is Content Marketing Specialist at Handshake, where she creates high-impact sales, marketing, and technology-related content for wholesale brands. When she’s not writing, she’s talking with sales reps, sales managers, and other industry professionals to source new topics of interest and further understand how Handshake has helped them increase sales and build their businesses.
The following is a guest article by Margaret Colebeck of Vantage Advertising LLC.
When it comes to preparing for an upcoming trade show, first impressions are everything. From trade show displays and signage to product demonstrations and presentations, the first impression your brand creates with trade show attendees sticks with them for life.
In order to create the ideal first impression for your brand, you must have a team of highly skilled and reliable trade show event staffers at your booth. But, what skills should they have? Below, we’ve listed the top ten most important skills every trade show event staffer should have. Use this list as a guideline to determine which skills are the most beneficial to your booth.
10 Important Trade Show Event Staffing Skills
Listening Skills
– Along with great communication skills, your team must also have great listening skills. Why? Because as important as it is to communicate your brand to attendees, it’s more important to listen to their needs so as to effectively provide a solution to their problems.Margaret Colebeck is the Marketing Manager for Vantage Advertising, a nationwide event staffing company that provides exhibitors with experienced trade show models and booth talent for their events. She manages and writes educational content for their blog & social media pages in an effort to inform and inspire trade show exhibitors about trade show marketing, lead generation, event staffing, and more.
When it comes to your Exhibiting Toolkit, I don’t mean the screwdrivers, masking and duct tape and scissors (although those and other items will come in handy), but what about the various bits and pieces that will help draw visitors to your booth and capture more leads?
Let’s create a short but incomplete list of some of the necessary tools you should consider having in your toolkit.
Let’s break these down a little more:
A Damn Good Plan should include what you’re going to do 6 months before the show, 3 months ahead, 2 months, a month, etc. It includes your pre-show marketing schedule, the booth details (making sure to review the booth ahead of the show with plenty of time to do any minor repairs), electrical grid if needed, shipping dates, booth staff schedules.
A Well-Trained Booth Staff is a crew that is pleasant, friendly, knowledgeable, friendly (did I say friendly?), willing to work long hours, flexible and trained. Trained in what? Booth etiquette, how to interact with visitors for maximum efficiency, lead capture knowledge and more. Your staff is your front line in a chaotic environment. If there are any weak links in this chain it will eventually show.
A Booth That Represents Your Company Brand at a Glance: this often means a custom booth, but it certainly doesn’t have to. There are a lot of tradeshow booths that can be customized to fit your brand sensibilities. They also have to function well, meaning there has to be proper storage, product display and meeting areas to accommodate your company exhibiting goals.
Lead Capture Mechanism: Whether you’re writin’ those leads down on paper, or capturing them in electronic form, all of the leads should have maximum information required to confirm the next step, and nothing more. Name and address, phone number and email are often the top of the list, but ask if all of those items are absolutely necessary. What’s as important is agreeing on the next step, whether it’s a follow up call, meeting or simply sending more information. Agree on what the next step is, and when it will take place.
Follow Up Plan: How are the leads getting to the sales team back in the office for follow up? Are they being transmitted electronically back to the team each night? Are they being transported in your briefcase? Whatever the method, make sure not to leave them for someone else. Too many leads wind up in Neverland. Sticking them in an envelope and then tucking that envelope into the booth crates often mean that the next time you see them is 11 months later when you open up the crates to prepare for next year’s show! Beyond that, your sales team should be prepared to receive and follow up on the leads in a timely manner.
No doubt you can add to this list, but these are the basics. Leave any item here aside at your own risk!
This is a guest post by Ruthie Abraham of The Brand Builders.
Regardless of whether you’ve worked at dozens of trade shows around the country or whether you’re headed to your first show, coming up with a compelling way to get people to stop and see what you have to offer is always one of the greatest challenges at a show. A standard greeting normally isn’t enough to engage someone, so you need to develop a catchy opener.. Pre-plan your opener. It can be catchy, intriguing, flattering, startling, weird, clever or some combination of these, but we recommend having a few on hand and testing your pre-planned lines to see how initial attendees react. If you get a good response on one, you can continue to use it for the rest of the show and at your next exhibition.
Here, we break down 10 ways to get the conversation started in a compelling way and connect with a quality lead:
Ruthie Abraham is the founder & President of The Brand Builders – a B2B marketing agency focused on helping companies drive results, return and revenue from their online marketing. Their B2B Marketing Blog is a resource for executives and professionals to learn about lead generation, content marketing, strategic sales, social media, trade show marketing and more.
Tradeshow colleague Ken Newman’s Magnet Productions just released their newest demo reel. Since all they do is draw mobs of crowds to tradeshow booths, this is probably something that you should see. As Andy Saks of Spark Presentations said in his Facebook post mentioning the reel, “thanks to the lovely and talented Ken Newman and his company Magnet Productions for including some clips of me in Magnet’s new trade show talent demo reel. This was all recorded at the VMworld trade show in San Francisco in August when I was presenting for Magnet’s client Citrix (I do not have that much gray hair though, that’s all CG).”
You may have a spectacular booth, a cool product and a well-trained staff. You may have a great spot on the floor near the main entrance. You may even have a special guest star in the booth for a few hours.
But all of that can go for naught if you can’t draw a mob on a consistent basis. In a recent meeting with a potential client, we asked the following question: when you get back to the office, what is the one thing that you would point to that would indicate your exhibiting experience was a success?
The answer? A sheer mob – almost all of the time.
So drawing a crowd is deemed important; probably the most important part of a tradeshow, in fact.
So how do you consistently draw a crowd to your tradeshow booth exhibit?
There are more ways to draw a crowd than there are ways to portray Dr. Who on television.
One favorite way is to hire a professional or two. Having a professional presenter in the booth that has the experience in attracting a crowd and informing that crowd about the exhibitor’s products and services is one of the most effective methods. The presenter can be an actor, presenter, magician, juggler, or unicyclist. Or maybe all at once!
Another way to attract a crowd is to have live music in the booth. This was done effectively at CES recently when large exhibitors were able to hire bands such as the Foo Fighters, Black Eyed Peas, Maroon 5 or others.
Okay, you don’t have that big of a budget or booth. So now what?
Some would shout the praises of money-blowing machines, prize wheels or free giveaways. But I would ask if these curiosity-arousing items are really attracting the right people. It depends on the show. CES is one place where a band would work. The local or regional industry show might be better for using a money blowing machine or prize wheel, but you would still want to have a method in place that allows you to ask attendees questions to quality or disqualify them as potential clients or customers.
As Anders Boulanger says in this great article, ‘do not leave free gifts out in a bowl for passer-by to grab and go. It is important that they don’t get it until they give something first,’ such as an email address, phone number or business card.
One way to attract a crowd is to have some sort of interactive element that relates to your product or service. If it’s software, for instance, you can offer a brief demo. If you’re selling iPad kiosks, have one or two that can show people how they work by opening them up and taking them apart. If you are promoting your service that helps put your company on the social media map, you can show attendees how it works with case studies and other demonstrations.
Or have an in-booth trivia game based on your company’s products and services. Every hour giveaway prizes to attendees that can answer the most questions based on the available handouts or brief onscreen interactive presentations.
What draws a crowd? In a word: curiosity.
Other methods of drawing a crowd can involve pre-show marketing or creating a buzz on social media outposts such as Twitter, which are heavily followed at most shows.
But there’s more to taking home a lot leads than drawing a crowd. If you hire a professional presenter that is prepared to draw dozens or hundreds of people to your booth two or three times an hour, is your booth staff prepared to sift through them and find the good hot leads, collect contact information and confirm the next step?
If not, what’s the point of drawing a crowd? Attracting a crowd isn’t hard. But making sure you have a system in place to benefit from that crowd is the very important second step to your tradeshow marketing success.
Naah, I don’t want your tradeshow exhibiting experience to suck. But if it does, perhaps its because you did one of the following:
Don’t train your booth staff. If those staffers at the show that you’re still walking through are sitting at the back of the booth, talking amongst themselves, or chatting on a cell phone or texting somebody or eating, you know for a fact they have not been properly trained. Eating in a tradeshow booth is still the number one turn off to visitors and will pretty much ensure that anyone wanting to stop in at the moment will keep going. And probably not come back.
But not if you suck at any of these seven items.
This is number 6 in a series. Check the previous articles here:
So you’ve got a great booth. You’ve done a fair amount of pre-show planning and marketing. The products are terrific. Yet at the end of the show, your results fell flat. Not sure why, you say, you just can’t put your finger on it!
What about your BOOTH STAFF? Is there a chance you don’t have the right people? Or that you don’t have people that are properly trained in working a tradeshow?
It’s entirely possible that the success of your show depends on your booth staff. And if your staff is under-educated, ill-informed or simply not prepared, your results will show that.
So what do you do?
First, make sure you have the right people. A booth staffer should be outgoing, intelligent, approachable, friendly, knowledgeable – and trained in exactly what the company’s goals are for this show.
Which means that many of the people that you send to the show are not a good fit. Salespeople? Well, you’d think so. But if you have a salesperson that is used to a typical sales situation, they may not be prepared for a tradeshow floor, which is by its very nature, chaotic, fast and distracting. A ‘typical’ sales situation may mean that the salesperson has set up an appointment, makes an office visit and the prospect has scheduled 30 minutes, an hour or more for a meeting.
That won’t work on a showroom floor, and any salesperson who thinks it will work should be dissuaded of that attitude. Instead, a tradeshow booth staffer must learn to quick qualify or disqualify a visitor and move them on to the next step in a few moments. This doesn’t mean that the staffer must hurry someone along that is clearly a prospect, it’s that they must learn to recognize who to spend time with (and still limit that time), who to pleasantly thank and move on from, and how to steer prospects to the right people if appropriate.
This means that every tradeshow booth staffer can probably use a good training session. A good trainer will help a staffer to ask the right questions, and do a little role playing. It might mean that the staffer needs to be educated more fully on the company’s products and/or services.
At the bottom line, it means that the staffers – as well as anyone in the company involved in the tradeshow marketing effort – must expand their KNOWLEDGE BASE. The more information that people have, the more understanding they have and the more effective they’ll be on the tradeshow floor.
Another significant part of training will help inform staffers of the top no-no’s in a booth: eating, talking on a cell phone, standing with arms folded (which is body language for ‘don’t talk to me!’), and more.
Research has been done for years in the exhibiting industry, and multiple surveys and studies show that the more ‘buy-in’ a staffer has, the more effective they’ll be. The better-informed that all parties are, the more they’re able to work outside of their normal areas, which means that when a visitor shows up at the booth, the chances go up that they’ll be able to get an answer to their question, no matter what.
So: is your booth staff prepared? Do they understand the products and services? Are they capable of discussing them with visitors? Do they have qualifying questions ready for visitors? Are they able to greet people with a smile?
I would wager that no matter how good your staff is, they can be better at the next show by undergoing a training session. It’ll show in your bottom line.
