One of the booths I visited at last month’s NAB Show in Las Vegas was Time Lapse Cameras. They had done a good job of outreach with a couple of press releases and the follow up back-and-forth emails – and the fact that this type of tech appealed to my inner geek – I looked forward to visiting them.
Which lead to an eventual chat with Josh Banks and Marie Ferguson of TimeLapseCameras.com for today’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee. Add to that the fact that they came away with one of the NAB Products of the Year, well, it made for a fun conversation to learn more about their products:
Check out more from TimeLapseCameras.com here:
And this week’s ONE GOOD THING is the trailer from the upcoming Terminator movie:
Are you faced with authors call “writer’s block” when it comes to coming up with ideas for your next tradeshow promotion? Or need to come up with a unique exhibit design or presentation that perfectly fits your company brand?
I wish I had an answer. You know, like the Staples “EASY” button. But it ain’t that easy. Not if you want an idea that can be fully executed and give you remarkable results.
So where do ideas come from? Ideas that actually work?
There are several places to look for and generate ideas, so
let’s go over a few.
What have other people done?
At your next tradeshow, whether you are an exhibitor or an
attendee, take some time to walk the floor and see what others have done. There
are going to be so many ideas that you won’t be able to capture them all. And to
take it one step further, if you see an idea you like, imagine how it would
work if you folded that presentation idea into your brand and products. And you
know that anything you see at a tradeshow had to go through a lot to make it to
the floor. It had to be created as a concept, then discussed at length to see
what would work and what wouldn’t. Then a 3D designer had to determine how to
put that concept into the real world. Then, once all parties had signed off on
the idea and concept, it had to go to fabrication, where the builders had to
figure out how to build it. Not always easy, especially if there are some unusual
or outlandish ideas that need to be brought to life.
What other exhibit ideas are good enough to borrow or get inspired by?
But remember, just because it was brought to life and used
at a tradeshow doesn’t mean it actually worked, that it actually achieved what
the creators thought it would achieve. Which means it’s also worth asking “how
well did that work?” Probably the only way to find out for sure is to ask the
exhibiting company after the show how it all went for them. But by doing that
you might be tipping your hand that you’d like to use their idea for
inspiration!
What gets written about?
To see what is creative and actually works, pick up a copy of Exhibitor Magazine. To my way of thinking, all tradeshow marketing managers should get a subscription to this bible of the exhibit industry. Nearly every issue there is an in-depth look at tradeshow exhibits. Not only that, there is a breakdown of how the idea worked, how it fit with the company’s overall goals, what the results were, and often the cost. Even if the idea doesn’t exactly fit with your product or brand, use it to kickstart your own creative thinking.
Beyond Exhibitor Magazine, search online for creative
tradeshow exhibit ideas. There are a lot of them floating around, and any one
of them might be the inspiration you’re looking for.
Talk to others in the industry.
Networking can do a lot of things. One thing it does well is
spread good ideas. By talking to other exhibitors, designers, managers and
executives in the industry is that no doubt they’ve all seen some memorable
tradeshow exhibits along the way. Ask them what they recall, what they liked,
and how it worked. Make notes. And if you get a great idea that leads to
something, be sure to thank ‘em!
Brainstorm.
Creative thinking can often be generated in-house with a handful
of people. You may have even been in a brainstorming session or three in your
career. If done properly, they can be brief and productive.
Combining ideas from other sources.
Pick up a book on creative thinking and see where it takes
you. One of my favorites is Thinkertoys
by Michael Michalko. Worth the price no matter what you pay.
Any other books or ideas you like that help you creatively?
Make a note and share!
Tradeshow sales is a much different beast than any other
kind of sales.
Picture this: you’re standing in your tradeshow booth with dozens
of competitors lining the aisle, selling to the same market. They’re all trying
to convince visitors that they’re the best solution. The goal is to talk to as
many people as possible, because if you do that, you can gather more leads. And
the more leads, the better off your sales team is. That’s the common knowledge,
and generally it’s correct.
But step back a moment. Let’s examine that interchange a
little more closely.
“Less haste, more speed.”
Instead of doing your best to gather contact information,
such as scanning a badge, or writing down names and numbers and email
addresses, take the time to qualify. I’ve been to tradeshows recently where it
seemed like the only thing that was important to the booth staffer was to gather
as many scans as they could. Maybe it was a contest. But it was one in which
they ultimately lost, because they no doubt ended up scanning dozens or
hundreds of people that have no interest in buying, are not qualified, are not
the decision maker or don’t have the money.
Even though you’re trying to get as many leads in a limited
time, let’s remember a few things.
Are you qualifying visitors properly?
One, most of the people at the show are qualified to a
certain degree. They may not specifically be in the market to purchase your
product, but they are in the market, otherwise they would not be there. If they’re
not a potential buyer, there’s a good chance they know someone who is.
Two, a majority of them are decision-makers or can influence
a buying decision.
Three, given the volume of people walking from booth to
booth, you will not talk to everyone. It’s not possible.
Four, knowing that you can’t talk to everyone, take enough
time with the ones you do talk to to qualify or disqualify as soon as reasonable.
Now that you have the right perspective, understand what you
are really trying to do: qualify the leads, and gather as much information
as necessary for a productive follow-up on an agreed-upon date.
What you want to know
Here are the items you’ll want to uncover:
Are they interested in your product or service?
If so, when? If not, do they know anyone that is?
At this point, you will make an A/B decision: if they’re
interested, uncover more information. If not, and if they don’t have any one
they can refer you to, politely thank them and move on to someone else.
If they are interested, ask further questions, as if you’re
peeling back the layers of an onion:
When do you plan to make a decision? Next week, next month, next year? This tells you the urgency of the situation.
How is that decision made? Is it one person, or is it a collaborative decision?
Does the company have the funds committed to the purchase?
The follow-up questions
Once you have qualified them by getting the right answers to
these questions, quickly move on to the follow up questions:
When would you like us to follow up with you? Find a date, and if appropriate, get the time and date scheduled in both yours and their calendars.
How do you want us to follow up? Phone, email, in-person visit (if feasible), sending something in the mail?
That’s the simple, straightforward way to qualify and get
enough information for your sales team to follow up.
Yes, there is a good chance that your visitor will have a
lot of questions about your product or service, especially if it’s a complex
product, such as software or some technical hardware. In that event, answer
their questions on the show floor – take as much time as you need to determine
if they’re a real prospect or not – and then move on to the confirmation and
follow up phase.
Once you’ve confirmed the follow up, thank them and move on to the next.
In such a connected world, there is a lot of value and importance placed in disconnecting from everything for a short while. But do we really do it that much? In this week’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, I disconnect from the grid for a few days.
ONE GOOD THING: Disconnecting or Unplugging.
Need to disconnect? Take a look at this. Or this. Or this.
If you do a Google search for “showing up,” you get all sorts of links and suggestions as to what it means. Showing up for a performance, showing up for important events in your life for your friends and family, showing up at work by giving it your attention and energy.
Showing up is important. As Seth Godin put it, though, we’ve moved way beyond simply showing up, sitting in your seat and taking notes. Your job is to surprise and delight and change the agenda. Escalate, reset expectations and make your teammates delighted.
Show up to delight your visitors
Sure, showing up is important. On a personal and business level to me, showing up means controlling my behaviors and emotions. Knowing that when I set out to do a day’s work, I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do (calls, projects, communications with clients, writing, etc.), and doing my best to do it, every day. For example, I made a commitment in January of 2017 that I would show up every Monday to do a video blog/podcast for at least a year. Once the year was up, I would assess it from a number of angles. Was is working? Was it fun? Was it good? Did it get any attention? Did my guests get anything worthwhile out of it? Did the listeners give good feedback, even if there were very few? Based on my assessment of those questions (not all were completely positive, but enough were) I committed to another year. Then another.
So here we are.
Showing up at a tradeshow is more than just being there. If
you are to take Seth Godin’s perspective, you want to have more than just a
nice exhibit. You want to show up with more than just average enthusiasm and
average pitches to your visitors. You should set high expectations for your
company and your team.
How can you do that? By starting months before the show and
having ongoing conversations about how to get visitors to interact. How to get
them to respond. How to tell your company or product’s story. How to make it
exciting to just visit your booth, exciting enough so that your visitors feel
compelled to tell others to come.
There are no wrong answers, and plenty of right answers.
I’ve been attending tradeshows for nearly twenty years. In
looking back on photos from that era – the early ‘Naughts as the first ten years
of this century are sometimes referred to – things look different. It’s often
subtle, but what the photos from that era show is what’s NOT there. You have to
look closely and compare the images from around 2003 – 2005 with images from
today’s shows.
Lots of these types of exhibits in 2004 (Natural Products Expo West)
The big changes?
Video: Depending on the show, some are stark and blatantly obvious. For example, I saw so many large video walls at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas I lost count. Big, small, portable banner-stand-like video walls, large walls used for training (Adobe and others), most of them extremely high quality.
Some smaller shows or different types of shows may not have
the large video walls (or only a few), but my impression is that a majority of exhibits
have large video monitors. These typically range from around 40” to as much as
70” and all show sharp images. It’s much easier to attach monitors on exhibit
walls when the monitors are so slim compared to what was available a couple of
decades ago.
Fabric Graphics: Printing on fabric has come so far, it’s hard to imagine what it was like at the turn of the century. Printers have gotten so much better and fabrics have also improved that in many cases what you’re seeing on the exhibit walls are fabric graphics printed with such depth and clarity it compares with top of the line paper printing.
LED lighting: Hand in hand with fabric graphics, the evolution of LED lighting has meant better lights for a fraction of the cost. Combine LED lights and an aluminum frame with fabric graphics and voila you have a fantastic-looking lightbox that shines!
Augmented Reality: I’ve only seen this a few times at tradeshows, but I think it’s going to spread. It’s showing up at museums and other permanent installations. Why not tradeshows?
3D Virtual tours: Again, not used so much these days, but check out the recent interview I did with Phil Gorski from Ova-Nee Productions and see what they’re doing in the tradeshow space. I can see this happening more and more to take the physical tradeshow to a larger audience in the digital world.
Virtual Reality: Not something that is taking over the tradeshow world, but it is definitely there and a smart exhibitor that chooses to use VR will plan to do it right. Here’s an interview I did with Foundry45‘s Dave Beck.
Interactive Touch Screens: Depending on the way you want your visitors to interact this can be a big benefit to help show off your company, products and people.
Charging Stations: At the turn of the century hardly anyone thought of the need to charge a portable device. Now it’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t have that need a time or two a day during a long tradeshow. Charging stations can be custom-designed and built to fit your brand and to fit seamlessly into your exhibit.
Apps: Of course, there were no apps 15 – 20 years ago. Today it is a rare tradeshow that doesn’t have its own app where you can find exhibitors, information and subscribe to updates about the show.
Big Video Walls in 2019 (NAB Show 2019)
Social Media: This also didn’t exist back then. Today it almost seems old school to be doing regular social media posting about your tradeshow appearance. I mean, even Grandma is on Instagram, right? But social media is still a good way to post photos, respond to comments and let your followers know what’s going on while your company is exhibiting.
Here’s a novel idea: using the 3D Virtual Tour technology that is often used on real estate to allow potential buyers to virtually steer their way through the home, and use that tech to allow people to visit your tradeshow booth long after the show has ended.
That’s the topic of today’s interview on the TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee. Phil Gorski of Ova-Nee Productions spent a little time sharing how he started the company and how the technology works on a tradeshow booth.
At tradeshows, the game is all about attracting attention.
Have you considered a custom-printed floor?
Every client we’ve worked with that has chosen to use a
custom graphic on a printed floor has been happy with the result. They like it,
it looks good with the rest of the booth, and it gets positive comments from
their visitors.
There are a lot of different floor choices, but what I’m
talking about here is bringing the area below your feet into the overall graphic
design of the exhibit and booth area. When you incorporate a branding element
into the floor as part of the overall look, it adds POP and depth. Take a look
at these examples:
With Schmidt’s Naturals, their iconic flowery design spreads across the 10×40 space. It reinforces their overall brand. And when added to the clean and spare look of the rest of the exhibit elements, the colorful floor stands out.
Schmidt’s Naturals and their custom colorful flooring
Wildbrine chose a custom-printed floor that also added to the overall color scheme. The striped green and black floor added another dimension to the bright colors throughout the rest of their simple layout.
Wildbrine’s custom flooring of green and black stripes
Of course, you can create a custom look without printing a graphic below your feet. Another way is to use typical flooring but present it in unusual cuts or angles:
Dave’s Killer Bread/Alpine Valley’s custom-cut floor shows separation between two brands.
Another great example of a custom cut
Colorful tiles stand out!
Bring on the deck and a fake pool at Birch Benders
Whatever flooring you choose, there are any number of ways to make it stand out.
Disclosure: Dave’s Killer Bread, Schmidt’s Naturals and Wildbrine are clients of TradeshowGuy Exhibits; the others shown here are not.
The marketing funnel. It’s something I learned about years ago, but it’s interesting to reexamine now and then. Recently I attended the NAB Show in Las Vegas as a blogger and was asked by a few dozen companies if they could scan my badge. Once they scanned, I was put in the top of their tradeshow marketing funnel, even though they did exactly zero qualifying. See where this is leading?
When it comes to tradeshow marketing, the funnel does indeed
get interesting. As in any type of marketing, there are things you can control
and things you cannot. Scanning the badge of every person that comes through
your booth does indeed capture name and contact information and will likely
mean they’ll soon be getting emails from your company.
Let’s look at the tradeshow marketing funnel starting at the
very top.
The first step – the top of the funnel where its widest – is
the number of people attending a particular tradeshow that you’re setting up an
exhibit. For the sake of argument and easy math, let’s say it’s 100,000 people.
Do the Math
If you are one of 2000 exhibitors, that means you’re vying
for the attention of those 100,000 people along with 1,999 other exhibitors.
If the show is three days, 10 am – 5 pm, that means the show
floor is open for 21 hours. If each attendee walks the floor an average of four
hours a day and manages to visit one booth every five minutes, that means they
are visiting (again this is hypothetical and on average) 12 an hour, or 48 a
day, or 144 over the course of the show. If every attendee visited each
exhibitor at the same rate, you’d get about 13.9% of the 100,000 attendees to
stop by your booth, or 13,900 people. That’s 660 per hour, or about 11 per
minute. If a visitor stops by a booth every 2 ½ minutes, these numbers double.
But since people are unpredictable, let’s stay with the five-minute visit on
average.
Now – if those numbers are even close to real, what are you
doing to get their attention?
Are you giving out samples to visitors, doing product demos,
having one-on-one conversations? Or are you just randomly scanning badges of
every visitor even though they haven’t expressed any interest in your products
other than standing within scanning distance of the booth.
Every one of those interactions will mean that each person
will go into the top of the funnel, although admittedly they can’t be treated
equally because some will be more interested than others, some will be more
prepared to buy than others, and some are just kicking tires.
But they’re all in the marketing funnel. At this point we
can treat them equally.
For argument’s sake, let’s say that for every ten that visit
your booth, one expresses interest, enough interest to let them capture their
contact information.
That means some 66 people per hour have made at least an
initial commitment to let you invite them to the next step of the funnel. They
may have opted into an email list, agreed to have their badge scanned, or had a
conversation with someone in the booth. Again, assuming the show is open for 21
hours, you have approximately 1386 at the second level of your funnel.
Move People Through the Funnel
What do you do to move them along?
Here’s where the marketing funnel gets more interesting. Do
you simply email them? Or do you call them one-on-one to assess their real need
(or lack) to find out if they are a “hot” lead, “warm” lead or just a “cool”
lead that will be put on the back burner and perhaps inserted into a drip
campaign? Do you send them a sample? A PDF report of some sort?
An ideal tradeshow marketing campaign will have a number of
options available at the show, and each interaction should assess the visitor’s
desires and situation.
And let’s add one more step to the math.
Let’s say the average profit of your product is $10,000.
By adding up all the costs of your tradeshow appearance, you’re
spending $100,000 for this particulate show. That means you need to sell 10
customers to break even. If your average profit is $1,000, you’ll need 100
customers.
Anything more than those numbers, and the Return on
Investment on your tradeshow marketing plan is out of the red and into the
black.
But let’s take it one more step.
Improving Funnel Results
Let’s say that for every customer that purchases your premium product continues to purchase other products from you for an average of 7 years. The lifetime value of that customer acquisition just increased substantially, which means the money you spent at the tradeshow to come into contact with her means a lot more.
And if they’re a really happy customer, they may end up referring
a handful of new clients to you. Which makes that initial cost look better and
better with each passing year.
The more tradeshows you exhibit at, the more people you put
your products and services in front of. If you’re doing things right, or at
least learning from any mistakes you’ve made over the years and made adjustments,
your tradeshow marketing funnel will become less leaky. You’ll retain more of
the people that enter at the top.
We all have leaky marketing funnels. But by being aware of what works, what doesn’t and doing your best to maximize your returns, your results will keep improving. But it means paying close attention at every step. Keep asking your prospects what they need to learn, do they want to hear more, do they want a free sample or another product demo, or how they may want to interact with you and your company.
