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

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Dear Tradeshow Exhibit Buyer, (an open letter to first-time exhibitors)

Dear Tradeshow Exhibit Buyer,

We haven’t met before, but I thought I might take a few moments to share some thoughts on your upcoming quest to find a new tradeshow booth consultant to assist with design and fabrication.

Bob's Red Mill custom booth at Expo West 2013
Bob’s Red Mill custom booth at Expo West 2013

First – congratulations! Tradeshow marketing is one of the most effective ways of marketing – IF you do it right. If you do it wrong, it can possibly be the biggest waste of marketing dollars you’ll spend this year. And if you do it wrong, you’ll have little to show for it. And if that happens, your mind will be poisoned with the thought that tradeshow marketing is a WASTE of TIME AND MONEY!

But…if done right, tradeshow marketing can be the BEST way to spend marketing dollars. Why? First, it brings you face-to-face with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people that are in the market for what you’re selling.

Second, it gives you a chance to establish a brand in visitors’ minds in just a few short seconds as they approach your booth. That brand can be reinforced by a well-trained staff once those visitors spend a few moments at your booth.

Third, it can cut the cost and the length of the sales cycle. By meeting people at a tradeshow and qualifying them (or disqualifying them as the case may be), you can quickly determine where they are in their pursuit of your product or service. That also quickly determines your next step – which can be confirmed with them before they leave your booth.

Finally, while tradeshow marketing can be exhausting, it can also be FUN. You can get your team away from the office to a far away city. By getting people out of their comfort zone, they tend to depend on each other. By focusing on the exhibiting task at hand during the day, you build trust and respect and confidence in your team. By letting off a little bit of steam after hours with each other, you help each of them appear more real.

So, what to do first?

Here’s a quick checklist before you choose an exhibit and design team.

  1. Know your goals. Define those goals and be specific. Even though the overall goal of tradeshow marketing – any kind of marketing – is to grow the business and bring in more sales, each show may have a slightly different goal because of the nature of the show. If you plan to exhibit only once a year, it may work to try different exhibit companies out. But if you plan to exhibit several times a year, take your time to work with an exhibit consultant that you are comfortable with and enjoy working with personally. If an exhibit house is competent – and certainly most are – the most important factor is how well you get along with them.
  2. Understand the timeline. If you are looking to purchase a small ten-foot inline booth from a catalog, you really don’t need much time to do that. Graphic design will usually take the most at this point. On the other hand, if you’re building a 30×30 custom booth, plan on several months. A recent large custom booth our company worked on took about 8 months from the kick-off meeting to the set-up at the show. Know your timeline and build in extra time for reviews and speed bumps – you’ll always have them. A good tradeshow project management knows what a realistic timetable is and can advise you on what it will take depending on what you want.
  3. Know your budget, and remember that exhibits can be expensive. If you don’t have a realistic idea up front what your company is able to spend for a tradeshow booth for design and fabrication, it can get awkward awful quick! Any reputable designer will not start on a design until he knows how much a company has to spend. A good consultant will likely start the conversation by sharing industry averages, and then explaining how their company’s pricing compares to those numbers. For a quick rule of thumb, for inline booths, expect to spend around $100 a linear foot. For custom island booths, the price can range upwards from about $140 per square foot. Electrics and special lighting can drive the cost up, but those are good rules of thumb to start with.
  4. Plan on training your team. Even if it’s a small show with just a couple of staffers, it pays to be prepared. When your team knows how to quickly qualify and disqualify visitors, it will immediately increase the lead count. Booth etiquette is important, too. No eating, talking on cell phones, standing with arms crossed, etc. All of those behaviors – and more – keep visitors away.
  5. There’s more than just the show – there’s pre-show marketing and post-show follow up. Before the show, your company should be reaching out to potential visitors, informing them of the tradeshow appearance, and what you’ll be doing there: new products/services, special appearances, contests, etc. A social media marketing full press before the show will help draw interest and people to the show and to your booth. A good tradeshow marketing consultant will be able to assist you with planning and execution of your pre-show marketing. Post-show follow up is twofold: sales and marketing. Sales will be following up on all of those leads based on urgency; marketing will be taking content created from the show (videos, photographs, etc) and dripping them out via social media and other outlets to not only remind people of your appearance, but to tease them a bit for next year’s show.
  6. Designate a point person for all ‘official’ communication between your company and the consultant company. While your company may have a marketing team all chiming in with their opinions on the design and fabrication process, when you designate a single person to funnel all communication through, decisions become easier – and final. If the team decides that the color is blue and the point person communicates that to the consultant company’s point person, then that decision is final and the process moves forward.
  7. Jump in! Once the kick-off meeting is underway, trust the process. If you’ve never gone through the process of designing and fabricating a tradeshow booth that fits your company’s needs, keep in mind that your consultant has done it – many times. They’re professionals. Trust them to stay in touch and guide you through the many decision points you’ll have along the way. Follow the designer’s lead and offer your candid assessment of the design and watch how it changes until it becomes a final product ready to be fabricated. Trust your graphic designers. Trust your instinct.

By following this checklist, you’ll go into your booth project with eyes open.

And that’s a good thing!

Grab our free report “7 Questions You’ll Never Ask Your Exhibit House” – click here!

Promoting Your Event Online

If you’re going to a tradeshow as an attendee, or putting on an event of your own, here’s a shortlist of the various things you’ll want to consider as the base elements of our online promotion:

Event website: should contain event information such as schedule, days, times, locations, etc. This is your basic high school journalism approach of the 5 W’s: Who, What, When, Where and Why. This is also where your online registration forms will be. The page should also be populated with the various social media buttons that allow attendees to share the information, whether before or after they have registered.

Media Kit: Your digital media kit is where the press and attendees or even those just with a passing interest will find more detailed information in a variety of formats: event descriptions, videos (interviews, show previews, testimonials, etc.), photos of past events (speakers, exhibitors, locations); logos, banner ads and any flyers or posters you want to make available to promote the event.

Public Meeting

Blogs: of course you should have an event-specific blog. While it’s tempting to fill the blog with self-promoting posts, you’ll have a much better chance to gain readers and traction by sharing information on problem-solving, issues, and how-to’s within the blog. You may, for instance, have case studies on how a product or service got a client over a hurdle. Or you may have examples of problems the industry faces and the various ways those problems are handled. The blog needs to have links to all of the various social media and event registration sites, too.

Social Media: before the event sit down with your media promotion team and plan out the timeline of promotions: tweets, photo opportunities, social media sites you’re focusing on and the various people that are tasked with social media engagement. Identify the partners and colleagues in your industry that you’re looking to team with on certain elements; identify (and agree upon) responsibilities. The more you know ahead of time, the easier the event execution will be. Plan tweets, PR meetings, industry trade blogs and publication connections and more.

Going Mobile: a majority of your event attendees will be using mobile access to the various social media outlets, so your online presence (blogs, websites) should be optimized for smartphones. If the event is big enough, you might consider creating an event app (lots of companies would be happy to do this for a fee!) so that all information is easily available anytime/anywhere.

E-Mail: an oldie, but goodie, e-mail is still effective at promotion. And remember that in these days of mobile access, less is more. Streamline your emails down to the barest critical information so that they get to the point and are easily read on a smartphone.

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 photo credit: mikecogh

Should You Create An App For Your Tradeshow Appearance?

With the proliferation of smartphone and tablet apps and the declining difficulty of creating them, is it time to create an app for your own company for your upcoming tradeshow appearance?

It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. There are numerous online tools that make creating an app easier than it used to be. And with more and more of the web’s connectivity moving to stand-alone apps, your clients and prospects may find a lot of value in the app.

Admittedly, I’ve never seen a company app built specifically for a tradeshow appearance, or for the tradeshow side of a company’s marketing efforts.

So what information could you put in your app? Here’s a short list to get your brain working (no doubt you can add more!):

  • Yearly tradeshow schedule
  • Product information
  • Set appointment for interview or demo
  • Submit request for information or contact
  • Booth number and hours
  • Company information
  • Links to demo videos
  • Links to podcast interview
  • Client testimonials

Creating an app is not that complicated, but there are several steps to making it happen. If you have tech-savvy people in your company, you may be able to create it in-house.

But generally you’ll have to hire an app developer through ELance.com or another site. Get recommendations, or take a look at what the developers have done in the past.

First, appoint a point person that can see the development of the app through the entire process.

Determine what you want in the app. This may take several discussions with the various company elements, including sales, marketing, tech team, etc.

Find a possible developer or two, describe the scope of work as best as possible, and then negotiate the price.

There is a lot that can go in an app and it’ll be tempting to want to put as much as possible into it. But you’re probably better off keeping it as simple and useful as possible.

An app for your own company for a tradeshow appearance? Why not? It’ll give you an edge over your competition among those people in your market that have downloaded your app – especially if your competitors don’t have an app, and you have a very useful and user-friendly app.

 

Creating and Using #Hashtags Effectively

If you’ve been on Twitter a bit but still are confused about how hashtags are, and can, be used, hopefully we can take a bit of the mystery out of hashtags and give you some good ways to use them in conjunction with your event and tradeshow marketing.

First, what exactly is a hashtag?

Simply put, it’s the ‘pound’ or ‘number’ sign with a word or phrase after it: #jumpstart. This makes it easily trackable and searchable on Twitter or other platforms such as Hootsuite.com. You can use it with a two or three word phrase, but make sure there is no space between the words, like this: #tweetmetoday

Tweeting at Tradeshows

Use it when you tweet about a specific or general topic, such as #eventprofs when your tweet is related to the event profession. If you are tweeting about a specific event, use a hashtag that would commonly be used for that event, such as #expowest for the Natural Products Expo West show, held every March in Anaheim.

So if you’re tweeting out about your booth, just make sure to include that particular hashtag: “Hey, join us at booth 3029 at #expowest and check out the new eco-friendly shoes!”

That way, anyone who is tracking the show hashtag will be able to find it (Twitter will show search results starting with the most recent).

If you’re tweeting about something you or your company is doing at the show after hours, such as a client dinner, you might consider using the hashtag so that anyone following along can see how you’re involved: “Having a great dinner with the cool people from Bagga Riddim here at Joe’s Pizza! #expowest”

Whether you want to tell the world that you’re meeting a client is up to you, but in my mind in most cases there is nothing wrong with it. In fact it could be seen as good branding. Not only are you getting your name out there again, you’re getting it out there in connection with a client and a location. If you use Foursquare to check in, the location will be mentioned, so all you have to do it include the hashtag in the tweet.

Getting Twitter Involvement on Webinars

Let’s say the show is still a couple of months away, and you’re planning a webinar to promote your appearance (see this week’s earlier post about using webinars to promote tradeshows). You’ve got a new product to promote; you have one of the company management or marketing people on board to be a guest on the webinar. At the beginning of the webinar, include a slide that invites people to offer their comments on twitter. My suggestion is to use two hashtags: one that references the show and one that references your company:

 

 

This invites people to watch the webinar and relay their comments to their Twitter followers. Anyone who happens to be searching for that particular hashtag at that time will likely run across your webinar, which exposes you to even more people. Before the webinar you can promote it through your normal channels, but be sure to let your Facebook and Twitter followers know about it, too, and include links to the registration page.

Of course this same tactic can be used during your live presentation at the tradeshow or conference if you’re a speaker or presenter. The upside is that it can really help engage people, learn new things from them, take questions and promote interactivity. The downside is that if the presentation is going badly, you have no control over the conversation and may see some negative or snarky comments show up.

Twitter Chats

Another way to use Twitter is to hold a chat about a specific topic or subject. There are popular Twitter chats held regularly that discuss everything from marketing to industrial metal production. All you have to do is promote it through your normal channels, and through your Twitter account:

Join us for a chat about how to use drums to heal your soul: Thursday at noon ET; follow hashtag #baggariddim

If you have a guest on the chat, set up a handful of questions before hand that she’s familiar with. When the time arrives, welcome everyone to the chat and include the hashtag. People will follow along on the chat by simply searching for the hashtag in the Twitter search box. Invite anyone to submit questions and comments as the chat goes on. Schedule the chat with specific start and stop times (noon – 1pm, for instance), and stick to it. After the chat is over, archive the posts so that you can reference then in the future if need be.

Twitter is an extremely useful and flexible tool for instant communication anywhere, anytime. From the show floor, from your office, from the subway. It doesn’t matter, all a person needs is internet access and they’re on board.

What ideas can you come up with to use Twitter to effectively promote your tradeshow appearance or new product?

Freebies at SocialMediaEventMarketingU.com

Why Hootsuite is so Good for Tradeshows and Events

Okay, this is gonna sound like an ad for Hootsuite. But it’s not. Well, it’s not intended that way!

But the more I play around with Hootsuite, the more I find it’s a terrific tool for managing your social media efforts at tradeshows and events.

First, everything is in one place.  And I mean everything! You can load up several accounts from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and others. You’re able to set up several members of your team with access to the dashboard, making it easy for them to schedule tweets or posts ahead of time. This is a great tool when you consider the chaos of the tradeshow floor, and you know that you’ll want to be able to take care of people in the booth as well as mix in the occasional live tweet or Facebook posting with your scheduled tweets or posts.

Let’s say you’re planning a tradeshow appearance. You can schedule various activities in your booth, such as guest appearances, product promos, demonstrations, etc., and set up tweets and posts ahead of time. It takes some time to put it all into place, but once you’re at the show, you can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that all of those tweets and Facebook postings are going to show up at their scheduled time. And if something changes in mid-stream, such as guest getting caught in traffic and having to delay his appearance, it’s easy to log on to Hootsuite and make the changes in the scheduled posts.

When Hootsuite first came out, I grabbed a free account, and bounced back and forth between that and Tweetdeck (I wouldn’t count Tweetdeck out yet – I hear Twitter purchased the software and is working to add more capabilities to it). Then I drifted away. But now I’m back, and as I mentioned, the more I use it the better it gets. The coders behind Hootsuite keep adding more bells and whistles, making it more useful all the time. In fact, there’s so much there that I probably won’t ever use all of its capabilities.

As an event manager, your biggest social media advantage is the ability to get ahead of the curve on being able to set up pre-scheduled tweets and posts. This software is the best at doing that, and it’s web-based so you don’t have to download and install anything.

And don’t forget the mobile platform. There’s a Hootsuite app (which I rarely use because I prefer the web approach) that is also available if you prefer to do it from your smartphone.

Have I said enough? I could go on, but you might think I’m trying to suck up to the dudes at Hootsuite. Naah, it’s just a cool tool.

Hootsuite is available in both a free and premium version. The premium version, for just a few bucks a month, offers ore detailed analytics and deeper tools – well worth the modest monthly cost.

Spatial Awareness at Exhibitions

Guest post by Abishag Wilson

When you are considering your new exhibition stand design team, be aware of the space that your stand will be used in and the space that is available for the rest of your product demonstration, and yourself.

Most importantly, you need to be aware of how you want your onlookers to interact with your stand. This will formulate the basis of your design.

Nonetheless, an exhibition stand has to be fairly flexible with space if you intend to use it for more than one event. Not all centers and pitches will have the same height in the ceiling, or necessarily be on a nice ‘straight’ when people walk by. Prepare for corner pitches just in case. Perhaps you may even have a 360 degree free-standing stall?

Think about all the pitch and plan accordingly.

Your bespoke stand should be able to cater for many events. For these reasons your stand should be portable – being made of many lightweight sections. Try visualizing individual items as being put in situ together, like Lego blocks, rather than comprising a fully formed stand.

Once you have thought about the pitch, consider the physical boundaries of the stand. Will it have walls and a ceiling, or will that make people feel claustrophobic? It can be intimidating if you ‘box in’ visitors to your stall.

If your stand is to have a roof, then you should consider introducing spotlighting insider or making it transparent so that naturally available light can fill your stand. No one is going to want to walk into a dark stand, it will look unprofessional, and look like camping gazebo.

Ask yourself if your viewers easily walk around your stand and/or in between the items and POS on show?

Free standing Point of Sales allow the visitor to walk around freely and should be tall enough that they do not block sight within your pitch, but not short enough to fall over either!

Chairs in a stall can have a similar effect. If your guests require a lengthy demonstration, then seating may be necessary – but do not let it look cluttered and clumsy.

Think about disabled users who may want to get around the stall also, the gaps between stands should be accessible enough to get a wheelchair through.

Avoid exposed cabling at all costs, it is not only a trip hazard but it is not visually pleasing to see. It could also be of risk to any younger visitors tempted to give the lead a pull and find out where it is attached to. Space will be reduced if you run cabling anywhere but a corner, if it is to be on show.

If you have an over-head display, it is prudent to think about whether it is targeting those on the ground around the stall or those further away who may be looking for your stand. Keep it at a sensible height that does not encroach on your customers by hanging ominously overhead.

Abishag Wilson is a freelance author who has vast knowledge on exhibition stand design . For more information she suggests you visit http://www.clipdisplay.com.

 

Different Drum

Do you march to the beat of a different drummer? Or do you fall in behind other exhibitors, advertisers and marketers lock-step, following the same marketing and exhibiting methods that have been used for years?

I first heard the phrase ‘march to the beat of a different drummer’ when I was a pre-teen – just about the time I started to learn to play drums in the school band. Just about the time I was recognizing rock drummers such as Dave Clark, Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts.

YES! I thought. I play to a different drummer! Even though I had no idea what it really meant. I just assumed that it was a cool to march to your own beat – whatever that beat was.

Now don’t get me wrong. It’s not always a good thing to march to your own beat. Some people do that and end out on the fringe, where no one wants to follow and the audience is sparse. As a marketer, you’re looking for the largest possible audience for your specific message.  For some products and companies, that market is in the millions. For others, it may be much smaller, in the hundreds or even dozens. Or less. Just depends.

Marching to the beat of a different drummer means to follow your instinct and gut as much as it means to follow the numbers or stick to a ‘tried-and-true’ path.  In the conclusion to ‘Walden’, Thoreau writes, “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.”

The creators, inventors and marketers who marched to a different drum were also ones who changed the world. Look at the life stories of folks like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak of Apple, Bill Gates of Microsoft, 3M’s Art Fry (who invented the Post-it note), Alexander Bain (fax machine – in the 1840s! – look it up) or one of many others who saw things differently.

At your next tradeshow, look around. Who is doing things differently? Is the wacky company that’s making a giant 7-foot-long shoe out of cardboard in their booth? Is it the company that chopped a VW bus in half to make a mini-micro bus to fit in their ten-foot booth? Is it the exhibitor that chopped and painted an industrial storage container and made it into a unique booth?

What grabs your attention? What draws crowds at events?

Now: what can you do in your tradeshow marketing efforts that show off your extraordinary beat to a different drum? And how can you do that in such a way that it gets people attention, invites them into your world, shows them that you are different in a good way, and yet doesn’t cross that imaginary line into fringe or bleeding edge?

And if you can do that, will you tell the rest of us how it’s done??

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photo credit: dominic bartolini

Product Training from Classic Exhibits

Mel White, Classic Exhibits VP of Marketing & Business Development

Classic Exhibits invited me to attend a day-long training of their new products and services this week. Interpretive Exhibits has been a distributor for Classic Exhibits for several years – probably our longest association with an exhibit manufacturer. We like Classic Exhibits for several reasons, not the least of which is that they’re right up the road in the Portland, Oregon metro area and easy to visit.

The training also included a small group of exhibit folks from the San Francisco Bay area, who were up for the day to get the skinny on what C.E. has to offer.

And yes, they have a lot to offer; in fact, the list seems to continue to grow. Classic Exhibits has recently added a number of eco-friendly and sustainable products to their line. They also have created a number of unique exhibit designs in the past few years that have proven to be winners with their clients. Competitors, too, it appears, as some of the designs have been ‘knocked off’ by other companies.

We spent some time learning about the awesome (yes, I really said awesome) Design Search tool available to Classic Exhibits’ distributors. It allows buyers or browsers a chance to go through hundreds of designs and configurations and see mock-ups and actual photos of several versions of each design. For years Classic Exhibits has photographed every exhibit that goes out the door and keeps adding the photos to the mix, giving you as a buyer a chance to see how other people have adapted a particular exhibit to their use.

Even if you’re not in the market for a new exhibit right now, you might be interested in spending some time going through the Design Search tool – just to see what the possibilities are. Check out Design Search here.

Beyond that we all got a chance to touch, feel, hold and eventually dismantle some of their exhibits, including the Perfect Ten hybrid, Sacagawea hybrid and the Magellan hybrid displays. So easy to dismantle. Like butta…

Finally a look at the tough old bird; the standard pop-up exhibit that has built a reputation over the years as the toughest little pop-up in the industry: the Quadro S pop-ups. These babies are so sturdy that Mel White, the VP of Marketing & Business Development, described one meeting demo that he started by standing on top of the exhibit. Yeah, that’s tough and sturdy.

All in all, great to see what new things are coming out, and getting reacquainted with the old stand-bys. Need an exhibit? Check out Classic Exhibits Design Search here.

It’s Not About You

Maxi Trusso

It doesn’t matter whether you’re exhibiting at a tradeshow, writing on a blog, making a sales call or trying to get a date.

It’s NOT ABOUT YOU.

Even though we understand this intellectually, it somehow seems that we grapple with this in real life.

Your visitor doesn’t care about you. They only care about how what you do affects them.

After all, when you’re putting up a tradeshow booth, your inclination is to show what’s NEW, what’s COOL and what’s RELEVANT about your company.

Often that doesn’t matter to the visitor as they just want to know what’s relevant to them.

But the good news is that as often as not the two competing tasks – telling your story vs. making your story relevant to your visitor – are in congruency.

If you’re trying to sell a new food product, you may be interested in pushing that product to your customers because if they buy a lot of it, or a lot of people buy a lot, it’ll be good news to your bottom line.

Your visitor doesn’t care. Instead, she is interested in its taste, calorie count, cost and how her family might like it. Those things are important to her, not your company’s bottom line.

Now of course you say – YES! That’s elemental. Of course you create a tradeshow booth and tradeshow marketing campaign based on what the customer wants.

But do you? Really?

If your company is unknown in the marketplace, yet the first thing a visitor sees is your company’s name in light at the top of the booth, you’re thinking of you – not your customer.

Your name isn’t relevant to them. Yes, you’d like to MAKE it relevant, but you do that by inviting them in with something compelling to THEM. The top graphical imagery in your booth should be what’s most important to THEM. In some cases that may be a compelling question or bold statement. Your company name’s impact and meaning with them will grow over time.

If you’re Apple, Microsoft or Wii, the name is sufficient and relevant, because the visitor has an impression of your brand and are interested in your new products. They have history with customers.

A new company doesn’t, so your task is to think about what’s most important to THEM: draw them in with a statement, graphic or question that addresses that specifically in regards to your product or service.

Sales calls are often the same. If I had a quarter for every sales person that called me weekly and did an ‘information dump’ on me before even asking any questions, I’d be able to buy both of us a nice cuppa joe. Weekly. In those cases, it’s about them. Not me.

In your relationships with friends, partners, clients and prospects, make it about THEM.

You’ll do better than most of your competition.

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photo credit: il_Morta

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