September 17, 2014

What’s Your Biggest #Tradeshow #Marketing Challenge? (Survey Results)

A couple of weeks ago I posted a one-question survey which asked tradeshow marketers to identify their BIGGEST challenge when it came to creating a successful experience. To me, success means coming away form the show with more leads than last time, having a booth staff that’s on top of their game, a booth that really shows your company’s brand and identity and in general leaves you wanting to get back and do it again!

The survey went out via our tradeshow marketing list twice and was posted a handful of times on a few social media sites. In other words, it wasn’t scientific but was instead mean to capture a snapshot in time of what people were thinking when they clicked through to the survey.

The question read like this:

What is your biggest challenge in using tradeshows to market successfully?

The question was designed to be as straightforward as possible without trying to steer anyone to a specific answer or topic. There were eight answers possible. These came from the general topics under which all tradeshow marketing elements would likely fall:

Determining your show objectives
Budgeting
Pre-show marketing and preparation
Creating an awesome booth that represents your company’s brand and image
Booth staff training
Lead generation
Post-show follow up
Keeping track of everything from show to show

The survey was designed to let respondents to choose only one answer. I’m not sure if it would have been better or worse if respondents could have chosen more than one. My thought was it forced people to settle on just a single choice, no matter how many challenges they had in tradeshow marketing. Besides, the question asked respondents to tell us their ‘biggest challenge,’ not their two or three biggest challenges.

As responses to the survey came in, there were two answers that stood out as being the most challenging to the respondents: post-show follow up and creating an awesome booth. For a time it was neck and neck, but in the end, ‘post show follow up’ edged out ‘creating an awesome booth that represents your company’s brand and image’ but not by much.

Tradeshow challenges results — Results from the one question survey: What is your biggest tradeshow marketing challenge?

Bottom Line: the answers don’t surprise me much. In my experience, some of the biggest challenges in tradeshow marketing that people recognize revolve around having a great booth, and taking care with all of those leads that come back to the office with you once the show is over. Booths can be expensive to create and maintain, and leads are often difficult to shepherd through a follow up process. About 80% of all tradeshow leads do NOT get followed up on, so that result is not surprising.

What was interesting to me is that booth staff training didn’t get a single hit among the three dozen or so survey respondents. Staff training is often one of the most overlooked and neglected areas that can influence a company’s tradeshow marketing success.

The fact that about 16% of respondents chose ‘pre-show marketing’ and ‘lead generation’ also indicates some challenging problems in identifying what is the best approach to driving traffic to your booth and, once they’re there, to capture leads in an effective manner.

Tradeshow marketing isn’t easy, nor is it cheap. If it was, everybody would be doing it and growing their businesses faster than they could keep up with. However, done right, it is one of the most effective ways of promoting new products and reaching new markets.

July 3, 2014

21 Tips to Maximize Your Tradeshow ROI

The following is a guest article from Jennifer Callahan of Fathom:

It can come as a directive from the top, but most likely it’s Sales or Marketing trying to squeeze company budgets to allow a team to exhibit at a tradeshow. So if you’re part of a team trying to get dollars approved to set up a tradeshow booth but are facing increasing pressure to prove that it’s worth not only the money, but the time away from the office, you need to read on.

No matter which industry you’re in, you have likely seen budget restraints over the past five years. Proving a Return on Investment for Sales and Marketing is more important than ever. So how do you maximize ROI for your upcoming tradeshow?

First, it’s never too early to plan. Following are just a few items you should begin working on now:

– Press Release: A crucial part of your pre-show marketing. Tell people what booth number you’ll be at and what they can expect from your team. Will you have new product demos? Free assessments? Make it easy for reporters from trade mags to meet with you by stating when and if you’re available to meet with the media.

– Your Website: On your home page you will want a noticeable call to action (perhaps with a discount code for attendees?) to incentivize anyone attending the show to stop by to check you out.

– Multiple Blog Posts: This is a no-brainer if you have plenty of time between now and the show. But don’t just do promos about your company. Write about what attendees can expect from the show and the types of events that have happened in the past. And when you return, write a wrap-up blog post.

– Use Video! If someone from your company is speaking at the event, or if you will be interviewing any notable people from your industry, make sure someone videotapes it. Place the video on your YouTube channel, along with a link to it in your blog, Twitter feed, Facebook posts, etc.

– Meet with Current and Prospective Customers: Schedule time to meet with your current customers at the booth. It’s not a bad idea to have prospective customers meet with your Sales or Marketing team at the same time. Oftentimes your current happy customers can be great ambassadors of your brand.

– Toss the Paper: Resist the urge to haul reams of paper documents for passing out at the booth. Get interested prospects’ business cards to email them everything they’re interested in, post-show. Chances are your documents will end up in hotel room trash cans, anyway. This runs into the next tip:

– Email, Email, Email: Nurture prospects with email post-show. It can start with company documents that explain more about products and services. And from there on out, it’s up to you to continue with marketing automation to further nurture those valuable leads.

While tradeshows may be dwindling in attendance in your industry, there is a way to turn attendees into customers in this digital world. It takes major planning and teamwork between Sales and Marketing. Download the whitepaper 21 (+2 Bonus) Tips to Maximize Your ROI to plenty more tips to make the most of your company’s marketing dollars.

(Tim sez: check out this great infographic):

FATHOM_Manufacturing_Tradeshow_ROI_Tips-Infographic_2014

Find featured work from Jennifer Callahan here.

December 23, 2013

Tradeshow Marketing Analysis: Where to Start

Where to start with your tradeshow marketing analysis? Let’s try at the beginning!

Okay, dumb answer to obvious question. Or….perhaps not.

The beginning can be a moving target. As a young writer I never knew where to start a piece of fiction or article or project. Then someone said ‘start anywhere, begin now’ – and with that I realize that it doesn’t matter where you start, as long as you DO start.

But for the sake of argument – and for the sake of having some cohesive structure to this article and the next few, we do need to start somewhere.

And that somewhere would be on determining your specific tradeshow marketing OBJECTIVES.

If you’re already going to shows, you should spend time discussing them and confirm that they’re still worth going to. A large client of ours abruptly pulled out of a large tradeshow after doing the math and realizing that the show was not helping their business. Instead, their main business had shifted online and it made more sense to move the tradeshow dollars towards the online area which paid more dividends.

Another client stopped going to a major show for a few years while reassessing their tradeshow marketing objectives. They’re back now, but only with a renewed commitment and specific reason or being there.

If you have not been to a specific show, you should plan to attend without exhibiting to get a feel for it. Talk to exhibitors, get feedback on their experience. Ask a lot of questions. Watch visitors and see how they interact. Research your competition and see what their booth(s) look like. Imagine how your booth would fit in side-by-side with those exhibitors.

business chart showing success — photo by salfalko, some rights reserved

As for what your objectives might be, how do you determine them? After all, every show is different – at least a bit. Some are drastically different: different audience, different competition at each show, different orientation (location of your booth, promotion by the organizers) and other ways that shows differ.

Some common objectives might include:

Building your Brand
Entering a new market
Bringing home qualified leads
Sales, pure and simple
Recruiting partners
Networking with current clientele
Supporting vendors
Sign contracts
Develop RFP’s
Collecting new prospects to start drip marketing
Public Relations
Recruit new employees

To gauge the success of meeting those tradeshow objectives, some metrics you might measure include:

Number of demos given
Number of press mentions
Number of visitors to booth
Number of new leads
Number of applications for positions
Number of RFPs

How might you measure those metrics? Some would be manually counted by staff, some would be counted by scanning badges at the booth.

Here are some questions to help you determine your objectives:

What are your main show goals and objectives?
What is your secondary objective?
Who in your company defines your goals and objectives?
How well do you meet those goals with your tradeshow marketing?
Understanding that each trade show has a different target market and a different mix of attendees, how do your goals and objectives change from show to show?
What is your target audience?
Does this show meet that target?
What companies are your main competitors at the show?
How do they stack up against you in terms of Booth size and scope, presence, staffing, pre-show marketing and visibility

There are no right or wrong objectives – only objectives that fit the needs of your organization. Once you determine those objectives, determine as well the metrics you’ll use to measure the success of meeting your objectives. And don’t try to do too much at a show. If you try to meet a half dozen marketing goals at a single show, your message and execution will be ill-defined. Focus on one or two main objectives and figure out how to best measure them.

Here’s part two: Budgeting

Want a free digital copy of my “Tradeshow Success” book? Click here.

December 16, 2013

An Open Letter to Veteran Exhibitors

Dear Exhibitor,

You are an experienced tradeshow marketer. You probably have been to many more shows than most of your colleagues. You’ve seen it all – from the small mom and pop shows decades ago to the sophisticated shows with several thousand exhibitors. You’ve seen goofy musical acts, professional product or service demonstrators in booths, wolfed down tons of free food samples, pocketed hundreds of free giveaways until you finally decided they were mostly just worthless junk.

And it’s a pretty good bet you know what works. You’ve tested pre-show marketing, booth staff training, having your best sales people on the show floor and you wonder why your company’s sales staff still has a hard time following up on all of those leads once the show is over.

So let’s see it: let’s see the results of those years of experience. What did you get out of it? By now you must have figured out exactly where the wasted dollars are – and you’ve plugged those holes so that every single dollar spent on tradeshow marketing makes an impact. Right?

Yes, let’s see the records of all of those tradeshows. No doubt – with your experience – you can pull out a 3-ring binder for every show for the past decade and answer any question about the show: how much was spent on booth space, drayage, travel and lodging, pre-show marketing, etc. – and can show us what the ROI was on all of those dollars invested.

Heck, you can probably even show us in great detail with song and dance, the impact of your young social media team. No doubt they’re compiling stats on how many contests they’ve run through Facebook and Twitter to drive traffic to the booth – and what the results of those contests or show specials are. They likely have a precise count of the number of photos and videos they’ve posted in relation to the show, and what the feedback was from them.

So: let’s see them. Let’s see all the results of your professionalism in action. If you can immediately pull those results up on your computer or grab a binder and hand to me – then you’re good. In fact, you’re awesome. You can go back to whatever it was you were doing before you started reading this letter. After all, you are the pro. You’re the expert – the veteran tradeshow marketer who’s been doing this for years. No one can surprise you. After all, you’ve seen it all.

But, if not – if you can scrunch up your face and say ‘Hmmm…I might admit that there are a few missing spots…’ I would ask: What exactly is missing?

Don’t have all the records you think you should? You’re not doing all that you really could be doing at each show?

Let’s suppose that it might be good to have a refresher on the various elements of tradeshow marketing – JUST to make sure that you’re not missing any pieces. After all, it’s not a bad idea to see things from a new perspective, right?

So, from my viewpoint, here’s a list of what you might consider keeping track of in your tradeshow marketing endeavors:

Overall Tradeshow Marketing Objectives
Shows You Attend and the Specific Objectives for Each Show
Budgeting Figures
Pre-show Marketing
Public Relations Outreach
Exhibit Booth: size, age, layout, cost
Booth Staff: who are they; what’s their experience and training and overall level of knowledge of the tradeshow marketing efforts
Show and Booth Visitors: breakdown of each show in detail
Social Media Sharing: who’s in charge, what content gets shared, what are the results
Post-show Follow Up
Lead Generation: methods of collection, grading, distribution
Record Keeping
Final Overall Assessment

These bullet points can be broken down in great detail and the more detail you have, the more educated you are – and the higher the chances that you will have a more successful show.

Remember this: your competition is out there and many of them invest heavily in booth staff training, pre-show marketing, public relations, and social media engagement. They’re not fooling around. If you’re not looking closely at these items on a regular basis and keeping your tradeshow marketing assessment current, you could be slipping behind because it’s a good bet your main competitors are. Those competitors want to win – and they want to take away your current clients and customers. No doubt they’re doing everything they can to achieve those goals.

What are you doing with your tradeshow marketing to keep one step ahead of your competitors? Are you investing in an upgraded booth when the old one is falling apart or do you limp along another year? Are you investing in keeping your booth staff on top of their game with regular trainings? Are you investing in creating a great experience for your clients and potential clients at the next tradeshow, or do you just cross your fingers and hope that the status quo will be ‘good enough’ for this year?

Do you think your competitors are settling for ‘just good enough’?

If not, what are you going to do about it?

Sincerely,

Tim Patterson
TradeshowGuy Exhibits
1880 4th Street NE
Salem, OR 97301
Toll Free: 800-654-6946
TradeshowGuyExhibits.com

PS. If you need help performing a complete tradeshow marketing analysis or audit, click here.

December 2, 2013

Are You Maximizing your Networking and Marketing Opportunities at Tradeshows?

The following guest article was written by Chris Newkirk:

Tradeshows can be a huge expense for small business owners and although statistics show businesses can increase revenues and grow their customer base from events like these, many companies still struggle to attract attention and make trade shows worthwhile.

What are you doing wrong?

Networking involves a whole lot more than shaking hands and handing out business cards. If you view everyone as an opportunity and stop seeing them as people, chances are you’re going to strike out. Consider how you like to be approached. People can sense they are being targeted for a sale, opportunity or referral from a mile off.

Treat people like people and look to make friends and connections. Don’t approach people by asking them, ‘what do you do.’ Try asking questions that target them personally, can help spark a genuine conversation and can lead to a memorable discussion.

Ask open ended questions that are event specific and don’t bombard people with materials, information or sales pitches. After you engage them in conversation, before they leave ask them if they’d like to be added to your contact sheet, or what information they’d like you to send them.

Encourage visitors to find you on Facebook and if you have access to an IPad give people the opportunity to check you out your Facebook and Twitter profile. You can generate buzz by picking a hashtag for the event. Use banners to promote your hashtag—encourage people to help you get your hashtag and the event trending on Twitter!

Are you making a memorable impression?

Everything from the time you arrive and leave, the things you talk about and the way you use your display and products all can work together to make you memorable—or leave you dead in the water.

You’ve heard it a million times, arrive early and leave late, it really does work. Approach the early birds and try to become people’s ‘first friend,’ check back throughout the day and see how they’re doing. These people will remember you and can lead to referrals.

While you’re there make the most of your space. Do extensive preparation well in advance so you know what size the space you’re provided with will be and what regulations you might have for light and sound. Update your display if it’s old or if your banner stands are outdated or damaged. Consider spending more on displays that are less common and can draw attention to your booth. Even something as simple as a few laptops where visitors can browse products or the company blog will keep people at your booth longer and help draw a crowd.

A pretty booth won’t set you apart from the crowd though, they tend to be a dime a dozen. Try something fresh.

If you haven’t done it before, consider introducing the use of technology in your display. Informational kiosks are one way to remove clutter from your table and promote environmental ideals. IPads are a tool that you can use to display your entire product inventory or allow people to browse your company blog and interact on your social media sites. You can invite people to sign up for your newsletter or add their email if they’d like more information about your company, industry or product directly into a spreadsheet instead of using a paper sign-up.

The use of technology as allows you to engage with more people. If a larger group of people are visiting your space, you can invite some to use the IPad and kiosk while you engage directly with others giving you more time to form relationships without worrying about isolating other visitors.

Other ways to create an engaging space include:

-Enlarge your space using mirrors

-Use a projector to display video

-Take photos of your clients when they stop by and stream them on your projector or share them on social media throughout the event

-Suspend company products from the ceiling

-Incorporate lighting to illuminate your space

How are you following up after the show? Try reaching out through social media

If you have a company blog, writing a series of posts about the trade show and the people you met can be a great tool for networking. Share the post with people from the event and mentioned in the context via email and social media. Because they’re included they will be more likely to share the post on their own networks.

Don’t use follow-up emails to bombard people with a slew of sales information. Provide them with materials that demonstrate value like links to internet videos, industry information and special reports and educational white papers. Preface the email with things like, ‘I thought of you when,’ or ‘I thought you might be interested.’ The key is to keep in touch without coming across as pushy or simply trying to sell something.

Keep in mind some of your most valuable contacts may end up being people who have never been your customer, but instead end up sending a high volume of referral business to you.

The bottom line

Networking is about relationships. If you’re attitude, body language or display is unwelcoming or un-engaging people have no incentive to talk with you or form a relationship with you. Your end goal shouldn’t be to target everyone you meet to get their business. Instead your goal should be to form solid relationships so you can get business from everyone they know.

Author’s bio: Chris Newkirk works in marketing and sales consultation. Chris attends a number of trade shows a year and enjoys learning what methods work for companies in various industries and enjoys sharing his networking tips.

September 24, 2013

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

September 18, 2013

Generate Buzz By Getting Social For Your Next Tradeshow

This is a guest post by Matthew Brennan.

Tradeshows can wield a terrific impact for businesses. The effect of waves of people coming to your tradeshow booth to find out more about what you do – and buying from you – can be great for the bottom line.

The thing is that trade shows can be crowded, and you need to work hard to set yourself apart from the competition. That can be accomplished in person with great banners, marketing materials, and branding. But there are things that you can also do with social media to generate a buzz that will keep people talking for a long time.

Use Twitter Hashtags to communicate – Twitter hashtags are a great way to make sure that the conversation keeps going. If people have a question after they leave your tradeshow booth, or simply want to talk about what they saw, they can leave a tweet with the tradeshow hashtag. That way they can be sure that the right people see what they’re talking about.

Hashtags are simply the pound sign immediately before a word on a tweet. It makes them searchable in Twitter, so anyone attending the show, or looking to find out more information, can find it.

Use giveaways – Are you giving some promotional products away at your Nimlok tradeshow booth? You can use these items to spark a little interest online. Mentioning them on your Facebook page or in a tweet can motivate people to make an appearance, and see what you have to offer in person.

Why not let people know that you’ll have a free _____________ to the first 100 people? If what you’re giving away is truly valuable, it may just be the incentive to get them to come earlier, creating a demand.

Preview your exhibits at the show – Do you have something great planned for your tradeshow booth? Facebook and Twitter are the perfect place to give your customers and fans a little taste of what they’ll be in for on the tradeshow floor.

What aspects of your industry or business are you highlighting? Is there something specific that you’re looking to promote? This is the place to expand your reach and get in front of people. Letting people know what they can expect ahead of time can increase the crowd.

Use QR Codes – Your marketing doesn’t have to be strictly from the online world to the trade show floor. You can use your tradeshow presence to drive people back to your website and social platforms and create more long term relationships. This can be achieved easily through the use of QR codes. You can put these simple codes on any of your marketing materials, and when your customers scan them, it will return them to a specific website of your choice.

You can send them to your Facebook page, if you want them to become a fan. You can send them to your blog if that’s where you’re publishing your best content. You can send them to a Pinterest page, if that’s where some of the best pictures of your work reside. The possibilities are endless. This is a great way to keep people wanting more.

Use The Same Graphics And Logo – You worked hard to come up with the perfect banners, branding and message for your offline tradeshow presence. Don’t throw that all away. Make sure that your Facebook and Twitter cover photos incorporate the same design. This will help keep a consistent look and feel between your offline business and your online presence.

About the author: Matthew Brennan is a marketing writer based in the Chicago area. He regularly writes about content marketing, blogging, and engaging with your audience. He has been published on ProBlogger, Soshable, and Business2Community. Connect with Matthew on his website, www.matthewlbrennan.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+.

March 26, 2013

How GoPro Dominates Using Social Media and Tradeshow Marketing

I first encountered GoPro at the 2009 Outdoor Retailer Winter Market show in Salt Lake City. Nick Woodman was making a spectacle of himself. About once an hour, he would get on top of a platform and start yelling at the top of his lungs. He would exhort visitors to check out the brand-new product – a small HD camera that captured crazy video with a wideangle lens. It was small enough to strap to a helmet, chest, end of a ski pole, wherever.

Trying to get your hands on a GoPro camera at Outdoor Retailer Winter Market 2013

During these hourly exhortation’s Nick would regale his audience with examples of how great his product, the GoPro camera – and how it captures extreme sports videos – is. It also engaged eager visitors with the chance of winning one.

The story of GoPro is one that happened very quickly. It didn’t take long for the combination of trade shows, social media, and virtually giving away the store every single day to create a rabid following.

If you follow GoPro on Facebook, you’ll notice that they give away everything they make to one person every single day. I’ve signed up hundreds of times and never won. But it doesn’t keep me from signing up again and again and again. That’s how much I’d like to get my hands on their latest and great HD sports-action toy.

Early in 2013, Nick Woodman, the CEO and main figurehead of GoPro was featured on the cover of Inc. magazine. The story was about how he had grown the company to a multi-million dollar enterprise and created a new camera niche virtually out of nothing. The company had done it with a great product that is groundbreaking, and the combination of tradeshow marketing, social media and pure moxie.

Since I saw them at the 2009 outdoor retailer when a market in salt Lake city, I’ve been a big fan of GoPro. They offered $100 off of a camera if you purchased at that time and a coupon for discount on a future purchase when their new HD camera came out. I bought one of their early cameras and have had fun with it ever since.

In January 2013 I attended Outdoor Retailer Winter Market and it didn’t take me long to find the GoPro trade show booth. It wasn’t large compared to many other booths at the show, about 30 x 30, but it was plastered with a dozen or so large screen video monitors. As you enter the booth you were given a chance to sign up and possibly win a new HD camera. They also indicated that with the sign up, you would be emailed a coupon for a $100 discount on their new HD camera. So in effect, they’re giving you a chance to win something and they’re capturing your information so they can stay in contact with you.

I talked to one of the girls working the booth and discovered that Nick was not there, but it didn’t matter by this point because the company was too big for Nick to go to every tradeshow. GoPro has quickly proven itself to be a serious player in the camera industry, and has been called ‘the fastest growing company in the world.’

Several times a day a GoPro booth staffer stands up to give away T-shirts, swag and of course that coveted GoPro HD model camera. Hundreds of people yelled, screamed, waved arms and otherwise made fools of themselves hoping their name would get called.

Go Pro’s custom tradeshow booth matched their brand’s look, feel and style. It looked a bit brash and with the multiple video screens your eyes were drawn to action, action, action as the sports action videos played in an endless loop.

Suffice it to say that with the combination of savvy social media, aggressive trade show marketing and a groundbreaking product, GoPro dominates their niche. They certainly have new competitors – with any new product that carves out a big share of the market, someone will come in and try to catch to the leader. And someone may yet catch up with GoPro. But GoPro’s excellent marketing – including tradeshow marketing – is proving to be all they need right now to be the leader of the pack.

Check out the Inc article.

Then check out the selection of videos.

Click here to grab my Tradeshow Follow-up Checklist

September 18, 2012

Making Real Connections Using Social Media

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.

photo credit: Bo Valentin

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Dear Tradeshow Exhibit Buyer,