It seems like I’ve been doing a lot of list-making lately. Here’s another one!
Branding: the content you share defines your company. Think before you tweet!
Networking: share content that highlights or involves people from other companies. Take photos of booth visitors, tag them in the photos and watch them share with their followers.
Interactivity: by sharing content and responding to comments and questions, you’ve begun to see interactivity, which leads to…
Engagement: a step above simple interactivity (which may be almost meaningless), engagement is more personal and responsive.
Organic spread
(your content could go viral): a good piece of content gets legs, no matter who it comes from. Can you create, either purposefully or accidentally, a piece of content that spreads throughout the social media system? If it happens, pay close attention to the type of content it is, and see if you can determine why it spread. Then try to recreate something that does the same.
Social proof: if your followers like your material and share it, now you’re exposed to potential new people who may not have previously known you existed. But because they saw it from one of their trusted sources, now you’ve suddenly a trusted source.
Humanize your company: by becoming human to your market, you become more attractive to them, generally speaking.
Caring: by sharing you’re showing that you care about others.
Reciprocation: if you share something that focuses another person, company or product (it may complement something you’re doing so it makes sense to highlight it), those people will feel compelled to do the same for you vie reciprocation.
Sharing drives traffic to your booth. And your blog. And your Facebook page, Twitter page, YouTube channel, etc.
How about a quick list of tradeshow social photo sharing do’s and don’ts when you’re on the tradeshow floor:
Do:
Take pictures of guests and booth visitors.
Ask for permission to post the photo online.
Post as quickly as you are able.
Mention names (first names only are okay).
Sarah from Manitoba Harvest posing at Expo West 2012
Mention companies they work for (they love the free publicity).
Try to get their logo or tradeshow backdrop in the photo.
Remember that your photo-sharing becomes part of your brand legacy. Think before you post.
Shoot a lot of photos! If you shoot a photo of someone, tell them you want to take two or three to make sure you get a good one. If you take only one, chances are good that you’ll catch someone with their eyes closed or a goofy look on their face.
Tweet out each photo (if you have time).
Invite your photo subject to re-tweet and re-post the photo across their social media outposts.
Crop photos if you can. If you don’t have Photoshop or some other photo editing software, do your best to frame the photo as you take it to include only the main elements of the photo.
Don’t:
Wait days or weeks to post photos.
Post photos of people in compromising situations.
Post without telling people that you’re posting on your FB or Flickr page.
Share every photo….instead, pick and choose the best ones.
Share only on one social network. Instead, move beyond Facebook to Instagram, Flickr, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat…wherever your audience may be.
Take photos of other booths and post them. Typically that’s in bad form and is often frowned upon by show management.
Keep putting the same booth staffers in the photos. Instead, make the photos about your visitors as much as it is about you and your products and/or services.
There’s an old Janet Jackson hit song that asks the question: what have you done for me lately?
Not only does the question apply in love relationships (as in the song), but it applies to you in your relationship to your customers and clients.
It applies in your social media efforts, your tradeshow marketing schedule and your other marketing endeavors.
Did you post a terrific article on your company blog last week that helped solve a big problem that your industry faces? Awesome. What’s next?
Did you make a stunning appearance at the last big tradeshow and leave your clients and potential customers wide-eyed and amazed? Great. What are you doing at the next show?
Did you host a Twitter chat recently that got a lot of industry folks involved while you posed and answered questions? Cool. When’s the next one scheduled?
Did you put together a nice little video and post it on your YouTube channel last week that illuminated an issue in your industry – and your insight may help people move forward with more confidence? Excellent! What about this week?
Get the message? Everything you do recedes into the past, and it recedes rather quickly.
One of the folks I follow on Facebook is an old rock-and-roller from the Sixties. For months he’d update us about his activities: new tour, travel adventures, fan meetings, etc., and posted numerous photos of all of those activities.
When he went silent I didn’t actually notice it for several weeks. Then when it dawned on me I wasn’t catching his postings, I wondered if it was because he was dead. Okay, I didn’t really think that seriously, but it crossed my mind! Then I mused it might be because of the weird algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what information shows up in your news stream. Then it occurred to me that he might have simply stopped posting things.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Any salesperson will tell you that the hardest thing, especially if you’re selling a long-cycle product, is to stay ‘top-of-mind’ with your market.
I’ve missed making exhibit sales to companies in the past that I simply hadn’t called in six months. They knew who I was, they were aware of my company’s capabilities and skills – and my interest in working with them – and yet, when it came time to choose an exhibit company, they chose another company that was more ‘on their mind’ than I.
Trying to keep the hopper full in marketing, whether online, social media, tradeshow, traditional or some combination, is to attempt to feed a beast that will never be satisfied. If you’re a blogger, your readers want to know what’s next. If you’re on Twitter, yesterday’s tweets are yesterday’s news. Last month’s tradeshow is history.
It’s all history. It all recedes quickly.
After walking the floor at the Natural Products Expo West for a full day, it occurred to me that a number of exhibitors I had met and talked to the past couple of years were not here. Even though it’s huge show with thousands of exhibitors, and it might be easy to overlook them, that’s not the case: I looked them up on the show app and couldn’t find them.
They had vanished. Why? I wondered.
Of course, there are myriad reasons why a company wouldn’t return to a show for a third of fourth year, or even a second year.
It could be that the marketing goals have changed; they don’t have enough money; the company went out of business, there isn’t a market for their product, they can’t establish themselves against their competitors…any number of things would affect the ability of a company to show up at a huge industry tradeshow year after year.
Then I thought of the many companies I’ve seen and met that DO come year after year. When we discuss the show, and the success they’ve had, one common theme threads through the discussion: they all build their company’s success using the tradeshow as a springboard.
Many of those exhibitors that failed had solid social media marketing efforts. They were active in luring visitors to their booth. But even a good social media effort won’t cure the overall problem. What if you get people to your booth and you still fail in execution once they arrive?
If those exhibitors that fail to return to the show are doing things right away from the show, other factors notwithstanding, it really comes down to execution at the tradeshow itself.
There is a continuous chain of preparation and execution that has to happen to ensure the success of the tradeshow marketing effort, and if any one of those links are broken, the whole effort will fail.
Starting with the actual tradeshow booth, on to the pre-show marketing efforts, the show execution, and the follow-up with leads, all cylinders need to be hitting for the full effect: tradeshow marketing success.
While walking the show, I notice things, and one of the most glaring examples I see is staff failure. Many booths seem to have it all going: it’s great looking, the graphics are top-notch, the booth is functional and accommodating…yet the staff appears to be oblivious to visitors. They’re eating, talking on the phone, standing with their backs to the entrance, ignoring visitors…it’s truly astonishing to me that a company will spend tens of thousands of dollars on a booth, travel, booth space rental, advertising, marketing – and yet the whole effort flops because their staff is ill-trained.
There are other, less obvious, failures. For instance, graphics are ill-designed, packed with too much text or not distinguishing themselves from the competition. The photographs and graphics are not catchy enough compared to their neighbor. Or they have a giveaway that’s not capturing a specific, focused group of people (anyone want a new iPad? Yes, everyone does, and that’s the problem: not everyone is a prospect). When you’re competing against thousands of exhibitors trying to catch the eye of someone walking by your booth, you have literally about three seconds to visually grab them. If the graphics are lame or the display is packed with too much verbiage, the visitor won’t respond – they’ll keep on walking. And chances are they won’t be back.
Bottom line: tradeshow marketing can be extremely successful. I see multiple examples and talk to dozens of people that claim tradeshow marketing is their best platform for company growth and expansion. Yet…if a link in the chain is missing, the marketing manager will see the effort crumble, and struggle to identify the problem.
On your next tradeshow marketing effort, do your best to ensure the chain is strong from start to finish.
It’s rare, but not unheard of, for social media to backfire at the worst possible time and you’re facing the dreaded scourge of negative social media. Usually the worst possible time is when your company has a majority of its resources on site at a tradeshow. If most of your people are focused on doing demos, interacting with booth visitors and putting out a thousand little fires that seem to ignite during the show, the last thing you want is to have a blow-up on your social media platforms.
For example, let’s say you have a hot new product that is hotter than anticipated. You’ve even run out in the second day of the show and there’s no way you can fulfill demand.
Or maybe one of your employees opened their mouth to the wrong person and left a negative impression, strong enough for them to go out and tweet or post to their Facebook page.
In most cases, the negative comments usually won’t get too far, especially if you promptly respond and openly try to deal with any issues created.
But on occasion, depending on circumstances of the situation, those comments can get out of hand and go viral. So how do you prepare for such an eventuality, even if the odds are slim.
First, be aware – in a real time basis as much as possible – what’s being said about your company and products. This takes vigilance, and often means using some sort of tool that can monitor Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and others. Search for ‘social media monitoring tool’ and you’ll find plenty of good suggestions.
Second, be prepared for anything. Know how to get in front of a bad story. Be ready to respond appropriately – and make sure you respond as quickly as possible. Your Public Relations department should be ready to respond to that 3 AM call, and have the power to do so. Management has got to trust the PR department that they can craft a message that’s appropriate.
Third, don’t DO NOTHING. The worst thing is to sit on a story and wait for all departments to chime in. For instance, if you think that you need a legal opinion before responding to negative comments, chances are the story will entirely get away from you before you know it. Better to get a partial response out instead of no response at all.
Finally, don’t think that you’re immune because you have a product or service or a company that doesn’t lend itself to a firestorm of negativity. It CAN happen, and if you’ve at least talked about it and have some sort of plan in place, chances are you’ll be able to respond when needed.
You’re finished with this year’s big show. You had a great time, your employees did great, your sales people knocked down some big sales. Your lead generation tactics brought in more leads than the last time.
So you’re celebrating. Great! Awesome!
Now what? Do you wait until next year to ramp up for the big show again? If so, doesn’t that mean you’re really starting from scratch with a lot of people? Or you have to reintroduce yourself to the people that you met at this year’s show, and there’s a bit of awkwardness while you try and remember who they are and hope they remember you.
There’s an easier way.
It’s called social media. You know: Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Google+. When you are engaged in social media, you are involved in the right thing to stay in touch with all of those people year-round. So let’s take a stab at a handful of things you can do on social media to stay in touch.
It can start anywhere. Of course you’ll need to actually have outposts set up on the main social media outlets. At the next show make sure that your visitors can connect with you on your most-valued social media outposts. Could be Facebook, maybe it’s Twitter or YouTube – just have something available that you can either hand out or show them that makes it easy to connect. Perhaps that’s a post-card sized handout with your social media URL’s, or perhaps even a QR Code that takes them to a landing page that links to those places.
Also at the show: create as much content you can that you will share later. For instance, shoot videos of demonstrations, interviews, testimonials and other fun stuff. During the next 10-11 months, release a short video every 4 – 6 weeks. If you shoot a couple of hours of video during the show, it should be fairly easy to find 8 – 10 short 3 – 5 minute videos to post regularly. Shoot a few hundred photos – you can use them for future blog or social media posts. Take notes on questions that are asked. Use them to create an FAQ post for your blog.
As you continue to keep connected to your social media community, let them know what’s going on in your business. Share new products, introduce new people in your company; engage with your followers by asking and answering questions. As your company is involved in various events throughout the year, do the same things as that last big show. Even if it’s just putting up a table at a marathon or tabling at a retail outlet. Post photos and comments from those events.
Then when your next big annual show gets closer, start mentioning what you’re doing at the show: new products, new people, new services, in-booth guests. Whatever you have going, make sure that your community knows about it.
When the show finally opens, you’ll have visitors that have stayed in touch with you all year long – because you took the time to stay in touch with them! They’ll already know what new products you have and will make an effort to stop by to make sure then don’t miss them. They’ll remember you because you have been a part of their life – however small – over the past year.
It’s one of the toughest things for a tradeshow exhibitor to face: once the show is over, how do you stay in touch until the next time you meet those visitors who loved your company and your products?
Social media is the easy and most obvious answer.
Are you engaged in social media? Are you staying in touch year-round?
So you’re going to shoot a tradeshow teaser video to get people to be aware of your upcoming appearance whetting their appetite to see your company’s exhibit at the show. But you’re rarely messed around with video. Maybe you don’t like getting in front of the camera. Or you don’t know what to put in a brief video.
Well, let’s take a look at ten things to think about when assembling your video.
1. Know whom you’re talking to
What is your intended audience thinking about the issue you’re going to talk about? Are they well informed? Ill-informed? Mis-informed? The more you can understand the mindset of your audience, the better your video will be. In the case of creating a short video that relates to a tradeshow appearance, does your audience know anything about you company or your product? Are they familiar with the show? Do they have the proper context for your presentation or are they coming in from the cold?
Steaz Teas Interactive Fortune-Telling Cactus
2. Pick a single topic and stick to it.
You’ve seen videos that try to do everything and cover a lot of ground. In the case of a short teaser video, know exactly what the topic and don’t waver. If you have more than one reason to invite people to your booth, do more than one video.
3. If you’re going to be on camera, rehearse your presentation a few times, but don’t overdo it.
There are other ways to create a video than to use a video camera. A screen-capture program, for instance, is a great way to put a video together without actually getting in front of a camera. But if you’re going to put your face onscreen, rehearse it a few times until you feel comfortable with the bullet points you’re going to cover. And yes, you should just cover bullet points, and NOT read a script. By rehearsing it a few times you’ll get comfortable with how you’re going to say it. Record a few times and go with the best. Don’t worry about perfection – there’s still no perfect presentation – but just relax and let it flow and you’ll be fine.
4. Fancy production or not?
In most cases, there’s no need for fancy production. If you’re a service company such as a dentist or accountant, just be real and show people who you are. If your company is a high-end video production company, yes, you should show your chops! But in most cases, expensive production is lost on YouTube. It depends on the expectations of your audience, which are being lowered continuously thanks to a lot of low-end video production.
5. Authenticity
Want to impress people? Don’t try and be someone you’re not. If you can show who you REALLY are – your AUTHENTIC self – people will find that much attractive than a horse-and-pony show that has little to do with who you are.
6. Don’t waste time – respect people’s time and use it wisely
If you have 60 seconds worth of information, don’t use three minutes to get it all out. Be short and sweet and then get it over with. Respect people’s time. If they get used to your short (and respectful) videos, they’ll have a greater inclination to come back and see more.
7. Don’t do a hard sell – talk conversationally
This goes back to authenticity. Most people don’t speak in a hard-sell mode in social situations. Imagine you’re in social situation and you’re talking casually with a friend or colleague. Now, use the same approach on your video and you’ll be fine.
8. Solve a problem
If you can describe how your product or service solves a problem in 60 seconds or less (and you should be able to do that!), you have a great chance of getting people to show up at your booth or shop. What exactly does your product do? Do you have a proven result? Tell how your solution will improve their situation. Share it.
9. Subtitles can increase response.
Okay, I have no evidence to support this! But to my way of thinking, by showing subtitles you are reinforcing your message. Of course, there are a few people that don’t hear well and the subtitles may assist them in understanding what you’re talking about. Plus, it’s a good place to put a phone number or web URL. Most video editing programs allow you to insert text on the screen. Again, don’t overdo it – but use it.
10. Put a smile in your voice!
One of the first and best lessons I learned when I got into radio as a teenager: put a smile into your voice! It comes across…really!
I ran into a nice little post about Cell Phone Courtesy Month from etiquette expert Jacqueline Whitmore, which is a good reminder that cell phones are not only everywhere at all times, they can often be used indiscriminately – and rudely. Wait – we probably all knew that, right?
But in a tradeshow booth, it’s always Cell Phone Courtesy Month!
Yes, we’re surfing the net, uploading photos to Facebook, talking to clients or suppliers or grappling with that certain someone who is supposed to deliver a graphic update by 11:30 and it’s already past noon! Cell phones – especially since the exploding use of smartphones – are addicting.
But in the booth, during showtime, a cell phone can negatively impact the impact you have on your visitors. If they see you talking on a phone, chances are increased that they won’t approach the booth.
It is easy to become a slave to your phone. The best way to counter that is to realize its a cool that YOU control, not the other way around.
In the list of reminders, Jacqueline tells us to ‘be all there,’ keep it private, avoid the ‘cell yell,’ keep it private and excuse yourself when using the phone.
Yes, some calls are important and need to be handled immediately. But if you’re aware of the situation and the surroundings, you can still handle urgent calls (answer and say ‘I’ll call you back in five…’ and then return to your ‘live’ conversation) and deal with the actual humans that are present at the same time.
Bottom line: give your full and undivided attention to the people in your booth. They’ll be thankful and your company will come off looking better – and that can impact your bottom line.
The tradeshow exhibit is at least 6 – 8 months away – have you considered your tradeshow marketing strategy? You’d better get started – that’s not that much time!
“Huh? Over half a year and I have to rush things?” you say…
No, I didn’t say RUSH things…I mean you have better get your stuff together because those six months are going to go by pretty quickly. And the last 2 months will go by like an Indy Racer if you haven’t spent the first four months working on it.
Face it: when people visit your tradeshow booth, they expect to see the BEST that your company has to offer. If you’re a manufacturer, your prep time may mean several meetings and coordination with your manufacturing division to make sure you’re showing off the BEST of your BEST.
Why would you want to go to a tradeshow and put anything but the BEST of the BEST you have to offer on display? This is the one time a year that those visitors get a chance to see your goods and services. They’re comparing YOUR BEST with the BEST of several other companies – perhaps dozens of other companies.
So plan to put on your best.
This means your best graphics. Your best exhibit. Your best product. Your best people. Your best lead-capturing system.
When you put your best out there, you’re competing on the same level as the rest of the exhibitors – your competitors. Face it, most of them (but not all) are putting on THEIR best face at the exhibit. So you’d better be putting on YOUR best, too.
The challenge, though, is that we’re all just humans. We all have crazy schedules and incessant demands. And given those demands, when push comes to shove putting on your BEST is often extremely difficult to do. That’s why it takes more effort than you really think it will.
So that gets you back to idea of starting NOW and not waiting another few months on your tradeshow marketing strategy. If you start now and determine WHAT you’ll need to do to put on your best, HOW you’re going to do it, and WHO is going to help you to make sure it’s going to get done, the odds increase that you’ll actually make it happen by the time the show rolls around.
And that gets back to the idea of loving care: if you approach the planning of your next tradeshow with loving care, you’ll cover all the bases you need to cover to ensure that you are putting on your best.
Start now. Give your tradeshow marketing strategy some good old-fashioned love.
You’ve probably heard it a lot, and maybe even agree: Social media is NEW! It’s something that’s so brand-spanking new that it’s going to take you a lot of time and effort to figure it out! There are new tools, new toys, new ways of connecting. And since it’s NEW it’s gotta be confusing and confounding.
Nope, that’s not true. Social media has been around for quite awhile. Yes, some of the tools and toys are relatively new, but think about it: if you’ve been online for at least a decade you should be used to this stuff. I’ve been connecting with people online since before the Internet. You may remember a brief period of time in the early 90s – before the ‘net – when there were online community bulletin board systems (actually around from 1979 – 1995). These BBS’s would allow people to dial in to a central computer, share notes and programs. I remember having a conversation with a guy who introduced me to one of his BBS’s where he shared software. It would take two or three days to transfer a small software program from one computer to another via a dial-up connection.
But we were connected.
In fact, ‘instant chat’ was available as early as 1988, which was when IRC (internet relay chat) made its debut. It became a PC desktop feature with ICQ in 1996. Yes, we were sharing instant messages with smiley faces by the mid-90s.
Then came CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL (remember all those millions of CD’s you get in the mail hoping to get you to get on board with AOL?). And the web and email. Being from a radio background, my interest in those days was figuring out to share audio online. It wasn’t too tough, and shortly thereafter I was hosting (albeit briefly) a short comedy show online through a website I had figured out how to set up.
Yes, it was all pretty rudimentary in those days. But around 2004 podcasting came along and I jumped in with both feet.
Then around 2006 we all read about the new Web 2.0 where we’d all be interconnected. Except that we already were connected in so many ways.
Early in the decade lots of people were connecting using Friendster (founded 2002) and MySpace (2003).
Today with Facebook (2004), Twitter (2006), YouTube (2005) and LinkedIn (2003) generally regarded as the ‘big four’ of social networking, it’s not hard to realize that this stuff has been around for several years. And with our online connectivity reaching back a couple of decades, don’t believe anyone who says social media is “new” – it’s not.
What’s new is that the tentacles of social media are reaching further into small businesses, who are then trying to figure out how to implement these platforms into their marketing mix.
It takes some adjustment, admittedly. Often new people need to be brought on board, or current employees need to be re-purposed for some of their work day to ‘figure out’ how to use social media to reach their target market.
The good news is that there are unlimited resources available to help. If you’re the self-help type, you search blogs about social media marketing. If you’d rather hire consultants to teach you how to tie it all together, that’s appropriate as well. No matter how you approach it, there are myriad ways you can implement social media in your tradeshow or event marketing efforts.
But again – none of this is really new. If you think it is, you literally haven’t been paying attention. And you’re living in the past….around 1979.
If you still haven’t started using this “new” social media to reach your market, when do you plan to?
(image courtesy of Mentionablehonor and is used through Creative Commons)
