On this week’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee (now published bi-weekly!), Kenji Haroutunian of the Big Gear Show joins me to chat about the outdoors world, the tradeshow world and much more. Great to reconnect with Kenji:
Check out the Big Gear Show here.
This week’s ONE GOOD THING: The new Crowded House album, Dreams Are Waiting.
Here at TradeshowGuy Exhibits, we’ve worked with Classic Exhibits in Portland as our main fabricator for many years and they continually impress us with their skill and creativity. Last year at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, they posted a thorough look at the Symphony No Tools Portable Display, going through each element one at a time. It’s a great look at an elegantly functional portable display:
Tradeshow exhibitors know how easy it is to let costs run wild. Here are a half dozen ways to add to your exhibit and booth space without going broke doing it:
In all the years I’ve been attending Natural Products Expo West (and Expo East a few times), one of the things that I see time and time again is the number of small unknown brands looking to get a toehold in the crowded natural foods industry, and then to see them a year or two or three down the line as they start to appear on local grocery store shelves. And then some of them become much bigger brands, and a small number are sold to larger companies. And it seems like suddenly (although it’s been a years-long effort) that the brand is ubiquitous.
And I’ve been lucky enough to work with a few of them: Bob’s Red Mill, which was a growing brand when we started to work together around 2006. They’re world-wide now and Bob’s iconic face has appeared on billions and billions of product packages. Or Kettle Chips, which was a well-known regional brand on their way to national and international status when they became my first client in 2002. Since then, they’ve been bought and sold at least two or three times (okay, at least four – I looked it up) and are currently part of the Campbell Soup Company as of March, 2018.
We started working with Schmidt’s Naturals five years ago. At the time they were an up-and-coming Portland brand started in a garage. In the handful of years we worked with them on tradeshow exhibiting, they went from that small company to being purchased by Unilever and are now, as they say, ubiquitous.
There are plenty of other examples of brands that made their first appearance at Natural Products Expo West (this is getting to sound like a commercial for the show, isn’t it?) that I see on grocery store shelves: Brazi Bites, Mary’s Gone Crackers, Castor and Pollux Pet Food, Boom Chicka Pop, Rule Breaker and more.
I have no doubt it’s not a straight line from the tradeshow floor to the grocery shelves, but I firmly believe that many of these brands would not be where they are now without the benefit of consistent tradeshow marketing.
Check out this gallery of photos including exhibits from the show floor and how those products appeared this week on grocery shelves of a local store.
Shep Hyken’s new book, “I’ll Be Back,” is still months away, but it’s not to early to talk about it, or to catch up with him on how he and his team managed their way through the pandemic. Shep always has a lot to say, and it’s good:
Learn more about Shep’s upcoming book at I’ll Be Back Book.com.
This week’s ONE GOOD THING: The Politician, a TV series on Netflix.
Yes, you got a lousy location. What to do to prevent poor traffic and lack of leads by the end of the show? Here are a handful of things you can do to bring people to your booth:
When you step up to a larger island booth and get away from the shorter inline configurations, your options for a private or semi-secluded conference or meeting area increase dramatically. You can go all the way from a private, enclosed space with opaque walls to more open meeting areas that, while open to the aisle, have a barrier of some sort, whether it’s a see-through wall such as a milk-plex or some arrangement of foliage or barrier that tells people “this is private.”
This topic came up recently during an initial conversation with a client who stated they wanted a private meeting area in the booth. That led to a discussion about what exactly they meant by “private.” Opaque walls? An area that is clearly delineated as a meeting area by invitation only? A second floor that would also clearly mean “invitation only”?
There are many approaches to creating a private or semi-private meeting area for you and your clients or prospects in a tradeshow exhibit, limited only by your imagination and budget. Here are a smattering of exhibits I’ve seen over the years that have various iterations of what a meeting area can look like.
We had Dan on the show several years ago, but he’s up to some new stuff, like a podcast and a book in the works. Thought it would be a good time to catch up with him for a conversation:
Find Dan Paulson here.
This week’s ONE GOOD THING: The Wyze Watch.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Famous words, no doubt, and they certainly apply to any marketing endeavor you’re undertaking. If your goal is to simply appear at a tradeshow, you don’t have much of a roadmap. It might look something like this: rent a booth space, get an exhibit (doesn’t really matter what size or what it looks like); bring a few people from the office and talk to people that stumble across your booth.
Success! Of course, since you didn’t really have much of a plan, how could you fail?
On the other hand…
If you want to talk to bring home 300 leads, that requires a longer plan and a better road map. Setting a goal – any goal – immediately puts restrictions on your map. It forces you to go in a certain direction. And the good thing is that it makes you ask questions, such as:
And so you. You get the idea. Sure, you can simply set up a booth, hand out a few brochures and samples and cross your fingers, but if you really want to bring home the bacon with a bagload of new prospects, it takes more than that.
It takes a roadmap that only you can put together, based only on what’s important to you.
If you want a little help, you could do worse than picking up my book Tradeshow Success. It’s got a pretty good roadmap planning guide, chapter by chapter.
But whatever you use, if you want to get somewhere, you need a map.
With nearly four out of five leads generated at tradeshows not adequately followed up on, maybe it’s time to get back to basics. Here are 7 things to make sure you do. Watch carefully!
