Category: Tradeshow marketing

Over the past couple of months one of the the things I’ve dedicated a lot of time to is research. One element of that research was a short survey on SurveyMonkey.com, which asked 6 questions related to social media event marketing. The results helped shape the information and tools that you can find at SocialMediaEventMarketingU.com. Here’s a quick look the results.

First, a total of 77 people responded to the survey. These came from a small mailing list I have, a few clients I asked to participate and a handful of folks that clicked through from a Tweet.

Question One: Where would you consider your company’s social media event/tradeshow marketing approach to be?

• Beginning: 46.1%
• Intermediate: 46.1%
• Advanced: 7.9%

Question Two: Who performs your company’s social media engagement?

• In-House: 85.5%
• Outsourced: 2.6%
• Combination: 6.6%
• N/A: 5.3%

Question Three: If you could strengthen one element of your social media engagement in regards to your tradeshow and event marketing, what would it be?

• Making sure it actually happens at the show: 18.7%
• Bringing more people to the booth during the show: 26.7%
• Getting more followers and engagement on Facebook during and after shows: 17.3%
• Planning and executing social media at shows, period: 24%
• Other: 13.3%

Some of the “other” answers:

• we don’t do trade shows yet, but I subscribe b/c I like your content!
• We are B2B: getting more engagement on Twitter during/after shows
• None of the above – we’ve found few customers use it as much as its hyped to be used
• Be able to utilize social media without fear of bringing the federal government down on us – we sell tobacco!
• Beginning a robust conversation in advance of the Expo, sustaining it through the Expo, and maintaining it in the aftermath.
• getting permission to try new concepts for social media
• Not having to use Facebook as it is considered to be family and personal as opposed to professional and business oriented amongst our target customers.
• Getting my clients to embrace my social media ideas for them and coordinate their social media pages with complimentary technologies like bubble videos
• It has been difficult in the past to work the show floor and take photos, update FB, tweet, take videos, etc. But we’re working to designate social networking as 1 person’s role at shows from now on
• Getting more engagement on Twitter before, during and after the show

Question Four: In your opinion, what needs to happen at your company in the next couple of months in regards to your social media event/tradeshow marketing?

• Getting started and set up: 16.4%
• We’ve started, but we need to get up to speed: 16.4%
• Learning more about how to more effectively engage: 59.7%
• Finding a good company to outsource a lot of the nuts and bolts, strategy and planning: 0%
• Creating Facebook landing pages to create more engagement: 7.5%
• Other: 9.7%

“Other” responses:

• no one who attends tradeshows is willing to commit to social media
• Keeping people engaged on the page long-term. We capture FaceBook likes at the booth. We give away all of our promotions for the booth on Facebook. So the early engagement is great, but it is the long term that concerns me. How do we build a community.
• Don’t know!
• providing our agency more content-blogs-promotions etc.
• Incorporating more fun videos into the program over the next year.
• We are working on things, some of the shows we attend are not so big on social media yet, so we’re waiting for them to catch up. We still need to work on better integration with other marketing, website, etc.

Question 5: What is your position at the company in regards to social media engagement?

• Boss: I tell people what to do: 46.3%
• Worker Bee: I get involved regularly with our social media: 34.3%
• Department Head: I help direct traffic
• Other: 19.4%

“Other” response:

• Marketing director
• all of the above. we are a very small company.
• only one here, so I do it all.
• One armed paper hanger! The company is the two partners, two part timers, and an on-call tech.
• Also, I’m an influencer and recommender
• None, sadly. Too many federal regulations restricting our use of social media (as well as our belief in not marketing to anyone under the age of 21 and how does one restrict that?)

Some things catch my eye from this small survey. First, it appears that most of the respondents are from quite small companies – perhaps fewer than half a dozen people.

Second, it’s obvious that many of the respondents are still trying to figure out what to do with social media, with very few being in the advanced stage.

Third, almost 2/3 (59.4%) are interested in learning about how to use tools and techniques to engage in social media in their event marketing.

Fourth, almost no one actually outsources anything. My hunch is that for these people, it’s either too early in the process to outsource, or it’s too expensive. Or they’re just not interested in it for other reasons.

And fifth, based on a handful of the ‘other’ comments, it appears that many of the businesses and customers that tradeshow marketers are trying to connect with are also struggling with social media, and many are simply not involved. This doesn’t surprise me at all – a recent client of ours really didn’t want anything to so with social media: ‘it’s kid’s stuff’ as they put it, so the marketing directer hired us anyway to do nothing more than social media research – listening to the conversation going on in the blogosphere and Twitter and Facebook. There was a ton of conversation going on there, disproving the notion that it’s just ‘kids’s stuff,’ and we turned up quite a few useful nuggets for him.