How many ways can you use an iPad kiosk at a tradeshow? Let’s count at least 8 ways here:
WARNING! ALERT! BLATANT PLUG AHEAD!
Now that you’ve Want to check out some of our iPad kiosks?
Check our kiosk selection on the Exhibit Design Search site here.
Tradeshows cost time and money. A lot. So how do you differentiate from the thousand other exhibitors all vying for attention?
One way is to become a person of interest at the tradeshow. Here are a few ways to stand out from the crowd.
Be a speaker, or participate in a panel presentation. Typically these slots are open to company management, so if one of your management team is good at delivering a presentation or speaking extemporaneously in a panel situation, work to get them involved. Depending on the show, this kind of exposure can do wonders for word of mouth, especially if the presentation is top-notch. When I’ve given presentations at tradeshows, no matter how many people were in the audience, there were always a handful that wanted to pigeonhole me right afterwards and talk shop. Some have become clients.
You want more ways to become a person of interest? If you’re good, give demonstrations in the booth.
What about one-on-one interactions with booth visitors? You can be interesting by being energetic, outgoing, and asking a lot of questions. And if you have good stories, tell them. Everyone should have at least three good stories. At a party, they could be about things you’ve done or how you’ve lived. But at a tradeshow, if you have three good stories about the business, your products and how they impacted customers, share them.
Above all, if you want to be a person of interest at a tradeshow, just be an interesting person.
We’ve all been to those shows. Maybe it was a small Chamber of Commerce show, or a county fair or a local public tradeshow. You see booths with the standard six-foot table with a drape in the front of the booth, and someone has put a fishbowl on the table with a small sign that says if you toss your card in the fishbowl you might win something!
Or you see a spinning wheel where you are spinning for a small prize, and perhaps one larger prize. People line up several deep to take a shot at winning a pocket-size LED flashlight, some lip balm or some other little item.
Now and then you see a dunk tank or maybe a little golf putting green that draws people to a booth by the dozens.
These are not effective lead generation activities. You may think they are, but if you’re hoping to attract buyers to your booth or leads for your sales team to follow up with using these flimsy tactics, you might as well stay home and send me the money. Nope, tradeshow success is all about drawing a crowd and knowing what to do with it.
People who put business cards are not prospects. Most will simply plop a card in the bowl and wander off. You haven’t talked to them; you don’t have a valid reason for a follow up call.
And that wheel? What did you learn about that woman who won some lip balm? Probably nothing.
Lead generation is the specific activity of capturing contact information and related follow up information from visitors so you connect with them shortly after the show. A valid lead is someone who you’ve talked with enough to find out if they’re interested in your products, are nearing a buying decision and are seriously considering your company’s products or services.
So leave the wheels and fishbowls to your competitors.
One of our recent booth projects over the summer was a custom portable modular booth for the Toronto-based company SoYoung. The project turned out so great and people loved the look, that the design and fabrication team at Classic Exhibits thought it should be entered in the Exhibitor Portable/Modular, which recognizes design excellence. So it was. And it made the finals round where you, the public, get to vote!
Classic Exhibits also had two other projects make it to the finals round: Philadelphia Commercial and Nationwide.
The rules for the voting are simple: you can vote only once a day, but you can vote every day.
To vote, simply go here. To learn more about the awards, check this page.
Thanks to SoYoung for letting us design and fabricate their exhibit, and for letting us enter it in the design excellence contest.
And to see a full gallery of photos of the SoYoung booth, check it out here.
A tradeshow is a perfect opportunity to track stuff: sales, leads, visitors, and so on. Here’s a quick list of things you might consider measuring at each show. It’ll give you a chance to not only compare different shows, but it’ll help you track trends at different appearances at the same show year after year.
ROI = (Gross Profit – Cost of the show) / Cost of the show.
For example, if it cost you $200,000 for the booth, travel, lodging, salaries, food, parties, transportation, etc., and you know that six months later the business generated as a direct result of the show was $359,000, you’d write the equation like this:
ROI = ($359,000 – $200,000) / $200,000
ROI = $159,000 / $200,000 = 79.5%
Measure as much as you can. You’ll be glad you did!
To really stick in someone’s mind, you must be meaningful to him or her.
From “Meaningful: The Story of Ideas that Fly” by Bernadette Jiwa:
“It’s easy to believe that ‘meaningful’ applies only to the businesses in what some people might call the ‘do-good’ sector of non-profits, sustainability and so on. But every one of us, from a software company to a cab driver, is in the meaning business. Without meaning, products and services are just commodities and nobody wants to be in the commodities business.”
So how does that apply to the tradeshow floor? What does it take to create enough meaning for a visitor that will stay with them long after the show is over?
It boils down to the people. Creating the product is comparatively easy. Getting attention is not all that hard. But sticking in someone’s mind means that the people you employ must understand what it is that is important to the visitors, and what affects them: what about your product or service means something to them?
It’s not an easy answer. And if you don’t know the moment you walk onto a tradeshow floor, you probably haven’t spent any time discussing it with your team prior to the show.
However, a tradeshow is a good opportunity to explore that meaning with your visitors. Think of it: there are thousands of visitors to the show. When they stop at your booth, take time to ask questions. By looking a customer in the eye, you have an opportunity that isn’t available when you’re just talking on the phone or asking people to fill out an online survey.
A tradeshow is an intimate encounter in the sense that you are talking to someone face to face. Yes, there are hundreds of conversations over the course of a three or four day show. As Bernadette put it in the book:
“Bricks-and-mortar businesses have the advantage of intimacy, online businesses, which must collect a ton of (often valuable) data to learn more about their customers and determine how to give them what they want….but the waiter sees the wrinkle nose, the barista remembers the regular and the doctor hears the stories that inputs from the keyboard can never fully communicate.”
Use that face-to-face opportunity to talk with people and really understand what they like and don’t like about your products and services. And make it formal to the extent that when you’re asking questions, you’re writing the answers down. Share that data with others in the company.
Ultimately, your job is to make people happy. If your clients find true meaning in the services and products you provide – enough to make them happy with your company – you’ve done your job.
Listening.
That’s it. If you are a good listener, you’ll do well.
So many booth staffers I meet at shows seem to think it’s all about them. They will stop me while I’m walking by, try to hand me something, ask me a quick question, and (without really hearing my answer) launch into a spiel about their product or service that is supposed to wow me, get me to stop what I’m doing and sign up immediately!
Well, it doesn’t really work that way.
As a booth staffer, if you are a good listener, you’ll hear things from your visitors that other people may not hear. Sure, you need to ask questions – good questions – but if you don’t have the flip side of that coin, the listening skill to go with those good questions, it won’t matter.
Ask your questions.
Then shut up and listen.
Your tradeshow booth is, hopefully, a thing of beauty. You spent days, weeks, and maybe months working with a designer, then a graphic designer, then a marketing team, then a fabricator to create the perfect big booth.
Then you set it up at a tradeshow where you paid tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of bringing your crew and the booth to show it (along with your products or services, of course) to thousands of people.
And Joe the Attendee and Jill the Attendee walk by at a brisk clip, take a 4 or 5 second glance, or don’t even look up, and keep walking.
What happened? You think the booth is beautiful!
They didn’t give it a second glance.
There are many reasons why this might be.
The real challenge for you is this: how do people outside of your world see your exhibit?
When you’re considering what your booth is saying about you, consider as well what the attendee sees when they walk by. What does it mean to them? How do they react to what they see?
Look at it from their perspective. Is the messaging clear to people who have never heard of you? Does your brand ring clear and deliver itself without misunderstanding?
If your brand is strongly communicated and your messaging is clear enough for those who have never heard of you to easily understand it, your designers and fabricators have done their jobs.
What’s the single most important thing you can do prior to your next show to save money? You might be surprised.
Tradeshow exhibiting can be expensive. So as an exhibitor, you’re always looking for ways to cut costs!
Just in time for 2016 planning, Mel White of Classic Exhibits recently teamed up with Handshake.com and gave a webinar aimed directly at you if you’re trying to cut costs in your tradeshow marketing.
From rental exhibits, to non-hanging-hanging signs (yes!), to cost-cutting in your graphic production, Mel gives you two dozen-plus items to consider.
Well worth your time:
If you’d like to download the slide deck, get it here.
Oh, BTW..the single most important thing? It has to do with filling our forms. Yeah, boring, but very critical.
Doesn’t every Tom, Joe and Susie have a newsletter these days? After all, they can be very useful in getting your message in front of eyeballs on a consistent basis.
The fact is, my inbox is filled daily with dozens of newsletters of all sorts: news, marketing, comic strips, social media engagement, big biz, small biz, and so on.
I tend to open about one in ten if I’m in a generous mood. More like one in twenty or one in fifty. In other words, it’s hard to get my attention (or anybody’s) these days with just a newsletter. There’s got to be something in there that makes it worthwhile to click and open. And read.
But there are several newsletters that I read frequently. Some I open every single time right when I see it and stop what I’m doing. Others get put on the ‘later’ list and I usually make it back to them.
These are the tradeshow industry-related email newsletters that I read almost every time they arrive. I say almost because, hey, even I have to take a day off now and then! There are others out there – some are closed to the public and others don’t arrive frequently enough to warrant attention, and some I just don’t know about – but here are the tops in my book.
Exhibitor Magazine: a companion to their monthly print magazine, the newsletter is a useful and professional addition to your inbox.
TSNN: The Tradeshow News Network: between this and Exhibitor Magazine, you will have your pulse on the beat of the tradeshow industry news and happenings. Bonus: they have several editions available.
Classic Exhibits Tradeshow Tales: Mel and Kevin at Classic Exhibits in Portland, Oregon, offer great insight, humor and passion on a regular basis.
Andy Saks, Spark Presentations: Andy is a tradeshow presenter, Emcee, Staff Trainer and Auctioneer. In other words, he gets up in front of people. A lot. And his now-and-then newsletter is always a good read.
Anders Boulanger, the Infotainers: I enjoy this newsletter as much as any. Anders is a solid writer and communicator and always has thoughtful, meaty – and useful – pieces.
Marlys Arnold, Tradeshow Insights: Marly has been a show organizer and an exhibitor and comes at the topic from a unique perspective. A worthwhile read anytime.
Susan Friedmann, Tradeshow Tips: Susan is a CSP (Certified Speaking Professional) who has written many tradeshow related books and publishes a weekly tip sheet for exhibitors.
Skyline Tradeshow Tips: Friendly and useful, this newsletter doesn’t seem to show up a lot but when it does it’s good.
Here are some non-related business/marketing/sales newsletters that I read all the time. I think you’ll love ’em:
Monday Morning Memo: Roy H. Williams of Austin, Texas, author of the Wizard of Ads and a former radio ad salesman, rings my Monday morning with a loud and clear bell every week. I look forward to this.
Sales Tips for the Aspiring Rock Star: Paul Castain, sales trainer and marketing enthusiast is always a fun read.
Tim Ferris, author of the 4-Hour Work Week and the 4 Hour Body, publishes a newsletter every Friday (and at other random times) of stuff that has caught his eye. Good stuff.
Dave Pell’s Next Draft, billed as ‘The Day’s Most Fascinating News,’ is all of that and more.
