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Make the most of your presence as marketing your company becomes more crucial than ever. Yes, it’s not all doom and gloom. Live events are bucking the downward marketing spend trend. And the most prepared and positive brands will use this period as an opportunity to make sure their clients and prospective clients know they are survivors.
Stick to the rules
The first stage of a successful exhibiting process is determining a clear, focused exhibiting strategy in line with your overall marketing strategy/business plan. The importance of this stage is paramount: it is the first stage in knowing your goals, measuring your results and then reviewing your strategy for future exhibitions.
Focused pre-show marketing
It’s safe to say show organisers will promote to the general marketplace. But how many stands can a visitor attend properly in a day? Five, 10, 15? We’re restricted by our physical capability and our attention span, therefore you need to make sure that those people you have identified as being serious prospects put your stand at the top of their must see list.
Don’t start your marketing campaign too far in advance. Visitors decide relatively late on which stands to visit, although they may have decided to visit the show several months before (especially if it’s in Europe), they haven’t necessarily decided to visit your stand. Starting a month before the show is probably an adequate timescale.
It’s also important to make sure you set aside part of your exhibition budget for pre-show marketing. Often many of the invisibles are ignored, and marketing pre- and post-show show are often casualties. How you spend your budget is the key, not necessarily how much.
Value through research
Once you have a workable strategy in-place, look at what live marketing has to offer you and your company. Trade shows are permission-based marketing platforms – most of you current and prospective clients are under one roof and looking to do business.
Check up on what your competitors are doing. This informs your future activity in real time and accurately. If you really want to exploit the crunch, use this market research to create services that you know will appeal in difficult times.
Building bridges to your business
In today’s marketplace you need to do more than simply sell products and services to visitors to your stand. I call it the ‘proposition beyond product’. Simply put you’re adding value. For example, we worked with Prestige Medical, manufacturer and distributor precision medical equipment. On stand the company offered visitors a free dental infection report at their surgery. Prestige then presented the report to those takers at the exhibition.
This method can be defined as adding value to the next stage of the relation. You have actually come back to the potential client with information that should lead to future business being done.
Save money, budget
If there are a number of events that support your sector speak to exhibitors for feedback (you can find exhibitor lists on most show websites), and cherry pick the event which is right for you.
Don’t cheat yourself. Exhibiting incurs both visible and invisible costs. Take the cost of your space and multiply it by three or four times to give you a true picture of your investment.
Just make sure you calculate everything, including management time, training planning and follow up, as well as the obvious items such as travel, accommodation and sustenance.
ROI
By measuring leads generated, followed up and new meetings requested over a six or 12 month period, you will be able to calculate the value of your attendance.
Ninety per cent of business driven through exhibitions comes from follow up. That said many visitors won’t have an immediate requirement, so you need to keep in touch with them in the long term.
And remember, you do have to be prepared to adopt new approaches. After all, we all know that if you always do what you’ve always done, then you’ll always get what you’ve always had.
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