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Tag: Marketing

  • Promotional Items Should Be Carefully Selected for Maximum Impact

    Promotional Items Should Be Carefully Selected for Maximum Impact

    There are lots of elements to be considered if your marketing plan for the year includes participation in tradeshows, and a number of good reasons to include it in your plan in the first place. One element that has been closely focused on over the years, sometimes to the exhibitors detriment: the tradeshow “giveaway”. The use of promotional items for creating lasting attention and retention of brand image has cycled up and down in popularity over the last 50 years or so. There are some interesting correlations between the state of the economy and the level of quantity and sophistication attached to the promotional items given out at shows. In general, when times get tough, the quantity goes up, and the quality/cost goes down. When times are hard, something in marketers minds says “better to give away lots of cheap stuff just to get the name out there, than to spend the same but only give away half as many nice items that actually connect accurately to the brand”. Why, I have no idea, but it’s bunk.

    In reality, if you choose to distribute promotional items at a tradeshow, that choice should be as well-thought-out as the display construction, the sales training scheme for the event, the selection of size and location of the stand, and the selection of representatives working the show. Often such items are an afterthought, an add-on after everything else has been decided. Sometimes, there are “Standard” items that the company keeps a stock of, or makes available to each location for marketing purposes – they get a better price buying in higher quantity, and they make available or distribute it throughout their “system” for use in ad hoc marketing efforts, including local tradeshows. Ever visited a home improvement show, and the local bank has purchased a table space and brings water bottles and stress balls, and thinks this will make them memorable to the attendees and that they will open an account or apply for a loan? For the impact that really has on the audience, they may as well have taken the money and put it in one of those plexiglass Grab-a-Buck boxes – that at least connects money and banks in people’s minds and might have gotten them some attention!

    If you’ve made the decision to promote your business with a branded item, if that selection is made carefully, it can be of great benefit at that event, and can drive recognition and awareness, not necessarily sales. If really obvious, it can create buzz on the show floor and drive traffic to your display from elsewhere on the floor. And if you’ve really read the audience right, that item will be so specific to a particular population that it will help qualify that traffic and thin and focus the lead selection before they arrive! Now that’s a promotion.

    Some general rules of thumb for a successful promotional item giveaway.

    1) If you can do so, and it’s appropriate, try passing out samples of the product. Smaller, not necessarily fully functional, but a good replica of your product will at least remind the recipient for months to come, who gave them that item and what they make.

    2) If you can’t sample, for whatever reason, select something that links practically to what you do or what you offer. This type of item at least will carry some activation, that coupled with the logo printed on the item, will conjure up a memory of your firm and what it offers.

    3)If you can’t sample, and you can’t link practically with your product, link with the audiences habits or industry specific needs or processes. If you’re marketing to engineers, a measuring device of some type is a good example of this – they can actually use the item at work, where they hopefully make purchasing decisions.

    4) If you can’t do 1, 2, or 3, at least make the item something useful or entertaining and of good quality, including the imprint method. Also, be aware of the audience. If you can, try to select items that are at least non-toxic – sounds strange, but I can’t tell you how many stress balls and foam toys I’ve handed to my young kids only to find out the printing rubbed off when they got drool on it, or put it in their mouths.

    In short, smart, engaging, creative choices that engage the audience’s imagination, trigger a memory of what you do, your products or your brand promise, that are practical and useful within your industry are the best bets for effective giveaways.

    There are lots of other tips and tricks to using promotional items to drive traffic and leads. More later . . .

  • Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    Ten Tips & Truths For Marketers

    For those of you who are marketers, or if you’re a business owner or solo practitioner who acts in a marketing capacity (and who doesn’t), here’s a few things I’ve picked up over the years – they don’t have anything to do with social media, channel support, SEO or anything to do with a particular media.

    10) If you’ve worked hard to evoke an emotional response to your product in an ad or direct mail piece, for goodness sake give people a way to actually buy it! Make the response mechanism obvious, it avoids delay in responding.

    9) Put your address and phone number on your website, in an obvious place – not everybody trusts everything they see on the internet, and sometimes you just want to send somebody something or talk to an actual person. Why make me work at it?

    8) ASK for the order. Don’t assume that the audience will understand what you want them to do, no matter how obvious you think it is.

    7) Take the offer seriously in your ads and direct marketing communications – the audience will, and they will hold your feet to the fire for every possible interpretation you can imagine. The more transparent and clear you make the offer, the less confusion you’ll receive from the audience, and confused audiences tend not to buy things.

    6) Treat your house list like the gold that it is – you’ll never find a more receptive set of eyes and ears for your message than someone who is already predisposed to hear it. Respect the power it represents, and the people behind it.

    5) You can never know too much about the people you’re trying to reach – but you can interpret data incorrectly. Trust but verify, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, and vet your data with real people and anecdotes – you’ll be glad you did.

    4) Make your copy simple enough that your 80-year-old grandmother can understand it. People’s attention spans are increasingly short, and they don’t have time to analyze your obtuse copy to extract your message.

    3) Sales letters should be long enough to compellingly tell the story, and not a word longer.

    2) Lists, design, artifice and devices don’t sell products and services, feelings do. Evoke an emotional response in your audience and you’ll move the needle.

    1) A target audience never bought anything – PEOPLE buy goods and services – whether it’s online, through the mail, over the phone or from a billboard. Reach out in an accessible, human way, meet a need or solve a problem, and the sales will follow.

    Seems like basic common sense, but ignore such simplicity at your own peril. You’d be amazed how many top flight professionals can’t apply these basic tenets to their everyday work and score a good number.

    If you found this helpful and would like to read more like this, subscribe to this blog above, and be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Tradeshow Promotion Requires Strong Planning

    Tradeshow Promotion Requires Strong Planning

    Recently we’ve been approached by several tradeshow organizers to review, upgrade, or revamp their marketing efforts, for a variety of reasons. With all the visibility and power perceived by marketers who use social media, often tradeshows get put on a back burner. Often there are misconceptions about the cost, value and ROI of exhibiting in a tradeshow, and those impressions are what the organizer is fighting when they try to attract new exhibitors, or build attendance. There are other aspects of working tradeshows into your marketing plan that are misunderstood or poorly perceived that present challenges to the organizers.

    We’ve been working with exhibitors, and organizers, to eradicate some of these misconceptions, and to maximize the value of the tradeshow marketing channel as a viable means of penetrating a new market, launching a new product, or raising awareness of a new application to a new vertical.

    When we work with organizers, its often to open up the shows to include new markets, to add new exhibitors and expand the show, or shift it’s focus. This involves building a strong marketing platform, and a focused sales effort, working in tandem, to approach new exhibitors with a fresh angle or a new spin to show them the value of the show to their sales efforts. Creating a solid prospectus that tells the story accurately and gives the exhibitor a feeling of confidence that the organizer speaks their language, that he understands their market, and that they are competent to make their experience a good, profitable one, is one of the first steps. As always, there’s a lot of research involved in creating that element, to gather data on the buying audience, demographics of the attendees, the market as a whole. Once that trust is established, then it’s a matter of making contact with the correct individual to work through their issues, concerns and needs to prove to them that the organizer will be with them every step of the way.

    When we work with exhibitors, it’s usually to help the exhibiting company break into a new vertical market and to make an impact, to raise awareness of their firm within the industry at large. In those cases, its a matter of getting the attention of the audience, and even of the other exhibitors, be they partners or competitors. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of buying a sizable piece of real estate and designing a flashy display. We’ve worked with some companies where it was appropriate to do exactly the opposite – purchase the minimum size space, install a low-key display, but participate heavily in other parts of the overall marketing opportunity, like sponsorships of events, banners in the halls, kiosks, hospitality suites, press conferences and publication ads in directories, maps and schedules. These kinds of activities require lower levels of human resources, help present a unified and ubiquitous-appearing presence, while not spending on expensive floor space and having to furnish it with a large staff and display.

    No matter who we’re working with, it all starts with research and planning to maximize the opportunity presented by the show. Solid planning and a knowledge of the audience can make even a marginal show a resounding success, generating revenue, growth and partnership opportunities, and helping markets expand and driving commerce. If you work in the tradeshow space, let me know what challenges you’re facing – we’d love to hear from you.

  • Tradeshows – Make A Commitment, Make It Count

    Tradeshows – Make A Commitment, Make It Count

    We recently attended a tradeshow (Granite Partners principal and staff, not the royal “we”) with a client, in an effort to help them gather competitive information prior to entering a new market for a line of products they were planning to launch in a few months. We got together prior to entering the show floor, and discussed a specific set of goals and tactics to be applied to our activities during the morning, including observing and asking questions anonymously of the competition, researching potential production partners or related ancillary product partners that worked with our product, finding possible new applications for our product beyond the intended use, and observing the marketing tactics used by our potential competitors.

    A tall order, but one that can usually be filled in a couple of hours of strolling the show floor, watching, chatting with vendors, asking questions as if we were in the market to purchase, along with a few covert snapshots of displays and a collection of collateral materials in our show bag.

    After spending an hour on the floor, we had accomplished most of the goals we discussed. Some general take-aways on the state of small tradeshows:

    1) Vendor displays have gotten less expensive – and less professional. If you’re going to spend the time and money to highlight a new product at a tradeshow, don’t have your sister-in-law design the booth and the collateral signs because she won Third at the science fair in 11th grade! Go to the professionals for your exhibit design, and have a professional help you with a marketing plan that will help activate and leverage that display and turn it into viable leads! Just because the structure is less expensive than it used to be, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend the savings on good design!

    2) If you’ve gone to the trouble to design and transport a display, at least show up, set up and participate. We saw three or four empty booths, half constructed and missing key elements, with no sales or technical staff in evidence – shame on you, what a waste!

    3) If you are prepared and suited up, working the booth, don’t just shoot out a generic question to passer-by to try and snag their attention – it’s tacky and worse, ineffective. Simply come out from behind the table, out into the aisle, make eye contact with attendees, and maybe ask a legitimate question, maybe something related to the problem your product solves. If you hit on a sore point, you’ve hooked them, if that’s not their problem it’ll be a pretty tough sell to start with and you’ve not annoyed anyone. Being a tradeshow attendee doesn’t mean you’ve signed up to be molested in the aisles!

    4) This is not a re-run of “Boiler-room” – stop trying to close me on a complex, high-dollar, multi-step sale three minutes after I meet you at a show. Ain’t Gonna Happen! This is essentially a meet-and-greet with A/V support. Simply take my information, give me some data and some salient points that can be beneficial or differentiating for your product, and actually do the follow-up work later in the week. Even at consumer-based, residentially-oriented shows, I may not want to sign a contract on a $10,000 piece of infrastructure construction on my house – such things need researched, discussed with family, budgets allocated, etc. It’s a long-term, complex, consultative sale, not a $10 widget that helps wash the car faster.

    5) Do some pre-show marketing. Don’t rely on the show organizer to do it all for you, your results will reflect such an approach. If you plan to sell into the local market, do some homework, craft a decent direct mail piece, do some segmenting, mail a few key zip codes and let some likely consumers know you’re going to be in their neighborhood. You’ll be the busiest guy on the floor.

    No matter how small a show it is, if you’re going to spend the money and time, make it count. Make the commitment, do it 100%, make an effort to be your professional best. If you’re counting on a show like this to make your year, your plan is flawed, and your desperation will be readable from a mile down the aisle. A show should be a small part of a more holistic approach to your overall marketing effort, not a make-or-break event.

    Happy trolling . . .

    If you found this information valuable, and would like more, subscribe to this blog above, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” . . .

     

  • Key Marketing Element – Define “Value”

    Key Marketing Element – Define “Value”

    Whether we’re creating a marketing plan, implementing a creative campaign or setting up for a key sales call, there is always a big question lurking in the background of all of our efforts – “What is the value of our product/service to the customer?”

    Most marketers can create a list of features that show off their product, might even do enough to differentiate it from competitors, but features don’t really drive response or sales. A list of benefits, what good things your product or service will result in for the customer is better, and will drive response and sales. But showing value, real intrinsic and perceived value, is where the true art of observation, listening, distillation and research converge to drive real results. This is where experience will pay off.

    Take for example a simple cleaning service: the features they might offer include trained personnel, bonded service agents, natural or organic or hypoallergenic cleaning products, long-term contacts and one-time specials for realtors and landlords. But those features will make the reader work to derive the benefits from them, if you’re lucky. More likely they will go on to the next competitor.

    Benefits derived from these might include peace of mind for landlords and homeowners, high quality cleaning jobs above and beyond the normal, fixed and reasonable pricing, flexible scheduling for repeat customers etc. Good benefits, if you know you have a need and understand how such services work and the challenges that they can bring. Again, a lot of work for the reader to figure out whether this service is for them.

    But what is the real value – a good impression on viewers or potential renters or buyers of the house or it’s residents, reduced risk of disease and infestation because the house is clean, reduced risk of allergic reaction due to reduced dust and allergens, and the bottom line – you don’t have to put in the work to clean the house! People hire a cleaning service because they don’t have time or expertise or inclination to clean it themselves. Luxury, convenience, time saving, thoroughness and a quality result are the key value triggers for marketing those types of services, so make sure you highlight them in your outreach efforts.

    Those values can be derived from some quick customer and ex-customer research, maybe a card after the service is SOLD, not after services are rendered, that’s a service-level evaluation, not a buying reason. Maybe a quick online survey or e-mail survey to your current and past customer list would reach the audience effectively. But you have to ask the right questions to extract this actionable information, and some analysis is needed to apply the newly derived data to your creative and strategic executions – that’s where the experience comes in – a highly experienced marketer can do that distillation of data and analysis and derive a strategy based on that knowledge and execute it for real results.

    Do your homework, do the analysis, and show the VALUE in your offering, not just features and benefits – value finds a home in buyers minds every time.

    If you found VALUE in this post and would like to receive even more, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – 

     

  • Tell The Corporate Story – Not “Just The Facts, Ma’am”

    Tell The Corporate Story – Not “Just The Facts, Ma’am”

    We’ve been reviewing lots of corporate materials over the last several weeks, as it’s stock Proxy season. Each Spring, public corporations hold their shareholder meetings, and issue proxy voting statements for the shareholders to provide feedback to the Board, elect new board members and settle other issues like compensation, accounting firm choice, and other matters. They are also required to bring shareholders up to date on the financial health of the company. Many of them choose this opportunity to further inform shareholders of their efforts and fill them in on future endeavors planned by the company, by mailing out Annual Reports with lots of artfully crafted text and full-page glossy images – all that’s required by the SEC is a set of edited, audited financials and some bare-bones intent reporting.

    If you read this creatively crafted text carefully, you’ll have a hard time discerning where the company fits in the competitive scheme in their industry (they’re all industry leaders) and how their products are perceived, sometimes even what they do or are used for! Some are so nebulous, so vague, so “artful” and flowery, they become nearly useless.

    Holy missed opportunity, Batman! What a tremendous chance to reach out and tell your corporate story in a way that really provides not only usable information that might prove relevant to increasing future investment, but to do double duty in a number of other forums where a corporate story might be useful. Love the images, too, but do they reflect the daily reality at that firm? Not likely. Do they tell the story? Better than the text, but is it the right story? Maybe not.

    I think they can do better. Printed Annual Reports may be going the way of the dinosaur, with online websites allowing technology to improve communication’s timeliness, and relevance. The use of multiple imagery, video, and the tantalizing prospect of nearly endless real estate in which to put more flowery copy, not to mention the reduced cost of reproduction and distribution, make online Annual Reports very tempting. Not sure of the SEC’s feelings on this, but we now have online proxy voting, so the annual reporting requirements can’t be far behind.

    For now, let’s hope corporate marketing departments take transparency to heart, and while they don’t have to back track all the way to the days of Dragnet scripts, a little direct, honest language may go a long way toward convincing shareholders to maintain and even increase their investment. It might also allow employees and other constituencies to become company evangelists – surely the current copy can’t be repeated verbally by company representatives – at least, not with a straight face . . .

    If you liked reading this and found it valuable to you in your business life, or just entertaining, you can receive more like it in your inbox weekly – FREE – just by subscribing to this blog above. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Leaving Gold On The Table

    Leaving Gold On The Table

    For those companies out there who include industry tradeshows in their marketing mix, either on purpose as part of a strategy, or “because all our competitors are there”, you are probably leaving a pile of gold behind when you pack up your boxes to go home.

    Recent studies by independent national organizations show that very few companies do any pre-show marketing to prospects or clients, and that the number of leads actually followed up after the show is in the single digits!

    This type of behavior makes no sense to me, and is creating a case of diminishing returns for the tradeshow industry as a whole and for those who participate in them. If you were to spend millions of dollars on a Superbowl ad for your company, and then disconnected your phones for the month after the ad ran, you’d consider such behavior ludicrous, wasteful to the nth degree. Yet, that’s exactly what you’re doing when you fail to broadcast your presence at an event, when you pay dearly to participate; spend thousands on a complex display and related collateral material; spend endless time in meetings reviewing a hundred different types of tchochkeys and giveaways; take a week’s worth of time from your key sales people, technical people and administrative staff; when you don’t get full benefit from T&E, including travel, meals, hotels, cabs and entertainment; and then don’t follow up some of the most qualified sales leads and partnership opportunities you’ll ever encounter. Absurd, you say? Commonplace, at best, if we’re to believe the data. And that’s just for one major show – scale that up to include 6-10 shows a year, and you’re watching a pot of gold in lost opportunity fly out the window!

    So how to you capitalize on all that opportunity? Five quick fixes that will cut waste, provide more value and prevent lost opportunity:

    5) Train and select your on-site staff with care. Even for a major show, you don’t have to send the whole team. While a big group of people all dressed alike trolling the floor and inhabiting the exhibit does have some value, especially in reinforcing your brand, it’s a costly and inefficient way to do that, and the job can be better handled by fewer better selected candidates. A mixed bag of junior and senior sales staff, one technical person to act as advisor and closer on the BIG sales, and a couple of engaging administrative folks to help clean up the loose ends, steer traffic to the sales group and provide coverage. That’s it. Train them all to be effective in as many different roles as are appropriate, so there is good overlap, but make sure everyone knows how important this show is to the prosperity of the company, and that all leads, no matter how small or remote, could be important, and are to be treated as such.

    4) Set up a lead management system, and use it. That’s not the same thing as renting the capture machine from the show management’s vendor. This is a system within the company for qualifying, funneling and following up on leads gathered at the show. Your existing prospect database is a good start, but it’s probably not built to handle a big influx of leads in a short time, and likely doesn’t have a good qualifying system within it. It should be designed to work quickly, have all the follow-up materials created in advance and be able to customize them to a certain extent for each lead. Nothing is more impressive than having a quick, well-crafted, specific follow-up note waiting for you when you get back to your room for the evening from a vendor you spoke with that afternoon!

    3) Craft an effective pre-show marketing strategy. If you really want to stand out of the crowd, marketing your presence at the show a couple of weeks beforehand is one of the best ways to do it. You can prompt booth visits, make appointments with big clients or promising prospects who are planning to attend, build attendance in your hospitality suite event, pre-qualify leads, and much more with this simple step. Get access to the registration list from the prior year if it’s available and use it repeatedly and effectively. You’ll be amazed at the resulting traffic.

    2) Set goals for the show that make sense, and hold EVERYONE accountable for meeting them. Especially if this is one of many shows you participate in each year, goal-setting will give you some idea of how worthwhile your tradeshow investment is likely to be. It gives you an ROI variable to push back against when making decisions for next year. Make them just barely reachable, and make them finite and quantifiable – “we will contact and follow-up with 25 new prospects not in our current database at this show.” Now, it’s everybody’s responsibility to be familiar with what’s in that prospect database, know who the big fish are, and engage everyone in a productive, helpful way to make that number attainable. It forces a teamwork approach, and keeps down the finger-pointing later if you don’t hit the number.

    1) See the show as a triple opportunity and treat it as such! How many times do you get to be in a room with a huge universe of prospects and customers, prepared, armed and in a selling environment, all in one week, with your best troops in attendance? Not very often, I’ll wager. So make that opportunity count. Follow-up religiously, engage every reasonable visitor, invest in some staff training, make the display work for you, make sure it carries the brand well and is easy to read and understand, make sure your staff understands the goals and the importance of the results to the success of all concerned. Make sure that lead management system is working for you, not just making you more work.

    You’ve invested a significant chunk of budget to participate in these marketing opportunities – its up to you to make the investment pay back. Enjoy.

  • Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    I’ve long been an advocate of soliciting the help of marketing experts when developing, launching and branding new products, services or businesses. We’ve seen in our practice that the earlier you get the marketing folks involved in the process, the more likely you are to be successful. This is backed by study after study, both anecdotal and empirical, over the last 20 years. How many articles and references have you seen, including obituaries, that say something like “. . . successful business man was a marketing and promotions genius and applied his skills to creating and growing the company . . .” ?

    Clearly, the knowledge of the practice and theory of marketing is a valuable, nee critical skill to have in your bag of management tricks. And indeed, it seems the more input from the marketing folks you get, the faster and bigger the success is! Ramp up times are shorter, development and product lifecycles reduce, launches are more dramatic, and alternate applications and uses surface faster and are more often taken advantage of, when the marketers get heavily involved in the upper echelon decision making.

    So why has it taken so long, and required so much effort for marketers to seek and achieve a true place at the C-level of management structures in the U.S.? The newly-invented Chief Marketing Officer title was a hard fought battle, typically one that is won on an individual basis, and in only a small percentage of companies, often larger and older firms, where upper management is often tinged with risk spreading behaviors rather than overt leadership. Often this battle is won by only the most vocal, dynamic, personable, innovative and connected of marketers. One might say these are inherent traits in every good marketer, but you’d be surprised at some we’ve worked with who are impossibly poor at blowing their own horn while excelling at promoting the business they serve.

    I’m convinced, after working directly with over 100 marketers in the last thirty years, that those who market themselves as well as they do their firms are those destined to go the farthest. In some cases, it’s a matter of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, but that only really works on an internal basis on the way up the ladder in a contained environment. But in this case, they have to not only talk the talk, they have to walk the walk, too. You have to back up the swagger with bottom-line success time after time to truly gain legend status. Just plain visibility alone won’t do it.

    Business executives rise to prominence in their own small world through long-term, solid achievement, aided by public recognition of those achievements and a desire to be associated with those achievements. Which makes it even more amazing that marketers have had such a hard time gaining celebrity status in the business world, as marketers have an endless series of “wins” to point to on a given day.

    Some of the difficulty is that marketers tend to be collaborative, work in teams, even if the team leader works in a supervisory capacity – there’s just too much for one person to really do without spreading the load, and thus the credit. CEO’s get credit for the good decisions, and spread the blame for the bad ones among their top management team. Marketers tend to take it on the chin for the failures, while others take credit for the successes. That shadow tends to keep them in the background, slaving away as good corporate brand stewards, until there’s a regime change.

    The challenge before us as marketers is to loudly and often show the value we contribute to corporate success. We needn’t be shy about putting our names and faces behind the successes we create, because in reality, there is no success in business without something being bought or sold, and we’re the closest to the end of the sales chain and have the best understanding of what customers want and need. That makes our expertise not only critical but invaluable. Don’t be afraid to step up and take credit for the successes, spread the credit as far as you need to, to your team and beyond, but accept the success for what it’s worth without demurring or deferring. On the other side of the coin, never shirk responsibility for the inevitable misses, take them head on, learn from them and apply that education to the next situation. You’ll be applauded and respected for the integrity, so you win anyway.

    Stay the course, be visible, be effective, have an impact, and don’t be afraid of public exposure – you’ve earned every last bit of it. Be the corporate leaders we know you are, but do it in a visible way. Everyone’s a winner in the end when you do.

  • Spring Tradeshow Season is Here – Are You Prepared?

    Spring Tradeshow Season is Here – Are You Prepared?

    In many business verticals, Spring/Summer is trade show season. If your marketing plan includes trade shows for your vertical or peripheral industries, and your booth selections and floor plans are set, now you’re facing the task of pulling together a strategy, designing and fabricating a display of some sort, creating collateral and sales support materials, and training staff to get the biggest bang for your trade show buck.

     

    That last piece of the puzzle, staff training, may be the most overlooked and the most mission critical to achieving your goals for each show.

     

    Firms we’ve worked with treated staff training for trade shows as an after-thought, making seemingly random staff selections, and handing them a brochure and saying “learn this” – not a good idea. Some firms who hire spokesmodels do this, but their goal is different and the model’s role is different than a staff person.

     

    If you’re going to spend many thousands of dollars leasing floor space, designing and fabricating a custom display, paying staff T&E to go to a show and work, feeding them, housing them, and paying expenses for them to entertain clients and potential clients, the people you send ought to at least be proficient enough to maximize the opportunity. Sending the mailroom manager, the receptionist, and two PR people because they are young, unattached, unconstrained and attractive will come back to haunt you when the results for the year’s sales come in. You’ll have a much harder time justifying your budget for trade shows if you don’t show good results. Sending the whole sales team may backfire as well, without at least a few technical people there to answer some of the tougher questions, and some senior management to run the show and meet with those key clients as a show of respect for their past and future business.

     

    Proper selection of a good mix of professionals to man the booth is only part of the equation. Making sure they are all on the same page, with the same message and a similar approach, pushing the same products in the same way, speaking knowledgeably about your products or services, is critical to a good show result. They should all be taught how to use their booth time productively, to make the most of the opportunity, how to engage prospects, how to qualify them, how to screen them, how to steer them to the correct individual internally, how to appear and how to behave when they are “on stage” in the booth.

     

    The other key element of trade show success is the follow-up. Studies by CEIR have shown that nearly 80% of all leads gathered at a trade show are NEVER followed-up. You paid for them, why not use them? When you calculate your cost of acquisition at that trade show for new customers, you’ll realize what a gold mine they can be, if you’ve done your homework and set up a system to make sure the leads generated get followed properly.

     

    Some companies do this extremely well, and they usually let technology do the work for them. I know of several companies that go to shows with a complete set of pre-written e-mail follow-up letters, divided into different levels of interest, different product interests or whatever their scheme supports. As soon as a lead is logged, either from a business card or through the badge reader system, an e-mail is issued to follow up, send links to the company website, impart additional information, give out coupons, keys to prizes, whatever. Sales people have the opportunity to add personal notes to these, to add specific answers to technical questions. Sometimes these systems are extremely fast – I’ve received e-mails on my smart phone within minutes of leaving the booth!

     

    Whatever system you employ, make sure the staff is trained to use it, and that they use it often. And remember, it’s not usually about quantity, it’s about quality. If there are lots of leads, but the resulting sales after diligent follow-up are low, maybe that’s not the best venue, and it should be reconsidered carefully for next year’s plan. On the other hand, if you only get five leads, but they all convert, your cost of acquisition will be very high!

     

    Trade shows are a lot of work, use a lot of resources, and can be an extremely effective tool for generating new leads and new customers, for polishing your brand within the industry, for launching a new product, or for doing product research. But without a properly trained staff, good follow-up mechanisms, and a solid integration plan, all those dollars and hours are for naught. Good luck!

     

    If you liked what you read here, and found it valuable and would like to read more,  pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

    https://www.createspace.com/4066578

  • Be An Agent For Change

    Be An Agent For Change

    At it’s root, marketing is about change. Changing perceptions, changing appearance, changing buying behavior. But if marketers are to conquer the C-level chambers and earn a real seat at the management table, they have to be an agent for change in the business. Simply executing within the frame isn’t good enough any longer.

    It’s up to us as marketers to lead the charge into the future, to examine and adjust business models, to question the status quo and come up with workable solutions, without reservations, obstacles, roadblocks, and excuses. Lots of platitudes surround this type of behavior, but the ones that i prefer are “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” and “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward, there is no standing still”. Food for thought . . .

    CMOs have it within their power to revolutionize their businesses, they just have to give themselves permission to do it. Use the powerful imagination you were blessed with and put it in gear to create the next step in the logical growth path of your business, or better yet, leapfrog the next step and go ahead by two! The competition will never catch up!

    Change effected is usually change managed. Making changes for change’s sake is a short-lived phenomenon, one that shakes things up, but doesn’t move the needle for long. To affect long-lasting change, the path must be plotted before it can be blazed. Note the spelling, Plotted, not Plodded. You don’t have to take a year to plan the next two – change can be made quickly and still be lasting. Better to try five or six different things now than plan one thing perfectly.

    Go forth bravely, boldly, and be a change agent – you’ll be surprised what just the change in mindset will bring . . .!

    For more on becoming an agent of change, subscribe to my blog above, or follow me on Twitter @docpoulos – let me know what you think! and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”