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Tag: Tradeshow

  • Attendee Acquisition Is A Long-Term Investment That Pays Off

    Attendee Acquisition Is A Long-Term Investment That Pays Off

    With the recent rise in attention among marketers to customer engagement, and customer experience, customer journey, call it what you like, event marketing has risen on the marketing totem pole to a higher priority than ever. But with that new status comes a new sense of accountability as well – “If we’re going to host all these people and feed them, educate them, allow them into our world to meet us and each other, I want to see that the expense associated with that activity pays off . . .”

     

    Finding out what that expense is would be a logical first step, and then bench-marking that expense against what competitors are paying might be another. We’re marketers, after all, competitive and curious, and we test and measure everything!

     

    The finding out part is pretty simple. The 2016 Benchmark & Trends in Attendee Acquisition study was released by Lippman Connects, Exhibit Surveys, Inc. and Tradeshow Executive magazine as a joint study. That study shows that the average cost of attendee acquisition marketing is over $300,000 per event, and when you get more granular, the average show with flat or inflating growth spends roughly $32.66 for each attendee they attract. If you’re spending less than that, and your show is still growing year over year, then you have reached a level of marketing efficiency that bests roughly half the shows out there – congratulations. If you’re spending less than that, and your shows are declining, you have a decision to make: Invest more in your marketing efforts, across all channels, unless you have clear evidence of an inefficient or low-performing channel, or continue to contract until you level back out and your attendance flattens, and then re-examine the relevance of your event to the current audience.

     

    Now the value-tracking portion, which is a little tougher. Start with how many visitors you’re attracting for each paid exhibitor. This is a good number to know for marketing purposes, because exhibitors use this to calculate their expense of acquisition for new customers from your show, and use it as a benchmark when making the decision to exhibit in your show. According to the same study, shows studied had 22 attendees per exhibitor and scheduled the floor time for a total of 21 hours or more.

     

    But attendees don’t just sign up for the exhibitors. Some 50+% of show attendees are there as conference enrollees, and the show portion is just gravy. 42% indicated that they were interested in the exhibits. Smart show organizers recognize this, and are attempting to make this portion even larger by enlisting the help of the exhibitors themselves. Pre-show marketing by exhibitors is a staple of attendee attraction, and the more you encourage and enable your exhibitors to market their presence at your show, the more attendees you end up with, at no additional expense. That’s a win for everyone!

     

    One of the key challenges in event marketing is justifying that $32 per head acquisition cost, and more importantly, tying it back to a specific marketing activity. Given that most event marketers use a broad variety of channels to market events, including direct mail, traditional print advertising, where appropriate radio and TV advertising, social media promotions, outdoor, e-mail, and other channels, linking any single activity to an uptick or drop in attendance is difficult at best. Your post-show survey work should shed some light on what the most likely driving force behind registration might have been, but it’s really the integrated effort that drives the boat on this one – each channel supports the others to drive overall awareness and memorability for you events, and what you’re testing in your survey is simply the one channel that most closely came to triggering the registration process.

     

    If you do a lot of digital marketing, and have links sprinkles all over everything that drives traffic to your registration page or an online form, it is very likely that this will appear to be what is driving attendance – but is it? If you put up billboards surrounding the venue at a consumer show, and get a lot of walk-in traffic (non-pre-registered), is the billboard driving attendance, or is it just a reminder of the date? If you ask attendees point blank why they registered, chances are excellent the answer won’t be “I got an e-mail and filled out the registration form.” It will more likely take the form of “I saw that my colleagues were going and wanted to go with them,” or “we go every year to see the new technology, and to reconnect with colleagues in the industry.” Those results are harder to directly link to a single marketing activity, but go directly to awareness of your event, which is driven by all of your integrated efforts combined.

     

    Strong, consistent research can help pin down what efforts are working the hardest, and you can use the data to reallocate resources in your budget to take advantage of certain triggers, and drive incremental growth in the short term. But real, sustainable growth is a long-term commitment of time, effort, and resources to contain and drive momentum year over year, and requires constant testing and reinvestment to show results.

  • 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 . . .

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  • Exhibitions and Trade Shows – A Thing of the Past?

    Exhibitions and Trade Shows – A Thing of the Past?

    Guest blog

    Posted by garethcase ⋅ August 30, 2011 ⋅ 5 Comments

    It’s a subject that comes up every year. There is always an Account Manager who wants to do an exhibition because it’s closely aligned to their vertical market, but is there still real value in these events?

    The internet’s exponential growth over the last decade has meant that we have access to pretty much any information we want, no matter where we are or what device we are viewing it on. Research in general, for that latest gadget, your next holiday or even which e-marketing platform you are going to deploy is at our finger tips 24 hours a day.

    Before these technological advances, research was the reason I used to attend trade shows, but over the last 10 years, I have noticed a dramatic decline in both the size of events and the number of attendees.

    There are many reasons company’s choose to exhibit at trade shows. For example, it’s a good forum to launch your brand into a new market or geography. It’s also good to have brand presence at an event well subscribed to by your customers. The other main driver is lead generation. How many of you can honestly hold your hands up and say you have had a really good ROI from events and exhibitions overall? I hope I hear about some great successes but in my experience the ROI does not stack up. Yes there have been shows where we have converted some great opportunities, bit If I compare it £ to £ against over marketing activities it probably comes out bottom of the list. When working out the ROI, don’t forget to include the investment of time from your employees, a trade show with 4 of your sales team not only means you’re paying them to be there, but also missing out on them selling elsewhere during that time.

    If you are going to do trade shows and exhibitions then my advice is to pick niche events aligned to specific vertical markets you want to attack, rather that generic shows that cover your solution/product set. The key is to develop a proposition that really helps your target market overcome a ‘common challenge’. This way you will quickly gain engagement and been seen as a value add rather than a box shifter.

    Surely it’s better to be the only company at an event that offers your products and solutions than being one of 150 all offering something similar?

    My Response:

    Gareth – I, too, have sat on both sides of this fence, organizing some of the largest industrial events in the country (US) and attending and exhibiting in hundreds of shows for a variety of clients. I, too, have seen reductions in attendance and square feet sold, likely a factor of a combination of better information sources (the internet and elsewhere) and the current economy. However, if applied to the marketing plan in a focused strategic way, there is still a huge value in live trade events. NOTHING can replace the face-to-face interaction, the energy, the insight gathered at a live event. True, hard data research can be gained electronically, but the “Who” portion of the show is just as important as the “What” that you get electronically – seeing your competitors approach, viewing new entrants into the market for possible partnership, gauging the health and direction of an industry at large, are invaluable to the well-rounded executive.

    True, lead generation is one of the principal reasons to exhibit, and many shows don’t support this activity aggressively enough, though they should. But on the corporate side, 8 out of 10 viable leads are NEVER followed up with – after spending all that time, money and energy to exhibit, craft a display, man the exhibit with top, expensive sales staff, the leads lie fallow, reducing the ROI by a huge percentage. Shame on the sales manager who lets this practice continue . . .

    There are indeed numerous branding tactics associated with a tradeshow outside your individual exhibit, but some of the guerrilla tactics mentioned here in other poster’s comments would do more than “irritate the organizers” – they can get them thrown out of the venue, ostracized within the industry, their brand destroyed or reduced to a cartoonish bottom-feeding lout. If you work closely with the organizer, such tactics can be negotiated and usually an accommodation made so that these activities are viable and above-board, and a win for everyone.

    The branding aspect cannot be overstated – you’re given an opportunity to put your best foot forward in the most prominent arena your company has – a room full of customers and potential customers! Can’t ask for more than that in ANY business. When all this is factored in to the ROI equation, a well-selected show that gives you a forum to launch a new product, do primary customer research, show off a rebranding, put on a good face for the industry, and eyeball all your competitors in one room is an unbeatable opportunity. The rumors of the tradeshow’s death are greatly exaggerated and superbly premature . . .