EVENTS MARKETING
Events Marketing is becoming more of a practical and economical way to gain mass visibility for small businesses. With the numerous opportunities, it is not surprising to see businesses in their start-up phase competing at the same Events Marketing with more established companies.
When you are considering your company’s participation in a specific event it is important to understand that Events Marketing requires more Strategic & Logistics Planning than any other type of Marketing.
What many participants tend to forget is that their presence requires exceptionally more detail than just having a product or service displayed.
Interaction – Covering All the Bases
There are essentially two (2) marketing scenarios in a booth setting.
First, Sales and moving product. Second, Educating Event Attendees about a Product and/or Service your company offers and is featuring at the event.
None of these scenarios will be successful unless you have sufficient salespersons for these business interactions.
The most important element is to arm your booth with knowledgeable, professionally dressed, engaging, and approachable personnel.
Unlike interactions at your company’s offices where clients are coming to you with specific needs, Events Marketing interactions are cold starts and you have absolutely no idea the interest level attendees have for your product or service.
Your booth should include Staff Members trained to weed out the browsers and target those showing active interest.
Those who show genuine interest should then be introduced to staff who are knowledgeable and trained in demonstration and have experience in Sales Funneling.
The biggest mistake you can make is to assume the level of interest a visitor has regarding your product or service. There is nothing more irritating to a visitor than being bombarded with information because they happen to be near your booth and obviously are only casual browsers.
Not only will you gain a higher rapport with your audience if you concentrate on asking engaging questions, but you will also be able to quickly establish who to spend more time with. After all, your time is just as valuable as theirs.
Asking, “Are you interested in learning about our products?” is not an invitation to break into an endless monologue. Most visitors may say, “Sure,” out of sheer politeness.
Ask them what exactly interests them and why. Keep your initial response short and always end it by asking them a question.
Even when you find a genuinely interested party, always allow them to lead the conversation by asking them more pointed questions. You will make a much more substantial impact on that individual if you spend 80% of your conversation building a relationship with them and the rest on selling.
Creating Activity & Interest
Demonstrating a product or service is one of the best ways to create an activity around your booth. Crowds draw crowds because nobody wants to think they are missing out on something that appears exciting or new.
When planning to offer a demonstration, clearly know what you want to obtain from it. Crowds are great as long as you have control of them and are making an impact on most of your audience. Your demonstration should include interaction from your audience by allowing them to touch the product, by asking questions, and by asking participants to participate. Remember to make them laugh when possible. When we laugh others are more relaxed and their minds are more open and willing to accept new information.
Demonstrations are ideal if your booth is set up for selling products on the spot.
However, you usually have only 30 seconds to capture a viewer’s interest. Do not try to be the demonstrator and the salesperson. The solution here is to have one staff member performing demonstrations and another talking to the audience.
If an individual shows strong interest, invite them away from the general demonstration. and have another staff member available to perform one-on-one demos with them. People are more apt to buy on the spot after a personal interaction is established and you will also leave a greater impression that may influence future sales.
All booth personnel should understand the importance of eye contact, smiling, and body language. Your audience is a reflection of what you portray. People tend to mirror the other person – if you smile, they smile; if you are energetic, they become energetic, and so forth.
Demonstrations are important to the success of any booth and don’t always have to be live. The use of video or computer presentations, music, or spinning displays are an option. The key here is to draw attention and create movement within your booth. You have 30 seconds to catch their attention – be creative!
Leading to Success
It is very common to offer a Giveaway during a Marketing Event. This is a sure-fire way to drum up leads, however, if your prize box is accessible to anyone who wants to fill out the prize form, you are basically creating more work for yourself then necessary.
The intention you should have with your Giveaway is only to invite those showing a genuine interest.
Unless you have a solid strategy on how to deal with hundreds of entry leads, do not display your Giveaway. Offer it verbally and only to those that you have had a chance to converse with.
20 qualified leads are far more valuable than 100 casual ones.
At the close of your conversation with them, tell them about your Giveaway and ask if they would like to fill out an entry form. Display clearly on this form a checkbox stating, “Yes, I would like for you to contact me with more information about…”
Giving a person a choice, in essence, is allowing them to feel that they are in control of their decision and you will find them more welcoming when you do call them back.
Also, do not have them fill out the form and stuff it in a box. Instead, hold on to that entry form, and after they have left your booth, use the back of the form to take quick notes about any personal information or interests you gleaned during your conversation. This is a fabulous way to personalize your follow-up contact and will help build a stronger relationship.
Your first project within the week after the show is to contact each of these people.
Call those who invited you to contact them directly regarding specific information and mail everybody a personal ‘Thank You’ note combined with your brochure. If possible, write something a little more personal that relates to the specific information you wrote about them on the back of their entry form.
Your booth impact and your interaction are the key elements to your success at Event Marketing, big or small.
You should be fully prepared with a solid strategy, professional personnel, and quality display accessories.
Remember to treat your presence as an environment more so for building relationships and creating a positive first impression than creating direct sales. Consumers generally need to see your presence, whether it be at a show or from other marketing media, 4 to 6 times before they make a buying decision.
Integration: A Formula for Successful Events Marketing
In an uncertain climate, with companies in every industry sector more pressured to reach customers directly, Events Marketing is an increasingly critical investment – and it’s even more critical for companies to ensure that their Events Marketing investment delivers solid ROI.
While there’s no “one size fits all” solution, there is a formula that can improve the success of any Events Marketing marketing effort: integration.
Admittedly, integration has been an Events Marketing industry buzzword for some time. But while everyone talks about it, few accomplish it. Understanding how the integration works is a first step towards unlocking this powerful formula to utilize Events Marketing as a weapon yielding measurable results and dominating mindshare at any event.
Integrating Your Brand
It’s a fact that one of the number one ways business-to-business customers interact with brands today is on the Events Marketing floor. Yet Events Marketing is among the most neglected points of communication from a branding point of view.
There is often limited attention paid to the larger brand strategy, and often, with diversified global companies, inconsistent and confusing branding among divisions. It’s as though the integrated brand strategy ended with the advertising. Yet the customer’s exposure to advertising represents a pretty small piece of the pie in terms of time. The b-to-b customer’s real interaction with the brand begins after that, on the Event Marketing floor.
From a branding perspective, it’s critical to ensure that a company’s identity on the Event Marketing floor is consistent with its broader brand identity. Booth design, interactive media, collateral, messaging, and staff – all should be integrated with the brand identity outside the convention hall.
All should be consistent with other key marketing categories: in addition to advertising, PR, Internet marketing, direct mail, channel marketing, field sales force strategy, etc. Integrating knowledge and investments in these categories is critical to forging an effective, consistent presence on the Event Marketing floor.
If you aggressively leverage your brand and make it an integral part of the Events Marketing strategy, you will get tremendous velocity and return on your investment of marketing dollars.
Integrating Your Strategy
The aesthetics of your display plays a large factor in what draws traffic into your booth during the show but keep in mind that it is your personal impact on this traffic that is going to guarantee repeat visits to your outside establishment once the show is over. If your attitude is that your presence alone is going to create substantial clientele then the bottom line is – you are making a very costly mistake.
Creating a powerful and compelling Event experience starts with building an integrated Events Marketing strategy. The first phase involves engaging in a thorough and effective understanding of the desired outcome, the target audience, and how the Event content and experience should be designed to impact them most effectively.
The second phase involves integrating and aligning each element of the Event Marketing effort – pre-show, at-show, and post-show – to support that strategy. A dominating marketing effort integrates an array of pre-show audience acquisition and contact methods that drive results: message-driven collateral, direct mail programs, event-specific Web sites, e-business cards and event teasers, incentive programs, sponsorships, telemarketing, and email campaigns, just to name a few. At-show, integrate every element of the experience, including architecture, graphics, signage, product presentations, hands-on demonstrations, live entertainment, and show giveaways.
Ironically, two areas that many marketers neglect are lead management (see below) and staff training. Since the on-site staff can determine the success or failure of the whole Event Marketing program, we train our clients’ exhibit personnel and even provide staff to communicate the brand or product, connect with the audience, extract information and effectively hand that information off.
Finally, integrating post-show measurement and tracking is critical to protecting your Events investment – both by optimizing lead tracking and by enabling continuous adjustments and improvements to your Events Marketing program.
Integrating Your Audience Acquisition, Lead Management & Measurement
Too many companies do a great job of creating an Events Marketing experience that attracts new leads – and then fail to follow through with them. That’s kind of like buying a Sub-Zero and leaving the door open. As a result, marketers are not able to measure success on a quantitative basis.
To achieve and demonstrate quantitative results, we work with clients to integrate lead capture and tracking with their measurement programs by leveraging Relationship Development TechnologyTM (RDT). RDT is a combination of hardware, software, and services that make it easy to capture event data, report on it, and feed it seamlessly into your Customer Relationship Management System.
Using handheld and notebook input devices, the booth demonstrator captures attendee data and is prompted to ask the attendee targeted relationship questions. Data is tracked throughout the show, and visitors can continuously update their profiles with additional product interest information. On-site and remotely using RDT, event managers can run tactical reports, analyze traffic, product requests, and patterns and conduct investment analysis. This makes it easy to track success and make necessary modifications.
Post-event, each attendee immediately receives a customized thank you email with hotlinks to exactly the product information they requested, as well as optionally personalized Web pages. (This cuts down on expensively printed booth collateral – half of which the typical attendee throws in the trash.) RDT also categorizes the leads and survey information and creates lead profiles. This information, along with a final analysis report, can be turned out in under three business days – versus the four- to six-week turnaround most services offer.
ROI and ROO reporting should be ongoing and continuous. During the event, Events Marketing marketers need real-time reports on booth traffic and product interest. After the event, they need reports breaking down leads by demographics, company type, geography, and other parameters. Throughout the life of the program – and particularly as leads generated on the Events Marketing floor are picked up through other events and sales calls – it’s critical to ensure that all your valuable lead and measurement data is integrated into a single, powerful information warehouse.
Integrating Your Events Marketing Vendors
From a business perspective, it’s far more efficient to integrate all of the different strategic, tactical, and technical elements involved in delivering an Events Marketing marketing program – rather than trying to secure one company to design and fabricate your property, one to provide program management, one to provide theatrical presentations, one to measure outcomes and another to produce adjunct events.
Events Marketing marketers should look for partners who can deliver on the full spectrum of marketing challenges involved – rather than accepting the frustration of having to assemble all the pieces themselves.
Doing more with fewer vendors saves an enormous amount of time ramping up partners on your culture, your portfolio products/brands, your business development and marketing strategies, your competitors, and syncing with internal stakeholders.
Marketers spend less time educating and managing a stable of disjointed vendors, and more time marketing. Working with a sole-source partner also increases accountability, impact, and ROI. Overall costs decrease due to the inherent efficiencies of working with a global sourcing manager. Paradoxically, by working with sole-source Events Marketing partners, marketers end up with a less biased approach.
An agency with a truly integrated offering of communications services is inherently much more objective in its recommendations and counsel. Conversely, an exhibiting vendor is likely to recommend the same solution for every marketing communications challenge: “Build a booth.”
For business and consumers brands that depend on face-to-face interaction to tip the balance with prospects, or pharmaceutical companies eager to reach so-called “no-see docs” (i.e., physicians who won’t deal directly with sales reps), Events Marketings are a priceless opportunity to get a product or message directly to key audiences. And because Events Marketing deliver bottom-line return – a return that can be tracked and quantified – they represent a solid investment relative to less measurable marketing disciplines.
Thus it only makes sense that it’s more important than ever to ensure that an investment in Events Marketing marketing delivers effective results and clear returns. And it makes even more sense to ensure that your Events Marketing marketing program takes a truly integrated approach.
For more information, please contact us at 406 382 9323, Monday through Friday, 9-5 pm (MST).
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