Q2 2009 / There and back again: Part Two of a Two Part Series – How to gain the most out of your next trade show
Kevin Scully
Scully Communications
Kevin@ScullyComm.com
Types of trade show attendees
Trade shows attendees fall into two categories – potential and improbable customers. As an exhibitor, of course you are more interested in the former.
In any booth, you will find two types of potential customers:
Intentional Traffic: Those you reached and drove to your booth.
Casual Traffic: Those who wander in but have either ignored, not received, or completely forgot your advance promotions.
Intentional Traffic
Don’t assume too much. Even intentional visitors who plan to visit your booth may have trouble finding it or simply forget.
To address this some elements of your booth design should echo your pre-show marketing efforts. This is essential for absent-minded visitors. The echo could be as simple as a headline or an easel with a reproduction of the e-mailer – or as complex as a booth completely designed to link to your promotional theme.
The importance of the “echo factor” is inversely proportional to the uniqueness of your promotion. So if your traffic builder is as common as an iPod giveaway, be certain to do a very good job branding your echo. Otherwise all you have created is another booth where customers can try to take a long shot at winning an iPod.
Always keep in mind your goal is gaining permanent business, not transient attention.
Casual Traffic
As the name implies, Casual Traffic results from a spontaneous decision, typically from two stimuli:
Recognition: The visitor recognizes you, your product, or your company.
Attraction: The visitor is lured by a message, perhaps promotional or product-related.
Exhibitors who do no advanced promotions depend entirely on casual traffic. This can actually work if the nature of the exhibitor’s business has a broad or obvious appeal. It can also work for niche players if their products and messages are both simple and direct.
Counting on casual traffic is dangerous since its success depends entirely on the whim of customers offered no other proposition than, “here I am.”
In contrast, exhibitors who choose to promote to customers in advance, offer the customer a reason to visit – what’s in it for them.
As mentioned in Part I of this article, there are so many exhibitors at any given show, that we cannot leave it to chance that we will reach our audience. This “numbers game” works against casual traffic, especially in larger shows, where only a subset of the visitors walk down your aisle.
Most exhibitors should not depend on casual traffic. The good news is that any attraction devices employed that help boost casual traffic will also help intentional visitors locate the booth.
Build a booth that works
Your booth should echo the pre-show and web-based promotions. This creates a
“repeat exposure” experience crucial to customer retention.
The booth should also be designed to appeal to customer interests, so try to think like them when putting it together.
For example, resist the urge to use product names as headlines, such as “New Elutoraptor 500” – unless you’re absolutely sure that your audience is thoroughly familiar with the current Elutoraptor product line.
Clarity is critical. Exhibitors often try to be “cute” at the expense of clarity. These exhibitors should resist the urge to lead with a flashy tag line such as, “Ajax Company – tomorrow’s flow technology today” unless the majority of its customers are intimately aware that at Ajax “flow technology” refers to liquid micro-valves and not corrosion-resistant industrial gas valves. Unless your company is already famous, be direct when you project the nature of your business.
Keep detailed specifications off your booth. They require extra time for readers to process. That time translates into a lost opportunity to grab their attention. Provide those “<0.005microjoules” specifications in one-on-one chats. On the booth, offer customers a simple, specific user advantage. The only exception is when the specification itself is a killer advantage easily understood by your target customers.
In fact, when it comes to booth messages, resist the urge to decorate displays with any elaborate detailed descriptions – less is more. Use visual aids, demos, and in-person discussions to deliver the details.
For your booth signs, use more pictures and fewer words. A picture of your product in use is worth a lot – especially those that tell a story. Try to avoid static “product shots” especially if the product is already displayed in the booth.
Keep it simple
Remember, you’ll have around four seconds to engage the casual visitor’s attention and stimulate a decision to stop at your booth. Customers wandering the exhibit floor are probably on their way from one intentional visit to another.
You’re hoping to intercept them while they are focused on something else and suffering from information overload.
Your booth should offer a little relief from that overload while at the same time supply a simple answer to their primary question: “What’s in it for me?”
Use of booth space
Have a few stool-height chairs for customers use only. Customers can relax a bit and “take a load off their feet.” A stool height chair keeps them at eye level, and the banter on business. If they become too comfortable the staff ends up missing new traffic while they baby-sit potential prospects that have already been handled.
The staff
Ideally, the booth staff should be a mix of sales, marketing, and technical people. That’s a healthy combination to address attendee needs and one that keeps everyone on the team in the loop.
In terms of staff numbers two people per 10 feet of space is a good ratio. More than that is usually unnecessary and too crowded.
Plan what you want to say to your booth visitors – but not to the point of canning a script. Do make sure that the entire staff is on-board with the plan.
No rule is inflexible, but the goal is to execute the plan, not to “wing it.” Feel free to say the same things over and over. You will be the only one bored by the repetition.
Every customer is different. Pre-set in your mind how you will handle:
- The visitor who walks in and says,
- “What’s new?”
- Happy customers coming to chat.
- Happy customers coming to buy more stuff.
- Unhappy customers who are there to complain.
- Future customers who are there to learn.
- Friends, old and new.
Any of the above who simply won’t leave.
Create a quick demo or walk-through that involves action or pictures and few words. Adding action makes the event more memorable. Adding details makes it more forgettable. Simply cover the unique and memorable selling proposition of the product and the greatest customer need.
Coach the staff to avoid canned phases like “Can I help you?” or “Do you have any questions?” Customers instinctively recoil from these worn out and intimidating phrases.
Instead, just say something like: “Good Morning!” and look friendly. Or, be descriptive, and pleasant: “We make high pressure valves, and I do a great demo!” You may tire of your greeting, but pick a good one (or two) and use them over and over. Your customers will hear it only once.
Also, if a staff member sees someone eyeing the exhibit, coach them to be approachable: tell them to smile and wave the person into
the booth.
Be prepared to be clear and succinct. Resist the urge to plunge into detail because most customers will forget 70% of what is said, and will attribute 50% of what they remember to another exhibitor. This effect is called Trade Show Amnesia. Therefore, save the details for a sales call follow up.
Booth behavior
Here are three quick favorite rules for booth etiquette (there are, of course, other rules too):
- Don’t stand in front of that carefully-worded signage. Let attendees have a clear view
- Maintain an approachable (and awake) body language when waiting for your next visitor.
- Ask everyone to take their Bluetooth headsets out of their ears!
- Take-aways: thanks for the memories
- Put a printed take-away in every customer’s hand. A brochure is not a take-away. Bring only a small supply of brochures for visitors who insist on asking for one.
- Your printed take-away should include an echo of your demo/walk-thru, along with your show message and the URL of your virtual show (see Part I of this article, Q1 2009). It does not need to be elaborate – a simple postcard-sized piece will do.
- The take-away clinches the continuity in messages that follow a pattern: pre-event promotions, at-event demos, take-away handout, and finally follow up sales calls.
- When your visitor is back at the hotel or back home after the show, it gives him or her something to trigger a recall of the visit. It fights Trade Show Amnesia.
- Creating a take-away piece might seem expendable and wasteful. It is not. It’s a link in a continuous chain of repeated exposures. It keeps the message alive after the customer walks out of the booth.
How to collect leads
Collect accurate mailing and email address information from everyone. The majority of registrants will not include their email address. Therefore, be sure to ask for it.
Also, take good notes. Most staffers will develop Trade Show Amnesia as well as their customers and those notes will help complete the sale after the event.
There are lots of “LeadTriever” systems offered by trade shows offering the option of customizing a lead processing system using a tree of questions to process on a hand-held or desktop interface. However, unless the question-tree is short, the process will not be followed by the booth staff.
Finally, be sure not to overdo a good thing. Excessive lead documentation can lead to inefficient and inconsistent lead collection. Minimally, collect enough information to provide some level of qualification and enable intelligent post-show follow up.
The press
Obviously, members of the technical press are not going to buy anything. As a result, some exhibitors have been known to treat them as second class attendees. That’s a big mistake. The technical press can really help you sell by increasing the range and impact of
your message.
Invite them to your booth and welcome them when they arrive. You may even want to
choose a member of your team to handle the press. That person should seek out the press, visit their booths, and extend a personal invitation to your booth. The goal is to have them learn about your firm’s products to provide coverage in their publications.
Courting the press is not only a good idea for “post-show coverage” – it establishes a working relationship with their editorial team that can yield long term benefits.
Show respect for editorial discretion. Lead the press to the water. Drinking is their option.
Keep a press kit handy
Prepare a press kit with descriptions of your product news, a company background, and pertinent photos. Supply it on a professional-looking CD with a cover letter and an invitation to the booth, and contact information. Pack it all in a folder or envelope, and label it: “Press Kit.”
It is a good idea to put the Press Kit on your website. You an should also include a web link in the press kit, in case the editors lose the CD.
Resist the urge to put everything into the press kit. Include only those things you would like to see in post-show coverage, plus necessary background information.
Take the press kit to the exhibits of the publications you want to promote your message. Bring a stack of kits (about 30 is a good number for a large show) to the press room. Check back at the press room periodically, and replenish the supply if needed.
Every ending is a beginning
A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If the firm has done a good job with its Strategy, Traffic Generation, and Execution, it is now positioned to capitalize on all these efforts.
The most important thing to do when a show ends is to tie the follow-up back to the customer’s real needs which can be determined to some extent from your staff’s questions and notes taken during the show.
Immediately following the event, follow up with marketing activities that include the following:
- A letter, thanking the customer for the visit.
- Information, per the customer’s query.
- Instructions for the customer to seek further information.
Deliver the follow up either by email or pmail and be sure to include an echo of the show-related message.
Mail out another copy of the take-away
If you used a take-away card at the show itself, send another copy of it – or a derivative of it – in the follow-up packet that you send out to booth visitors. This is an opportunity for branding by applying repeated exposures to the firm’s message.
Providing another copy of the show take-away, including the demonstration message, is another opportunity to mitigate Trade Show Amnesia and set the firm apart from its competition.
In that communication, point customers to the virtual trade show, if you built one. Remind them they can view papers or posters or other event-specific items. Post the names of the Gizmo winners. You may even want to offer new prospects a second shot at winning a Gizmo by responding along with obtaining a copy of your white paper or applications CD.
The communication could even include some type of “social networking” information customers may find of value.
Keep in touch
Stay in constant contact with the prospects using a monthly newsletter or a quarterly product update. These prospects are members of the firm’s target customer group. You talked with them. You qualified them. Don’t waste that information. Some conversions take longer
than others.
Kevin Scully
Scully Communications is a marketing communications consultancy in New Jersey, USA. Kevin can be reached at +1 201 825 4186 or at Kevin@ScullyComm.com
