As a savvy organiser, your perennial challenge may well be about two things: Churn, or how you get more exhibitors to come back next time, and connected with this, how to improve the quality of their exhibiting.
You might also be concerned about proving that live marketing – especially in the B2B space – works, demonstrably. So my challenge to organisers is always how many of your staff, in particular your sales and marketing teams, understand what makes an exhibitor successful, and what makes a successful exhibitor?
Exhibitors need educating. In particular they need to see and understand the evidence that live marketing, trade shows, congresses and conferences benefit the growth of a company on many levels. Strategically, not just tactically.
So the language you need to use in the future is that which connects live marketing to a company’s business plan. The questions that an organisers’ sales and marketing teams should be asking are not ‘how much space do you want’, ‘what sponsorship do you need’, and ‘when will you sign up?’.
Rather they should be asking ‘by how much do you want to grow your business over the next year?’ ‘how much of that will come from your existing customers and distributors and how much of that do you need from new customers?’ and ‘what is the value of the new business pipeline that you wish to generate from your live marketing programme?’.
Not until these questions have been satisfactorily answered can an organiser offer the right package of space, sponsorship, symposia, seminars and so on, and intelligently link them to the client company’s business growth strategy.
I hear of some organisers whose churn rate is upwards of 50 per cent per show. I speak to conference and congress organisers who wish that their exhibitors attended more in their series of events. And of course I hear from exhibitors who haven’t really identified what benefits and value they have received from their presence at a particular event (at a recent Masterclass a survey of exhibitors revealed that over 90 per cent of them had not measured their results).
So organisers, ask yourselves: who do you want to speak to, what do you want to say to them and what do you need to know?
First, who do you want to speak to? My suggestion would be that you need to segment your market in a slightly different way, because you can’t speak to everybody at once. You might wish to prioritise from the following:
- Non-exhibitors: people who have never engaged in live marketing or trade shows before. What do you need to say to them and what do you need to know about them?
- Complacent exhibitors: they’ll always come to the show, but are not quite convinced or certain what they are getting. What language do you need to adopt to reinforce their commitment to your event and get them to perform better.
- First-time exhibitors: these are a major source of future revenue for any organiser. What techniques do they need to adopt, what strategy or plan have they put in place to maximise and measure their impact at the show, and what do you as organisers need to know to furnish them fully with all the tools they need to deliver a resounding success and beg for more space in the future?
- Probably the most sensitive group of all are the MLTDs: the Most Likely To Defect. These are exhibitors and sponsors, who you can identify as ‘last-ditch exhibitors’. They’re doing it one more time, either to prove that it really doesn’t work, or to satisfy themselves once and for all that it’s still worth attending. These are often large companies who are questioning their own confidence in a live marketing environment and they need to be shown a failsafe way of generating a better result than they’ve ever had.
- Finally, you might wish to consider those who have already defected: It hasn’t worked for them, and they’ve gone away. What can you do to bring them back?
I’m delighted to say that there is a vast amount of evidence with case histories to validate exhibiting at trade shows and congresses all over the world.
However, in all the above cases the language needs to change. Your sales and marketing teams need to become business consultants. They need a suite of questions which will swiftly get to the nub of what client activity needs to take place to make sure that an integrated Live Marketing strategy is in place, and that it includes your events. We have a name for this particular process: S.P.E.C.
Today the most successful businesses grow by combining social media with events. Take the music industry - it’s no longer about selling records or discs, it’s about generating enough excitement to drive fans to a live event. Exhibitions, tradeshows, congresses and conferences need to adopt the same mindset.
There is no escaping exhibitor education, at both the strategic business level, outlining what live marketing can do to grow their organisation, and at the tactical level, explaining what works and what can never work on your stand.
Logistically, educating global exhibitors is challenging. But you have to start somewhere.
One often-overlooked opportunity is at the show itself. How many organisers hold a live marketing masterclass or workshop at their own event?
Not so much for the exhibitors who are already there, but rather for the visitors who are ‘tyre-kicking’ the show with a view to exhibiting next time round.
A simple one-hour workshop alongside the ‘product’ itself – your show – promoted to those visitors who may when registering disclose that they might be interested in exhibiting next time, is one of the most powerful, but overlooked opportunities.
For the last 15 years our consultancy has only ever offered exhibitor education and processes – and we guarantee our results. We’ve worked with global multinational companies and tiny owner managed enterprises and applied our somewhat counterintuitive techniques in every case, generating astonishing and repeatable results.
Imparting knowledge and taking thought leadership in this industry is more powerful than simply selling some square metres of space. Once you have shown that you know what you are talking about, the space will sell itself.
Masterclasses, workshops, in-company consulting are in themselves a form of live marketing. And while webinars, downloaded planning tools and books are invaluable, they are not live marketing, which is the business we are all in.
We have worked with many organisers in every aspect of Live Marketing to up-sell exhibitors, reduce churn, and acquire new clients. We have transformed the experience for our trade show clients and for organisers all over the world.
Promoting live marketing as an essential ingredient in a company’s promotional strategy, must be the right idea for any organiser today and in the future. And the first steps are to make sure your own sales and marketing teams are speaking business language, and to educate the exhibitors, face-to-face, by whatever means possible. Start planning now, and transform your trade shows.
Blaskey on S.P.E.C.
- Selecting the right activity to deliver the business plan, whether these are professionally organised trade shows, conferences, congresses or some other Live Marketing activity.
- Planning every aspect meticulously. Our clients are subjected to a 20 stage process, which takes them on a journey that starts with defining clear objectives, by numbers, and ends with reviewing their whole Live Marketing programme.
- Execution alignment on objectives and messaging will dictate what the stand experience, the space, the booth, needs to look like to generate a journey which ensures a consistent visitor experience every time. Active listening via feedback, sales leads, requests for future meetings and the degree to which your brand has been enhanced need to be executed meticulously and the outcomes measured.
- Capitalising. Your exhibitors have to capitalise on all the contacts made with a view to initiating or developing new prospects and their business pipeline, so resource needs to be in place to follow up the leads immediately, relentlessly, energetically and consistently.
This article was first published in issue 4/4 of EW. Any comments? Email Antony Reeve-Crook
