Sunday, January 31, 2010

Exhibitors: Work rules drive up McCormick costs

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

You've seen the signs at the airports welcoming people to Chicago: "We're glad you're here," they say. Some think truth in advertising demands an added line, like: "Now, pay up!"

The convention business in Chicago is reeling as big shows defect from McCormick Place, or threaten to, because of costs. An $8 billion engine of the Chicago economy is seizing up as exhibitors -- the businesses that set up booths at the conventions and literally pay the freight for the privilege -- push trade organizations to move shows to cheaper places, principally Las Vegas and Orlando.

Some exhibitors are bitter, such as the company president who wrote to the head of his trade association after its show wrapped up in 2009. "Having to deal with McCormick Place personnel is more than frustrating," the letter said. "The experience is like being dropped into a den of thieves that pick your pocket at every opportunity, and it hasn't gotten any better."

The letter's contents were shared with the Chicago Sun-Times on the promise of anonymity. Few in the business want to offend the five labor unions that work at McCormick Place, for fear of retaliation at their next show.

The exhibitors and their trade groups complain about expensive work rules, like a minimum of three Teamsters on a crew vs. one in other cities. They cite five-minute jobs that are billed for an hour. They gripe about restrictions about who can do what in setting up or dismantling the show, and about occasional threats and intimidation. Full Article.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

The 7 People You Design Your Trade Show Exhibit for

Who do you design your trade show exhibit for? There may be more people than you realize.

As a trade show manager about to embark on marshalling the design of your company’s new trade show exhibit, you have to consider the interests of 7 distinct people: Link.

Friday, January 29, 2010

Using Tradeshow Incentives as an Effective Marketing Tool

What you Should Know about Tradeshow Premium Incentives Premium incentives can be an effective trade show or event marketing tool when successfully linked to your company or product There are thousands of choices in incentive items, and the choices change all the time Rely on your exhibit consultant for advice about creative opportunities to use incentives as part of your overall trade show exhibit marketing campaign Incentives Whether you use the term incentives, promotional products, or giveaways, the goal is the same. Exhibitors want to capture the interest and attention of attendees at the show AND be remembered after the show. Everyone loves a freebie, and giveaways are a tried and true method for attracting people to your booth at a trade show. A word of caution however; these items can quickly add up to a significant portion of your budget, so they should be distributed judiciously. Try to keep your expenses for promotional items within five to ten percent of your total budget. There will always be those people who simply case the exhibit halls in search of free stuff. In some cases it is your fellow staffers who will be hunting and gathering, so it is a good idea not to put your promo items out until right before the show is set to open. There are Four Primary Categories of Incentives Apparel (T-shirts, hats, golf shirts, etc. Office supplies (pens, calendars, clocks, mouse pads, mugs, etc. ) Fun stuff (toys, gag gifts, electronics, etc. ) Perishables (candy, mints, food and beverage, etc. ) Incentives are first a gift and secondly a marketing tool. If used effectively, the buyer will appreciate the gesture and will recall the seller’s marketing campaign and product. These are all positive benefits of incentives. More.

Thursday, January 28, 2010

100 Reasons to Exhibit at a Trade Show

There are over one hundred reasons to exhibit in a trade show. Does your company fit into any of these reasons to exhibit?

1. Sell products and/or services.
2. Gather qualified leads for post-show company follow-up.
3. Introduce new products to a new or existing market.
4. Demonstrate new products to a new or existing market.
5. Demonstrate new uses of existing products.
6. Give your customers an opportunity to meet experts.
7. Give a CEO an opportunity to meet your CEO.
8. Meet buyers face-to-face.
9. Open new markets.
10. See buyers not usually accessible to sales personnel.

90 More.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

52 Definitions Every Marketer Should Know

1. Marketing hipster or hipster marketing: The new bleeding-edge marketer. One of the first terms I’ve made up for this blog post but that I like a lot. If you’re doing some of the activities I’ve described below, you are a marketing hipster.

2. Lead qualification: People (with headsets), automation (CRM and marketing automation – yes, marketing automation) and process dedicated to contacting leads and qualifying them before passing them to sales. If you actually generate leads, you should do this. (See every other post on the Funnelholic.com). People can build this process for you like @bridgegroupinc or Stu Silverman (SalesRamp), or you can outsource qualification (numerous folks, I can’t even mention). Look, this is “old school” stuff, but it works. I sell leads, and what we’ve seen from our data is that companies with lead-qualification (and lead-nurturing) processes convert better than anyone else and, ultimately, buy more leads.

3. Conversion rate: The rate at which a prospect advances in your marketing process. I included this because everyone assumes conversion rate means landing page conversion. That is not true. Conversion rates happen across the life of a lead: Traffic to registration conversion, registration to lead conversion, lead to opportunity conversion, opportunity to sale conversion. Conversions happen all day in your process (I hope). Track them and watch them.

4. Lead scoring: Seriously, make it simple: the process of determining which leads are better than others. Don’t make it bigger than that. Use data you have now to start – this isn’t hard, then use marketing automation to implement, optimize and refine. Scoring seems so daunting, but it really isn’t when you finally tear down what it really is. The humans in your “conversion chain” score all the time in their head: They call certain leads more than others because they know they will convert.

5. Conversion chain: I just made that up in the previous definition, so I figured I would make a definition. The conversion chain is your series of conversion points you track from the top (e.g., Google, white paper syndication) to close. That’s a cool term. If it catches on, you heard it here first.

6. Metrics: Numbers generated via reporting that tell you something about your current processes. Yes, it can be called reporting or just “numbers,” but remember you want to be a b2b marketing hipster, so use the word: metrics. Here’s a tip: Choose three metrics to look at every day. Look at the rest once a week. More.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

A Tradeshow Checklist, born of experience


It's easy to waste time and money at tradeshows. It's not just the booth ($2k-$20k) and travel expenses ($1000/day including airline, hotel, rent car, shipping, and buying an extension cable at an outrageously overpriced convention center office supply center), it's the week of time spent at the show (including travel days) plus weeks of time spent preparing your strategy, crafting your sales pitches, organizing the booth crap, and chewing out the stoned guy at the print shop counter who claims to not see that the "red" in the color swatch is not the same as the "red" in your 6' x 6' banner.

Tradeshows are a combination of high-level strategy and low-level minutiae, so a checklist comes in handy. Link.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

How To Be Lean, Mean & Green At Your Next Event: Three Green Philosophies To Consider


by Jeff Hurt:

“In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences,”
R.G. Ingersoll (1833-1899).

Environmental initiatives have been in vogue since the 25th Anniversary of Earth Day in 1995. Yet in the past five years, many environmental friendly programs have moved beyond fashion and fad to becoming socially acceptable and the norm. Even some large corporations are expanding their social responsibility programs by creating a triple bottom line focus on people, planet and profit. Full article.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Trade Show Giveaways, A Great Way to Bring Traffic and Gain New Customers

There is something about getting free stuff. We don’t know what it is but for some reason everyone loves to get something for free. It can be something as simple as a cup of coffee from a friend or even looking back at the times we used to get that treat from a friend’s lunch in elementary school that they did not want. For some reason or another a free gift really makes us happy.

Look how crazy people get at sporting events, like football games, when there are promotional workers at the game shooting hot dogs and t-shirts out of pressured cannons. Or when these same event workers throw mini footballs or other prizes into the crowd, people literally lose their minds. Screaming for the promotional reps to shoot or throw the prize into their area. I have witnessed grown men and women basically snatch some two-dollar prize out of a small child’s hand. It is really sick when you think about it. Especially when it is over something you could probably get at the dollar store. Well, for whatever psychological reason we love a free gift or prize. It makes our day, no matter how crappy or in-expensive the item is. However, we are even more excited when the “free” giveaway is something practical or cool. More.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Good News on the (Trade Show) Marketing Budget – Trends 2010

Written by Susan A. Friedmann, CSP, The Tradeshow Coach:

In November the StrongMail '2010 Marketing Trends' Survey polled more than 1,000 business leaders across a wide range of industries about their marketing plans for the upcoming year. For the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing those trends and giving you tips to make them work for you and your company.
Trend: For almost everyone, marketing budgets (particularly tradeshow budgets) should hold steady or increase. At 48%, more companies will be boosting their budgets than just keeping them the same (41%). A mere 11% of executives said they were allocating less money for marketing. With the economy on the upswing, marketing efforts can make a huge difference now.

What this means to you:
• Spend smarter, not harder. Make the most of the budget you have by careful targeting. Invest in the trade shows that are likely to give you the best return.
• Make new friends, but keep the old. In terms of profit, an established customer is worth from five to seven times what a new customer is worth. Send your current customers special invitations to come to your booth. Show them how much you appreciate their loyalty.
• Out of sight doesn’t have to be out of mind. Maintain the connections you make at trade shows with targeted emails, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media. Link.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

How to be Social at a Tradeshow

Proving that creative marketing at events is just as important to the manufacturing world, ESAB North America launched a variety of actions to engage with their attendees at their most recent tradeshow.

ESAB integrated social media into their tradeshow marketing strategy at the FABTECH International & AWS Welding show in Chicago, November 15-18 2009. Their goal was to market effectively while interacting more with attendees in a different manner.

ESAB launched their Social Media campaign by introducing their fan page on Facebook in March of 2009 and following up with their Twitter page shortly after, in May.

“Social Media for us started as a curiosity, which then turned into an opportunity; an opportunity to connect with our customers in a way we never have and allow us to communicate directly with them,” says Carrie Godwin, Web Marketing Analyst at ESAB North America. More.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Tips and Tricks “From the Trade Show Trenches”

Written by Linda Musgrave at Salesopedia:

Hello class. For this TradeShow Teacher lesson I decided to share with you some of the lessons I have learned over the years. Some of them I learned the hard way by making mistakes, others I picked up through guidance by professionals in the field.

This topic idea was inspired by writing little sidebars in “The Complete Idiots Guide to Trade Shows” book I wrote, where I share “tips” about “lessons learned”. Since we don’t write sidebars here, the next best thing was to dedicate a TradeShow Teacher lesson to sharing tips and tricks with you. This is of course not a complete list, but contains a couple of key items you will find useful to remember.

Let’s get started with TradeShow Teacher’s Top 30 list of key “Tips and Tricks”.

1.) Don’t choose a show based on price alone! All shows describe exhibitor packages differently, read the details thoroughly. Sometimes the additional costs of items that are not included in the exhibit package can add up to a sizeable amount.

2.) Paper items can be lost or misplaced. If you have a scanner, or networked copier; scan paper items such as purchase orders, invoices, etc. to a show specific folder on your computer for back up purposes.

3.) Arrange a meeting with your accounting department and ask for their advice on how to best work with them to make your payment processing smoother.

4.) If cash flow is an important consideration, ask the accounting department if you should consider paying as many items as possible by credit card and ask which credit card should be used if you haven’t already been supplied with one. More.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Trade Show Exhibit Themes: Orbit Into Another World

Trade show exhibitors often ask why they should create a distinctive theme for their trade show display booth. There are at least three good reasons. Themes set you apart from your competition, stimulate excitement and momentum for your staff, and dramatically increase traffic to your trade show display. Link.

Friday, January 15, 2010

McPier overhaul prohibits McCormick Place workers from striking

McCormick Place workers would become public employees prohibited from going on strike - and face work-rule changes aimed at reducing exhibitor costs - under a legislative overhaul unveiled Monday to stop the trade show exodus from Chicago. Link.

Thursday, January 14, 2010

The Inevitable Tradeshow Question

By Matt Pillar, Editor In Chief, Retail Solutions Online/Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

Live from New York, it's... day one of the NRF BIG Show. I've been in town for pre-show events since Saturday morning, and though the exhibit hall opened mere minutes ago, I've already been asked the inevitable question at least a dozen times. "Have you seen anything that really stands out this year?" The question has almost become cliché at tradeshows. It's something I expect to be asked at any given time, and as such, I feel obligated to have an answer handy. Sometimes I simply don't, and when I do, pragmatic as I am, my response sometimes disappoints. Link.

New Trade Show Marketing Newsletter

The Tradeshow Network Marketing Group has developed and released a new trade show marketing newsletter designed to provide event marketing information to marketing, event, and trade show managers.

The new marketing newsletter called "On Target" contains informational articles on current trends in the trade show industry along with links to education, services and other trade show marketing activities. Link. Click on the Resources tab.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

TSEA’s Inaugural Face-to-Face Connections a Success

Strategic Sourcing Event for Exhibition and Events Industry hailed as “innovative,” “successful” and “fun.”

Chicago, IL – January 12, 2010 –The Trade Show Exhibitors Association (TSEA)’s inaugural Face-to-Face ConnectionsTM, the first strategic sourcing event for the exhibit and event industry, was proclaimed a success by all participants. The event was held January 6-8, 2010 in Dallas, TX and was specifically designed to bring buyers and sellers together to determine potential for a business match.

All participants benefited from valuable networking time with only two days out of the office by utilizing an efficient and cost-effective approach to a sales meeting. Participants met in pre-planned, 30-minute sessions that were private, focused and results-oriented. As one guest praised, “Incredible event! This is what we have needed forever! How could you ever qualify so many potential vendors in a day?” Other guests concurred.

Sourcing events such as Face-to-Face ConnectionsTM are becoming more common but this is the first time for companies that use face-to-face marketing to promote their products and services. All guests attended 10–14 meetings with sellers that truly matched up with their current needs.

Vendors were equally complimentary about the event. Each seller scheduled 10–15 meetings with buyers who were prescreened, qualified, decision makers and had specific needs for their products and services. They were provided a private space with no distractions for their discussions. One seller gushed, “Great environment to generate new business. (We) could never get this kind of one-on-one attention with prospects anywhere else.” All agreed they would generate, at minimum, several new customers as a result of the event.

For more information about becoming a vendor or attendee at the next Face-to-Face Connections,™ please contact the Trade Show Exhibitors Association via email at face2face@tsea.org or call +1 312 842-TSEA (8732).

Sunday, January 10, 2010

Exhibitor Coalition Plans Best Practices Initiative

Exhibitors are mad, and they're planning to do something about it. That, at least, is the assessment of a group of five exhibitor-related trade associations that have formed an Exhibit Industry Council to address some of what its leaders say are long-endured frustrations.

The coalition of five associations, in conjunction with what its leaders say is a growing list of supporting suppliers, plans to present a set of best practices it believes can provide opportunities to resolve issues – most significantly involving exhibiting costs – that have nagged at the tradeshow industry for decades but became a particularly sore point as the economy began to deteriorate.

“The genesis comes from the downturn in the economy and issues of cost that have come to a head for exhibitors,” said Jim Wurm, managing director of the Exhibitor Appointed Contractor Assn., one of the five founding associations. “For years, that was masked because business was so good, in spite of the fact there were concerns.” Link to TSW.

Make Sure You Get it Rite

When you’re a major exhibitor at a trade show, you want to make sure that you get everything perfect. Unfortunately, even when you spend upwards of seven figures to create your booth, things can go wrong.

At Samsung’s massive Consumer Electronics Show booth, visitors were greeted with this sign splayed across one wall: “Strikingly beautiful, Samsung’s mobile PCs strikes accord with their new design.” Can you spot the other errors? See comments.

Thursday, January 7, 2010

Follow CES Live on Twitter

Follow tweets as they happen here

To have your tweets appear on the page, use the #ces hashtag in your tweet.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

How to Be Social at a Tradeshow

Erik Lukazewski posted an interesting article on Tradeshow Insight about how ESAB North America launched a variety of actions to engage with their attendees at their most recent tradeshow.

They integrated social media into their tradeshow marketing strategy. Read how they did it here.

Monday, January 4, 2010

Ten Reasons I’m Glad It’s 2010

By Kevin Carty, Classic Exhibits:

I am very hopeful and excited as we step into 2010.

1. It can go nowhere but up from here.

2. As an industry, we seem more united than ever. That might sound strange to some, but with the advent of social media sites like LinkedIn, people seem to have an avenue to express concerns, issues and successes more readily. And they are using it! If you follow the groups and discussions, you see that for the most part we all have the same goals to improve our industry. Even some of the most traditionally 'taboo' topics are being discussed. More.