A Vital Tip for Trade Show Marketing
October 10, 2008 9:30 am MarketingFunMarketer Lesson of the Week
Craig, Any Tips on Trade-Show Marketing?
It’s easy for a small business to spend $5,000 – or more – to exhibit at a trade show. And I imagine many of you know all too intimately the pain of not generating nearly the number of forecasted leads. Low booth traffic is often the culprit.
Try this – before your next show, find out if you can secure the pre-show list of attendees. This list is an incredibly powerful tool, and is right up there with having an exciting trade show booth. With the pre-show list you can mail out a promotional offer to drive traffic to your booth. If your pre-show attendee list contains emails, then by all means send an email out, too.
Don’t be surprised if you have to pay a bit for the list. A moderate processing fee is common. A few shows turn the list into a profit center, charging far more than needed to cover the actual data processing and administrative cost. These shows may charge $500 or more for their pre-show list.
Yet you may find it worthwhile to pay even that much, if you are already committed to exhibiting at the show. Just remember there are usually several show you can choose to exhibit at. Next year when you do a cost-benefits analysis of which ones you’ll spend your marketing money on, factor in both the availability and the cost of the pre-show attendee list into your decision-matrix.
The physical make-up of the direct mail piece requires careful consideration. Simple and direct is usually best for a B-to-B mailing. A postcard, self mailer or letter will all work well. There is no use trying to create a full-blown direct mail package with letter, brochure, lift note and reply device. This specific sub-category of event-marketing promotion requires a brief, well-written format with an offer appropriate to the audience.
A Vital Tip: make absolutely sure you mail your piece out first class, presort. This is no time to skimp on money and mail it out standard (third) class mail. Don’t do it! Yes, I advocate standard class mail for general promotions: nine out of ten times standard class is your best direct mail option. Not now! The timing of the trade-show correspondence is simply too critical. Your standard class piece that is mailed nationally may take up to three weeks to arrive in your prospects mailbox, and that’s just unacceptable for a B-to-B mailing with a time deadline like this one.
The cost of every piece of mail that arrives after your prospect gets on the plane for the show is 100% wasted.
More on trade shows in another post.
Call me for more ideas at 402-423-2444 or email me at funmarketer@marketinghawks.com
FunMarketer Free Campaign Idea of the Week
Here’s a photo with a nice age contrast. You can really feel the bond between these two.
Photo: iStock #6490887
Headline: Grandpa’s Almost as Soft as My Super-Tot Mattress
FunMarketer Tip of The Week
On reason I picked the multi-generation photo above was it really inspires trust and warmth right away. As the financial services companies continue to fail, their competitors in the same space are taking out full-page ads that tell how long they’ve been around. That’s great, but I think one photo like the one above would really go a long way toward making a customer feel reassured.
Much better than just saying you’ve been around since 1913.
Happy Marketing!
Craig Lutz-Priefert
October 14th, 2008 at 10:30 am
You make a great point about spending “extra money”. A lot of times the additional considerations are what will make a disappointing campaign turn into a success. A lot of people start a campaign before thinking through the total cost and they just do the “minimum”. In the end, by NOT spending the extra money to execute a campaign can result in poor results.