Right now, right this minute, your organization is at a critical juncture! With a tradeshow on the horizon, two destinies await you.
Make the wrong choice, and you’re dooming your organization to an expensive exercise is face-to-face marketing. Valuable time, energy, and resources will be wasted — and you’ll be the one holding the bag. In a tight economic environment where accountability is increasingly becoming the order of the day, that’s NOT a good situation.
Alternately, by being proactive now, you can ensure that you’ll not only have a great tradeshow — but that when push comes to shove, you’ll be able to prove it! Measuring ROI has long been the most problematic aspect of tradeshow exhibiting. The actions you take now will allow you to overcome this traditional hurdle and showcase your team’s performance.
Make no mistake — you’re in a rough spot. Exhibiting is a competitive environment. You’re vying for attendee’s attention, against companies that are larger, better-funded, with newer exhibits and cooler ideas than you’ve got.
What this means is that anything you can do to differentiate yourself from the crowd is a “Very Good Thing.” Being different gives you an edge over the masses. On the other hand, being different invariably costs money.
We all want life to be easy. Challenges, obstacles, and difficulties abound, and although we do our best to overcome them, the truth is it’s a long and exhausting process. Unless we have a real, concrete reason to keep going, it’s far easier — and much less work — to give up and abandon our efforts.
Walk around any trade or consumer show and you will be able to collect a bag full of advertising specialties, or giveaway items all designed to promote. But look a little more closely. How many really do an effective job? How clearly do they get a message across? Is the message sufficiently visible? Is the giveaway useful or unique enough that you would want to keep and use it? All these questions, and more, need to be considered before jumping into the giveaway game.
Exhibitors often have to reverse roles and find themselves on the other side of the aisle playing tradeshow attendee. According to a CEIR (Center for Exhibition Industry Research) study, 39% of attendees spend less than eight hours visiting a show. As with exhibiting, planning and preparation are essential to maximizing time on the trade show floor. The following 30 points will help simplify the process next time you find yourself playing visitor:
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