20 Smart Business Dallas | November 2009

Insights Marketing & Branding

Insights Marketing & Branding is brought to you by BrandExtract

Maximizing trade showsStrategies to improve your success rate Interviewed by Sue Ostrowski

Most companies that attend trade shows put all their time and money into the show itself. But

by expanding your efforts into pre- and post-show activities, you can extend your brand and reach considerably more people than just those who attend the show, says Jonathan Fisher, CEO of BrandExtract LLC.

“Companies carve out a budget for the show but don’t set any money aside for the up- and downstream process, which is where the most value comes from,” he says. “Most companies put money into the event, sit back and hope something happens. But the vast majority of the op-portunity surrounding the activity hap-pens before and after the event, not nec-essarily during. If every show or event is not paying for itself three or four times over, you’re doing something wrong.”

Smart Business spoke with Fisher about how to maximize your show and event dollars and how to reach the 80 percent of your audience that isn’t attending.

What mistakes do companies make regard-ing trade shows?

Very few companies invest in pre- or post-show strategies. Typically, they just invest in the show, but this loses 80 percent of the opportunity surrounding the event since only 20 percent of your audience is likely attending. Too many companies simply send out an invitation before the show, and that’s all they do. They generally don’t create any other path to dialogue with their company around that event. They don’t look at so-cial media. They don’t think about creat-ing a LinkedIn group, for example, that’s specific to that event where people can post questions and comments about it and the company can attract conversa-tions with those who might not be able to attend. They don’t consider tactics that would attract leads, other than typical PR and ad placement. They don’t think about remote monitoring of their event presentations or setting up a video blog so that people who can’t attend can still participate.

Many of these technologies are rela-tively inexpensive to implement com-pared to the thousands and thousands of dollars you’re sinking into the event, but companies rarely maximize their enor-

mous investment with that comparative-ly tiny investment in pre- and post-show activities that will make that event ex-ponentially more meaningful and more valuable.

The market’s tighter now, and if you’re looking to capitalize on your current in-vestments, you need to step back, rethink where and how you’re spending your money and resources, and make those investments deliver greater returns.

What can you do after the event to maxi-mize the leads you’ve gathered?

Exhibitors at trade shows think that because they spent time with someone who stopped by their booth, or gave them their sales materials, that the job is done and that person is now a lead or sold. But that’s just where the real work starts.

You want to make the process as effec-tive and efficient as possible, but com-panies are rarely prepared to go through the downstream sales process after the event. If you already have a microsite set up around your event, you can post all your presentations, white papers and product releases from the show. You can offer electronic downloads for catalogs

and send out an e-mail blast to people in your database driving them to that microsite. You can then track the people who open that e-mail, and instantly, you cut the 1,000 prospects gathered at the show down to the 120 people who were serious enough to go look at the materi-als that you’re offering them. These are the 120 people that you want your sales-people to focus on.

It’s highly effective and easy to ex-ecute, but you’d be surprised how many marketing departments think they’re do-ing their job when they’ve gathered 1,000 names and passed them on to sales. But by culling those leads, your limited sales force can make best use of their time with the higher quality leads and not just the names that were collected in a free booth drawing.

How else can you continue to engage po-tential clients after a show?

If you’ve created online communities before the show, you can keep that going after the show. You can say, ‘I sat in on this breakout session and heard this per-son talk about this subject, and here’s what I’m thinking about that.’ Tools like Twitter or Blogger are effective dialog strategies if you have the time to sup-port them. Anybody who was following you before, if you’re still providing rel-evant intelligence beyond the show, will continue to follow you, extending your reach and adding to the network those who weren’t able to attend.

At a show, you’re reaching 20 percent of your universe, but what are you doing for the 80 percent who couldn’t attend? Is there a way that they can attend the show electronically, dialog with people from the show virtually, and get white papers after the show? If you are feed-ing them information and inviting them into those conversations, they’re get-ting 75 percent of the benefit through you at zero cost to them — which will give you an advantage over competitors who probably are still using the same old, tired approach to trade shows and events. <<

JOnatHan FISHer is CEO of BrandExtract, an integrated branding and communications firm that guides growing companies by

providing strategic branding solutions, market positioning communications, advertising, social, print and interactive services. Reach him

at (713) 942-7959 or (214) 770-7378 or jonathan@brandextract.com.

Jonathan FisherCEOBrandExtract