Trade Show Marketing

As the BC Hospitality Industry Expo is next month, it’s timely to review some best practices to ensure your company’s success at trade shows. First you need to set a quantifiable objective for the show. Do you want to meet 50 new prospects, develop 10 qualified leads, close 5 deals, or build the loyalty of 30 existing clients? Your sales approach, the marketing material, and products in your booth will change depending on your objective. Be sure you have ordered enough high quality collateral material to hand out, but don’t bring too much, because on average 70% of trade show materials get tossed out by recipients.

If you’re planning to give away a promotional product, be sure it has a tie-in to your company. A bottle opener for a brewery, or a hand towel for a linen manufacturer makes sense, but who needs one more pen or stress ball? However, a unique promo item that people carry around the show and play with, can generate a lot of interest in your booth and increase traffic. You can also plan a fun activity in your booth to draw people in and increase the length of time prospects and clients will spend with your sales team.

You have 3 seconds at a show to pique the interest of people passing by, so your booth should instantly communicate your value proposition. Make graphics bold, ensure text is big enough to be seen from 20 feet away, and use high impact images to grab people’s attention. If you don’t, they’ll walk right past you.

Your sales team should be actively engaged in talking with people coming by your booth, so they should not sit down, be talking on a cell phone, or working on a laptop, unless they are giving a demo. This should go without saying, but I’m appalled at the number of salespeople I see each year doing one or all of these activities and then they complain that they had no traffic at their booths.

Take some time now to put together your trade show plan and enjoy the successes!

Uncovering Opportunities

Understanding what business executives want to accomplish and then showing them how you can help them achieve those goals creates value. Start by researching the market and the company you’re pitching. Know what their corporate values are and read their annual reports and the news page on their website. Subscribe to Google Alerts to stay on top of breaking news and trends that affect your target market and specific prospects. When you call a potential client to educate him about an issue that he may not even be aware of yet, you position yourself as an expert in his industry and stand a much better chance of getting an appointment.

When you’ve connected with a prospect, uncover his needs by asking high gain, open-ended questions to give the executive a chance to tell you what’s important to both the company and him as a buyer. Starting with “Can you tell me about…” is a great way to start discovering opportunities. Continue with open-ended questions such as “How are you dealing with that now?” or “When will you be budgeting for that purchase?”

Show value after the buyer answers each question by explaining how your product or service can solve the issues he’s facing and how you can build a partnership with him to accomplish his goals. If he needs to reduce expenses, you need to clearly demonstrate how you can do that. You can also provide insight into problems that your prospect may not even know he has, leaving him feeling that the time you spent together was worthwhile.

When you consistently help your clients achieve their goals and provide value that positively affects their bottom line, you will be a valuable asset for those companies as well as the buyers.

"You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." Zig Ziglar

Setting Campaign Objectives

Before you start advertising you need to decide on the objective of your campaign. There are six objectives and a prospect needs to achieve the first objective before he can move on to the second objective. For example, a prospect must be aware of your company before he will understand the value you offer. #1 Develop an awareness of your product/service. #2 Understand the value your offer. #3 Develop a desire for your product/service. #4 Take an action towards a purchase #5 Retain a current customer. #6 Entice clients to refer other customers to you. Your advertising campaign should only attempt to achieve one of these objectives at a time. In other words, do not try to have one ad that is designed to develop awareness from a new prospect as well as retain an existing client.

Components of a Successful Ad

Attention Grabber- Your ad has to grab the reader's attention. This can be done with a strong graphic or an interesting headline. The more creative you can be to hook the reader, the more likely it is that your ad will be read.

Ad Copy- The KISS principle is critical when writing ad copy. You only want to inform readers of a few key benefits. Provide just enough information to tease readers and leave them wanting more information. An ad should not include all the information you would put in a brochure or on your website.

Call to Action- Your ad needs to inspire people to do something, whether they visit a specific page on your website or call to take advantage of a specific offer.

Contact Information- Give readers the information they need to contact you. Your address is typically not necessary unless you have a showroom. Your logo, although important to you and necessary for branding, is not valuable to your readers so it shouldn't be too large or at the top of your ad where your attention grabber should be.

Niche Marketing

The best way to start selecting a niche market is to define who your best clients are. What industry are they in? How tightly can you define that market? What size is the company either in dollar sales or number of employees? What geographic region are they in?

Next, look at your competitive advantages to analyze what you do best. What product or service do you provide that your competitors can't? What vertical market is not being serviced well by your competition? Once these questions are answered you can search for prospects that match those criteria and then target your marketing to that niche market. You will be highlighting the competitive advantage that you identified in your sales pitch as well as your advertising.

Please keep in mind that this doesn't mean that you won't accept business outside of that niche, it just means that you won't invest marketing dollars to solicit that business. By targeting your sales and advertising dollars your return on investment will be much greater.

So, What's in it for Me? by Bruce Hayne

The now popular acronym WIIFM (pronouned wiffim) is a product of our "me generation" with instant gratification and motivation to act, only coming after a clear understanding of the upside of the equation. We see it all around us, an attitude of only doing something if there is a personal or monetary reward attached to it.

So what does that have to do with marketing? EVERYTHING! If your marketing and advertising message does not answer this fundamental question, your prospects simply will not take action. It's not often that you are able to provide a brand new product, which everyone needs, with little or no competition. Therefore, the overwhelming odds are that your prospects are currently buying from a supplier offering a product or service similar to yours. So, what's in it for him? Why should he switch? What makes your offering better?

These questions may appear obvious, and there is little doubt that you have identified what sets you apart in terms of your product, service, pricing, customer care, etc. However, if your marketing and communications materials do not immediately answer these questions, your prospect is left asking himself, why would I take a chance on a new supplier?

Having said that, not all your ads have to communicate every conceivable benefit of your service offerings. Remember, that some ads are meant only to introduce or strengthen a brand, while others are designed to develop a clear preference in the minds of prospects. What is does mean is that your overall communication strategy with your prospects has to clearly identify and then support your benefit claims. Once your prospect can clearly see that it's in her best interest to take a serious look at your product or service, you are now well into the sales cycle and on your way to winning a new client.

Understanding the WIIFM principle means understanding your customers and why they buy. Each product or service category is different and each client has his or her own reasons for choosing and staying with a supplier. For instance, changing corporate law firms and changing toner-cartridge suppliers are entirely different buying decisions. Arguably the first deals with very sensitive information, relatively high costs, and long-term business relationships, while the other is more of a commodity item with a relatively low level business relationship. So while in the first instance the WIIFM question may include such things as corporate strengths, personal relationships, and integrity, the second would likely revolve around price, quick delivery, and ease of ordering.

If you are going to develop a strong marketing campaign, the first question you must answer is "What's in it for me?" If you can answer that you can now speak with confidence to your prospects, and ultimately convert more sales.

Prospecting for New Business

In order to grow your marketshare you need to be actively prospecting for new clients, yet sales reps often fail to conduct this important activity, and as their base of existing customers eventually shrinks over time, so does your company's revenue. Here are some tips to ensure successful prospecting:

• Set a goal that you want to achieve each week for business development, including the number of brand new prospects to be called and appointments to be made.
• Schedule time for prospecting into your calendar every week. If you don't allot a specific time for this important task, it won't get done.
• Use multiple methods and approaches to find new business such as cold calling, asking for referrals, advertising, webinars, speaking at conferences, trade shows and networking.
• Create a strong 20-second elevator speech to introduce yourself to new people.
• Write an introduction and voicemail message that inspires prospects and gives them compelling reasons to want to do business with you.
• Ask in-depth, probing questions that will help you understand the prospect's needs so you can inform them of your solution.
• Develop an integrated series of ongoing communications with prospects including phone, mail, and email. Personalize each offer depending on which stage of the buying process the prospect is at.