18 ways to make the most of your large investment in trade shows.

18 ways to make the most of your large investment in trade shows.

Jan 9, 2018 | Customers, Management, Marketing

Years ago as GM Marketing of the Dairy Farmers Co-Op, I had a significant chunk of my marketing budgets taken by the involvement Dairy Farmers had in the Sydney Royal Easter Show, and associated conference sessions.  This was an institutional investment, beyond the control of my marketing programs, as a Co-Op, the board was committed to it beyond any debate.  After a couple of years of whingeing, I took it on as a challenge to generate a return from the investment, that I would rather not have made.

In more recent years, I have attended many industry conferences, organised a few, and spoken at several, so have had plenty of opportunity to see what works and what does not.

Following are some of the lessons, the things you should have sorted out before you make the significant commitment to exhibit.

 

Have a clear objective.

Build brand awareness, find new distributors, generate leads, position yourself as the industry expert, whatever it is, without an objective you may as well save your money. Your objective will drive the manner in which the investment is made, the size, type and the way you manage it.

Be strategically consistent.

Ensure the show activities and presence at the show itself is aligned with the rest of your marketing activities and programs. Doing a one-off industry show because everyone else seems to be doing it is a basic error to make. It is almost always harder to say ‘no’ than to just go along with the crowd.

Market your presence in the show.

Use the investment in the show as a reason to contact all your networks, inviting them to the stand, to the functions you have organised, or to the sessions of the conference that you think may be of interest and value to them. Trade shows are really just very expensive and expansive networking opportunities, so the greater the awareness amongst current and potential customers that you will be there, available ready to talk, and even ‘do a deal’ the better.

Follow up, follow up, follow up.

Persistence pays off, although you do need to have a ‘tyre-kicker’ identifier in place, as you can spend a lot of time following up people with little real intent of a commercial relationship and transaction. Similarly, following up your competitors neighbour, or committed customer is just a waste of your resources. However, this is no different to the normal situation,  every business needs some sort of lead scoring system. It is just that at a trade show, the numbers can become overwhelming very quickly, and it is easy to lose focus and waste resources.

Automate the contact collection process.

Most conferences these days have entrance tags that enable direct input of a visitors details in your CRM/lead management systems. Use them, it makes little sense having people copying out business cards after the day has finished, or getting visitors to fill in a form. Simple automation improves productivity enormously, freeing you up to engage with visitors without interruption.  Trade shows are great opportunities to build your contact data base, and as the old saying goes,’the money is in the list’.

Relationships are crucial.

Trade shows are wonderful opportunities to strengthen existing relationships and forge new ones. It is a huge networking opportunity, all those interested people coming to you, rather than you having to trawl through LinkedIn one by one, spend advertising funds. The opportunity to forge relationships with a wider group than you would normally interact with, particularly with businesses with complementary services to yours can be gold.

Learn about the innovations in your and complementary areas.

Exhibitors typically show off their latest and greatest, so it is a great opportunity to see what is evolving in areas that may impact you, and that you might be able to pass on to your customers, building on your position as a trusted advisor, rather than just a supplier.

Learn about the problems current & potential customers have.

It is casual, ‘non-salesy’ conversations that often uncover the problems that are the sources of value you can add,  and opportunities to be followed up. Have as many of these conversations as possible, always seeking to understand the problems others have, rather than flogging the features of whatever it is you sell.

Ensure the elevator pitch is clear, and delivered by all in the same way.

Having a clear, well tested elevator pitch is crucial at all times, but never more important than at a trade show, when it  will need to be delivered many times, and by different people manning your stand. Not only do you want to grab the attention of those to whom you can add value, and the elevator pitch is a terrific filtering device, you want those who hear it to remember the salient points so they can relate it to others in their networks. Trade shows are meeting places, and nobody attends without meeting up with someone they have not seen for a while, ex colleagues, customers, old friends, and having them able to recite your pitch acts as a strong referral.

In addition, ensure that your elevator pitch is reflected in the exhibitor listings, so the scanner who may be your ideal customer can see clearly the value you deliver. Flick though any exhibitor listing, and you remain in the dark about what half of them actually do, and very few make the listing sufficiently compelling so  that you file it away as a ‘must visit’ stand.

Collateral material.

Ensure the collateral material, be it analogue or digital is in order, and created thoughtfully, and differentiates you from your competition, rather than putting some generic stuff together as a last minute rush.

Provide a next step for everyone who engages towards a relationship.

Successful B2B selling is a process, rarely a once-off interaction. It makes sense therefore to be very clear about the next step towards a transaction that may arise during the show, from more detailed information available on the stand, to follow up visits, availability of engineering resources, referrals to existing customers who will support your claims, and many others.

Make your stand compelling.

It does not have to be the biggest, or most lavish,  but it has to stand out, and particularly be attractive to  your ideal customers. Having a clear definition of your value proposition and ideal customer profile, then spending a few dollars on designing the stand to be particularly attractive to that group will pay big dividends.

Leverage your relationships

Sharing your relationships with other exhibitors, is a powerful strategy to position yourself as an expert. Take opportunities to speak at the conference sessions, which further positions you as an expert, and make sure you do a lot of preparation to make the presentation a good one

Keep metrics of follow up and conversion success.

Understanding the dynamics of your conversion funnel is vital at all times, but never more than when you are following up a large number of potential leads generated in a short time, where the opportunity to waste time on tyre-kickers is geometrically increased. A significant change in your numbers may be an indication that your lead scoring systems are in need of review.

Measure the ROI of the show,

Apply the measures over a long period to allow sales conversion and retention to be a part of the equation. Sales is a process, and depending on your product, can have long gestation periods, so ensure to accommodate the average gestation in your calculations.

Plan everything,

Leaving organisation of the detail to the last moment will not work. Spend time up front planning, not just your presence, but who else is going, decide who you want to connect with.  Too many times I have seen last minute printing errors, poor editing leaving spelling and contact detail errors, wasteful premiums, redundant material, and obvious absences from stands, just because nobody thought it important enough to do the detailed planning, and allocate responsibility to get the job done in plenty of time. Sensible planning also increases the productivity of your investment, as last minute rush jobs always cost more, and are never as good as when real consideration is applied. Be prudent, but be prepared to spend that bit extra to leverage the investment already made.

Be early for everything.

Often that is when the best casual conversations happen, when there is few pressures of time and other people.

Have a senior management presence.

Often I have seen stands at trade shows manned by bored sales people who would rather be elsewhere, or casual staff who know very little, and have no authority to do anything. Success comes from commitment, and the presence of senior management is a sign of commitment, to everyone. Besides, most bosses spend way too much time closeted in their offices and meetings, when they need to get ‘out of the building’ and talk to real people, those who do not see things as they do, and who have no institutional pressure to agree.

The costs of trade shows are significant, not just the stand, and material, but in the costs of planning, manning, travel and accommodation, and following up. The investment can be easily wasted, or alternatively, it can just as easily be turned into a marketing goldmine with a little thought and planning.

Photo credit: Joe Flood via Flikr

Indifference is the killer of businesses.

Indifference is the killer of businesses.

Dec 7, 2017 | Branding, Change, Marketing, Small business

 

Successful small and medium sized businesses are always on the lookout for opportunities, which can be a problem.

All businesses, and especially small ones do not have the operational and management ‘bandwidth’ to take on too many opportunities, they lose focus and end up being mediocre in the market that made them successful in the first place, as they compromise in order to enable the coverage.

In this terrific cartoon and accompanying commentary, Tom Fishburne relates the contrasting stories of the Mini, one of the most successful cars ever designed, and the Pontiac Aztec, voted one of the worst ever, despite being in front of the demand curve at the time and therefore in a great position to be truly successful.

The problem can usually be distilled down to indifference.

People buy things to solve a problem, scratch an itch. Sometimes that is a simple thing associated with what will I eat tonight, and sometimes it is a personal thing associated with self-image. When it is the latter, creating a situation where there is indifference, where the purchase decision is not driven by a strong emotion, you will end up failing.

Strategy is all about making choices. It is not just a matter of determining what you will do, it is also a matter of determining what you will not do. It is this  latter dimension of choice that always causes the most problems in coming to a conclusion, there is always that bit of green on the other side of the fence.

‘Find a niche and own it’ should be the mantra of every business, but particularly every small business. Be very, very good at a few things rather than average at a number of things.

A former client has a dominating position in a niche servicing the underground coal market in Australia. A dying market if ever there was one. There are several strategic options: expanding into underground coal internationally, and/or expanding into adjacent hard rock mining operations leveraging some of their technology that is relevant to the challenges faced. As there are limited funds available, choices need to be made. Not easy.

One of my mates is a baker, a creative and driven bloke who has successfully built a business servicing the ‘high end’ market in a major city. His business partners now want to expand by expanding operational capacity in order to service the ‘medium’ market  where there is indeed far more volume, but also more competitors with spare capacity, so it becomes a question of price.

Over 40 years of marketing, I have never seen a situation where the dilution of the value proposition benefits the marketer. Customers are not silly, they make judgements on a range of rational and emotional considerations, and they do not consider your operational and financial priorities in those judgements.

 

Cartoon credit”: is again a wonderful Tom Fishburne production

 

The evolving Push & Pull of the supermarket business model.

The evolving Push & Pull of the supermarket business model.

Nov 30, 2017 | Change, Marketing, retail, Strategy

Established supermarkets around the world work from a pretty similar, well-honed playbook. The current business model of supermarket retailers is all about scale and leverage applied to their supply chains, and offer of range and price to consumers. While there are many variations in the detail, in principal  they  are pretty much the same, a ‘Push’ business model.

By contrast, the rapidly evolving ‘E-Tailers’ exemplified by Amazon and Alibaba are pull models, relying on customer engagement to activate the sales process.

When you look  closely at the business models of Amazon and Alibaba, the gorillas in the E-tailing space, there are significant differences. Amazon still at some point in the chain physically handles the products they are selling, and they do often take ownership at some point, while Alibaba at no time touches or owns the products, all they provide is a platform for the exchange to take place, and they make a commission on the transaction.

The established retailers are driven by the core assumption of the 20th Century that price of the product, range, and location of the store will be the dominant factors in determining customer loyalty, which are both supply chain factors. By contrast, the models of the e-tailers are truly customer centric. The value chain is driven by the demands of the customer, which can be influenced, if not completely managed once enough data on the individual is available.

The difference from a strategic perspective is the technology required to drive them both.

It seems to make sense that the existing supermarkets will be setting out to match the customer centricity advantages of their digital competitors, while retaining the advantages bestowed by their control of the supply chain.

How do they do that?

Not easy, but increasingly becoming not just possible, but a reality. By combining their supply chain knowledge with the customer information being collected on store cards, the geolocation capabilities of mobile devices, and social ‘Big data’, supermarkets could find themselves in a position to ‘flip’ some of their revenue from Push to Pull.

Imagine the situation where Mrs Bloggs is driving on her way to pick up the kids at after school care  having finished work at her part time job.  She sometimes stops at the supermarket to do a top up shop for the household commodities, and to buy some fresh produce to cook for dinner. The supermarket  data base knows this routine, and what Mrs Bloggs usually buys from the information collected via the store card she uses.

The algorithms in the store database sends a message to Mrs Bloggs informing her of the price discount they have on a product she may not usually buy, but which they have a surplus at her local store, and the dinner prep bundle for a meal for which she sometimes buys the ingredients. In one case, there will be no discount, why discount something that is a normal sale, keep that discount dollar for a situation where it will generate incremental sales, or can be charged back to a supplier.   The alternative offer is discounted based on the stock turn and availability of the product that needs to be sold quickly. The algorithm also sends a complementary message to Bill and Betty Bloggs, waiting to be picked up, as it knows Mrs Bloggs is driving, so kid pester power is engaged.

Push to Pull.

The strategic development of our grocery markets has been cyclical.

I can still remember as a very young boy going with Mum to a number of stores to buy the groceries. In each one there was a counter and someone who took the order and assembled it from stock to which the customers had no access.  Then came the steady development of the supermarket, which increasingly leveraged the scale of the stores and their control of the supply chains to push product at consumers, and making a margin from the suppliers via retail shelf ‘rental’ and pocketed promotion fees.

The emergence of Amazon et al over the last decade has put some power back in the hands of the consumers, and they are using it, with many households now combining a visit to the supermarket with various forms of on line purchase and delivery. We are going back to the one on one model, but replacing the trip to the store, pantry management, and all the other things my mother used to do, with technology.

Those combinations will continue to evolve, driven by consumers.

Pull winning out over push.

 

9 forces you must harness to be a successful C21 marketer

9 forces you must harness to be a successful C21 marketer

Nov 8, 2017 | Branding, Change, Customers, Marketing

The tools of Marketing have changed, not just a bit, but totally, since the century clock ticked over.

The scary thing is that it seems to me that we have seen nothing yet. It is becoming more unpredictable than riding a wild bull every day!

While the tools have changed, and will continue to do so, the foundations remain intact. The successful marketer in the rest of the 21st century must reconcile the complexity and technology of the tools, with the simple and unchanged foundations of marketing success.

Following are the nine macro forces I see that businesses, and their marketing leaders should be considering:

The power of information.

Technology has put the power of information into the hands of the consumer, wherever they are. The tools that have achieved this, social platforms, mobile, the ubiquity of the net, have interacted to destroy  all the rules of marketing beyond the basic principals. We used to say information is power, and that remains true, it is just that the power is now in different hands, and they are not afraid to use it.

Brand building.

Building a brand is not what it used to be.  C19 marketing relied on scale, large ad dollars placed by large companies who could scale distribution, supported by the scale of capital intensive manufacturing. The brand powerhouses of the C19 are in trouble as options pop up everywhere, supported by direct to interested consumer marketing.

However, all is not lost, access direct to consumers has enabled a whole new group of brands to emerge based on the direct digital access.

Advertising in crisis.

Advertising as an industry is in real trouble. This is  not  the divide between the analogue TV, radio and magazine Vs the Gooface digital advertising duopoly, but the opportunity that consumers have to remove advertising from their environment by a combination of ad blockers and subscription based streaming services.   The communication challenge will become harder as consumers avoid more and more advertising to minimise the disruption, in the process, removing the opportunity for advertising serendipity.

Bureaucracies no longer work.

The pace of change has been so fast that the siloed and bureaucratic organisation and management structures of the past no longer move  quickly enough to respond in real time to the requirements of the market place. The businesses that succeed into the future will be those that enable the decision making to be decentralised in meaningful ways such that those in direct contact with the market and customers have the power to make often substantial decisions, This is a really challenging prospect to everything that has been true about organisations for the last 150 years. I see it as an external extension of the Lean manufacturing notion of Takt time, but instead of companies using the rhythms of demand to drive their operational responses, they need to reverse it to be able to be in advance of the market Takt time, to understand and respond to the drivers of demand, to remain competitive.

Consumer power.

The locus of power has moved from those doing the selling to those doing the buying. No longer do sellers have the information needed to make a purchase decision that they can dole out to potential customers in any way that best suits their sales strategies. Now, in most cases, a seller does not know of a buyers interest in a market until their decision is made, or almost made. In these circumstances, getting on customers radar early is essential as a means to be on the short list, which offers the opportunity to at least have a conversation.

Brands are no longer the authorities they once were, that role has been taken by individuals who have managed to build a profile, usually digitally, that attracts attention and offers credibility. There are however some exceptions, and these exceptions are mostly brands that have emerged in the C21

Buyer journey.

The journey of  a buyer is a minefield. Back in the old days, last century, it was pretty simple, there were few choices realistically available, mostly serviced  from the local area, and the sellers had the power. Now  there are a huge range of choices, and often confronted by the range consumers either filter out all but the very few, or decide not to decide, becoming hypnotised by the array of choice, with all the competing claims. Therefore, the first battle is the one for attention. In this situation, you would think that brands have a real role to play, but largely, that hole remains to be filled, which will be I believe the challenge for the 21st century marketer.

Big data oxymoron.

The oxymoron of big data is coming. We have all  this data sourced from an array of places, and cobbled together by algorithms to give us insights and detail never dreamed of just a few years ago. However, big data is all really about going to the level of the individual, so it is in some ways, small data. Market segmentation is moving from broad demographic descriptors that had little to do with actual behaviour, to a segment of one. The implications of this are profound, in that customers can choose to do business not just on an ‘algorithmic’ basis, but on a personal one as well.

Marketing is data driven: with a twist.

Marketing used to be all about people, emotion, supposition, instinct, and experience, mixed with often lethal doses of bullshit. Suddenly all the imformation we marketers had ever dreamed of turned up on our desks as data, and we dove in trying to become data nerds, a role entirely unsuited to most, so the new shiny thing, the tools, became the obsession, rather than the insights that the tools could  deliver. The pendulum swung too far, and it is still swinging, but in my assessment, the pace of  the swing is slowing, and slowly the realisation will again emerge that people really do matter, and you cannot learn that from data, you have to go out to where the people are, and actually talk to them, face to face, one to one, to get a grasp of the humanity behind all  the data.,

Marketers in the C-Suite.

Marketers have never been held in high esteem by the ‘C-Suite’  as the Americans love to call it. To a significant extend to my mind this is for two reasons: first, marketers have not often been the smartest people in the room, as measured by the normal things that are all about the optimisation and continuation of the status quo, they have been flaky. Second, they are the future tellers, talking and speculating about what might happen, and then having a number of bets on the table depending on the variables that show up, so holding marketers to a data driven world has been hard. By contrast, the other functions in the c-suite are all about what has happened, the past, so it is relatively easier to produce hard facts and data to describe it. This difference makes the marketers look by contrast they are having each way bets, and perhaps do not know what they are doing, and neither is healthy.  This has to change, and I believe the change is starting, as what has happened is an increasingly bad indicator of what will happen, and it is the informed, creative but analytically capable flakey ones who can demonstrate value are usually best placed to place the bets on the future.

There are several items above that will generate discussion, which I look forward to hearing.

 

Image credit: Tom Driggers via Flikr

The ‘Rocking Horse Shit’ story.

The ‘Rocking Horse Shit’ story.

Oct 27, 2017 | Communication

Years ago in a corporate strategy retreat that was also a reason to have a nasty headache on Thursday morning, we had a session on responding publicly with little or no notice. The disciplines required to be able to speak publicly with clarity and authority, while delivering the necessary message without the benefit of any preparation time.

Big call for most of us.

In the session, the presenter gave us a number of techniques, all of which I remember and use today, but one in particular stuck.

“Do everything in groups of three” he told us.

Three has a rhythm that both enables us to assemble, remember and recite back complex thoughts, and it enables us to instantly respond to a question or proposition in a logical and clear manner.

The presenter had given us a pep talk on some of the techniques, with emphasis on the ‘Three’ method, and finished by offering to speak for 10 minutes on any topic we chose to nominate. From the  following silence finally came the suggestion ‘Rocking horse shit’  from a jaded member of the sales team.

He proceeded to entertain us for 10 minutes on the differences that could be detected in rocking horse shit depending on the wood the rocking horse was made from, and two other variables. I still remember that Oregon originating RHS has a sweeter smell that that emanating from a horse made from a more exotic material like mahogany, but the best came from a horse made from the wood of the tropical and now rare Sandalwood tree.

All was arranged into logical groups of three.

This memory of this lesson was triggered by the wasted ½ hour I spent last week being tortured by a rambling, and monotonic delivery of what should have been interesting information.

There has been so much written about how to make presentations interesting, engaging and therefore useful, that it eludes me how supposedly intelligent people can still deliver this sort of crud, destroying any value the information may have, and their reputation at the same time.

Having the opportunity to make a presentation is a gift. Organisers are giving you the status of being an authority, having something worth saying, and the audience is giving you their most valuable resource: their time and attention. To waste either is an insult to both.

 

Photo credit: JohnBoy84 via Flikr

Will Apples ad barrier slow down Gooface?

Will Apples ad barrier slow down Gooface?

Oct 25, 2017 | Branding, Communication, Governance

In September last year (2016), Facebook conceded publicly that they had over-estimated the average  time viewers spent on video on their site by 60-80%. They did not tell us how long they had known of this ‘error’ but I suspect it was for  quite a while, as they aggressively pushed the ‘video first’ bandwagon.

It does not seem to have dented the volume of money going into the coffers of the GooFace (Google/Facebook) digital advertising duopoly, although it may have slowed a little after Mark Pritchard, the CMO of Procter and Gamble with an ad budget in the billions fired both barrels at the stupidity, complicity and fraud that underpins the digital advertising industry.

Digital advertising has been blighted not just by hype, hyperbole, fraud, but by tracking, and we know it is a blight, because something like 700 million devises now have ad blockers installed, and the big platforms are increasingly removing the ‘skip ad’ option that was initially in place.

GooFace make almost all their money from ads, and cross site tracking is a fundamental part of their arsenal, which they will protect at all costs. Making all sorts of claims supported by flimsy data, and more hyperbolic assertions (I suspect they will make tobacco companies look like beginners when they get a bit more practice) is to be expected. Apple  by contrast make almost no money out of advertising, so has loudly rattled the cage by announcing a new feature on an upgrade of Safari that  prevents cross site tracking.

Brilliant.

I wonder who will follow suit, as the march of subscription services without ads together with the blockers, must be biting deeply into advertising effectiveness, assuming we could see and analyse the data objectively.

Follow up Nov. 8, 2017.  Has the charm offensive stated?  This article in Marketing Week would suggest it has.