Five checks for Know-It-Alls!
A lot of what we do is to provide you with checklists for every aspect of event management. Let’s kick off with a checklist kindly provided by Sarah Farrugia of Stuff : Thoughts, ideas, concepts, small beginnings.
1) Do you make sense?
Visitors to an exhibition get overwhelmed in a short time by thousands of messages and miles of aisles. You need to sense check your messages many times with people who don’t know what you do. Many visitors are new to an industry or are not full time specialists in the industry you are in, they come to learn and understand who’s who and what’s what. Sometimes Know-It-All’s forget that not everyone is clever as they are.
2) Are you getting to know them before they arrive?
Often visitors to exhibitions are bombarded beforehand with mailings from exhibitors. How are you going to stand out from the crowd? Remember the difference between customers and prospects. A pre-event mailing to customers will be different to one to strangers. So you need two. The first to customers will recognise the relationship you have and be excited about seeing them again at the event. It will welcome them to your stand to drop by and catch up. A steady flow of current customers will make your stand feel warm and attractive. For prospects, be more clear, ‘we are exhibiting again this year and run a 5 min ‘what’s hot in the industry session’ for all newcomers…every 30 minutes in the mornings. Come by and meet others and get a behind the scenes…etc. The real work is done afterwards, what you are doing on the day is making a great first impression and getting talked about…
3) Now the party’s over…
This is when the real hard work begins. You have sales opportunities and you have to follow them up and build them into your sales & marketing communications. Some will be specific enquiries and most will be general. Focus on the general first by putting them into your day to day sales & marketing activities, they will be valuable but you aren’t sure when yet. Then focus all attention on the specific enquiries. It’s still a cat and mouse game. The customer is now back in normal life and often is not as keen as they were ‘face to face’. Nothing for it but rigorous sales processes. However they will be sensitive to your information and to things you are doing, so keep in touch. This is a great use for social media activity…
4) Exploit all the new ways to converse with your audiences.
These new methods such as blogs, microblogs, youtube, flickr and industry community sites are a softer way to explain what your company and products are all about and how they can be used. Put your new prospects onto a Twitter feed or onto a blog feed so they start to get access to your stories. So they start to feel very comfortable with what you have to offer. It gives them items they can send to others in their company to show them about you and what you do. Send useful tips and information to your Twitter community, be valuable and your sales activity will be more successful. Ask your community for help in seeing their point of view or about new products and how they can be used.
5) Things to consider…
There are two things to consider when using live platforms for marketing communications. The first is do you see it as a marketing exercise or a sales exercise? If you want to say ‘both’ you have to give a dominant perspective. Sales first, marketing second; marketing first, sales second. Remember for you it may be sales but for the visitor it may be marketing. So think about it next from your audience’s point of view, they are the deciders of what will work. Your live experience must be coherent for them otherwise it will be weakened. The last point, but certainly not the least important, is that you need to design in ‘fun’. Fun ways of experiencing what you have to offer. This isn’t about making visitors have fun, it is about enjoying the live experience of the marketplace in full swing and making sure you’re part of the exciting crowd, not one of those dull, bored people we’ve all seen hanging around dull, boring stands. Still we don’t need to tell you that, as you are ‘Know-It-All’s’ already.
For more information about Sarah Farrugia please visit www.sarahfarrugia.co.uk