La planification d’une foire commerciale est un projet qui prend beaucoup de temps et d’efforts et ce projet peut s’avérer intimidant à prendre en charge. Une grande partie du temps, nous ne savons pas par où commencer. Il y a beaucoup de tâches qui doivent être effectuées et avoir une idée très claire de ce que nous devons accomplir, nous aide à ne pas être distraits de notre objectif. Suivez ce lien pour découvrir comment optimiser votre temps.
Cliquez ici pour obtenir les 20 pages écrites et produites par Tradeshow Week Magazine: The Trend to Custom Modular Exhibits. Ces pages sont basées sur un sondage effectué auprès de 170 exposants. Comprenez pourquoi les exposants décident d’utiliser des stands non traditionnels : pour avoir une meilleure souplesse, un impact semblable et réduire les couts en ce qui concerne les stands modulaires.
Voilà ce dont vous avez besoin pour vous aider à prouver et justifier la valeur de votre programme pour la foire commerciale. Avec 19 modèles de planification, Measurement Made Easy, va vous aider à prendre de bonnes décisions concernant votre exposition et à montrer à votre équipe comment procéder.
Il y a 5 modèles de planification «Pre-Show » qui vont vous permettre d’analyser les opportunités et les couts reliés à celles-ci. Il y a également 14 types de systèmes qui vont calculer et mesurer le retour sur investissement (ROI), les nouveaux produits, les présentations analyse le budget reel vs le budget planifie, et plus encore.
Cliquez ici pour demander votre CD gratuit “Measurment Made Easy!”
Concevez votre kiosque adéquatement et vous accroîterez l’image de votre marque, attirerez de nouvelles opportunités, et aiderez à générer des ventes. Sinon, vous serez en charge d’un attirail trop gros, et ignoré par les visiteurs. Pour vous aider dans le bon choix du kiosque, suivez ce lien pour y lire 10 trucs majeurs à propos de design, couvrant le branding, les graphiques, la disposition, la présentation de produits, et bien plus.
Article by Steve Jahr
So you decide to exhibit at a trade show. Your competitors have exhibited there and you know your products (or services) are just as good as theirs, if not better, and you want some of that action. You rent a 10-foot exhibit space, a table and chairs, maybe a simple structure for a backdrop or a generic “show hall special.” That was easy. Let the show begin. Your products are good and competitively priced. They’re almost able to sell themselves. They’d better be.
Trade Shows DON’T Work Without You
Attendees file through the aisles and only a few have stopped at your trade show exhibit to ask about your company and products. They turned into solid leads, but there are just too few to justify exhibiting. The ROI just isn’t there.
Trade Shows ARE Work
Trade shows are competitive marketing environments. From an attendee’s point of view, they can be visual Pop Rocks as exhibitors clamor to be noticed. With their attention sliced so thin, why would they take any initiative to speak with you if it wasn’t readily apparent that you, potentially, have what they are looking for? It takes thought and execution to make trade shows work – planning in advance, setting your objectives, appropriately presenting your message and brand, staffing the trade show booth with the right people and a lead follow-up strategy.
Trade Shows DO Work
Do them well and reap the rewards! It sounds simple, but do these four things well and your trade shows will work:
1. Determine Objectives: What are you after? Leads? Sales? Exposure? All of the above? What does success look like? Determine that and work toward it.
2. Design Your Exhibit: It’s not just a backdrop, it’s a billboard. Show attendees who you are and how you can help them. Keep it simple, clear and readable.
3. Staff The Booth: Ditch the chairs, the chat, the cheeseburgers and work the aisle. Be open, welcoming and engage attendees at eye level.
4. Lead Follow Up: Do this! You go through all the effort to generate leads, so get them into the appropriate hands and follow up. The sooner, the better. If you don’t, your competitors may win by default.
To go beyond showing up and setting up, read the What’s Working In Exhibiting white paper. This guidebook reveals effective strategies for everything from show selection to exhibit design and many other keys areas. Click here to request your free copy.
Article by Mike Thimmesch
Ah, the good intentions of New Year Resolutions! People resolve to start doing things that they know they should be doing, but don’t, either because they’re too difficult or dull. Well, there are some essential trade show activities that fall into those categories!
Trade Show Marketer’s New Year Resolution #1: Follow Up On Your Leads
The first and foremost resolution you can make is to simply follow up on your leads. Following up on leads is almost like flossing your teeth or doing maintenance on your house: you know you need to do it, but are still reluctant. Following up on the leads gets overshadowed by all the other parts of your job that were neglected while you concentrated on organizing and going to the show.
Trade Show Marketer’s New Year Resolution #2: Measure Your Results
Measuring your trade show results is another worthwhile activity to choose as a New Year’s resolution. Measuring your trade show results can be complicated when you have a long sales cycle, have multiple lead sources to allocate credit for any sales to, or you can’t easily get access to the data you need. So it is both difficult and (compared to exhibit design and creating cool pre-show and at-show promotions) kind of dull. Yet without demonstrable results, your entire trade show program is in jeopardy.
Trade Show Marketer’s New Year Resolution #3: Update Your Trade Show Exhibit Graphics
With so many logistics to take care of, it’s easy to put much of our trade show program on autopilot and avoid the grief of getting new exhibit graphics. Yet, over time your marketing messages changes. Is the message on your trade show displays still relevant to the message that you’re using in your other marketing programs? What message is currently on your website, direct mail, print ads, and your blog? When all your messages reinforce each other, you are much more likely to be remembered. And when you exhibit at trade shows that serve different vertical market industries, do you take the time to adapt your graphics to better appeal to the different audiences?
How do you make resolutions stick?
These three are worthwhile trade show New Year’s resolutions. Yet, like all resolutions, they are easy to start, yet much harder to maintain. How do we maintain them?
“One challenge with New Year’s resolutions is that people often set unrealistic goals. They can quickly become frustrated and give up,” says Dr. Linda Nebeling, an expert in behavioral change and nutrition at NIH. “Any resolution to change needs to include small goals that are definable and accompanied by a solid plan on how you’ll get to that goal.”
Here are some ideas to make your resolutions stick:
Make it achievable
This list has only 3 resolutions, not 30, so it’s more achievable. You can even just pick one resolution from this list that matters most. And achieve what you can within your control – for example, if you don’t manage the sales force and can’t get them to cooperate, you can follow up directly with the trade show leads you generated to see if they met with your team or if they bought from you.
Break your bigger goal into smaller activities
For example, if the idea of measuring your results fills you with dread at the size of the task, then break it down into smaller activities. Make a schedule. Plan a step for each month, and give yourself a reward for each small step. So for the first month you outline each step needed to measure your results. The second month, get the list of all the leads into one place, be it a spreadsheet or a database. And so on. Then give yourself rewards for completing each step along the way.
Focus on the benefits
When we focus on the obstacles, we give problems more weight than they deserve. Put more energy into ways around obstacles, and especially on the benefits you’ll get when you achieve your new goals. Adopt and continue with these three trade show New Year’s resolutions, and you’ll generate more leads, more sales, enhance your company brand, and make yourself more valuable to your company. Keep these benefits in mind and the obstacles will look smaller.
Make yourself accountable
It’s harder to shirk from your New Year’s resolution when you’ve told someone else. “I tell my clients to have a trade show team and hold each other accountable, just like you have a workout buddy,” said Michael Flavin, account executive, Skyline St. Louis. Tell your boss you want to do this as part of your job improvement. Then your boss will hold you accountable. Even writing down your resolutions makes them more real.
It takes time to build a new habit. Give yourself time to turn wishes into actions into habits. I hope this will be a happy new year for you!
This blog post was sparked by Michael Flavin, account executive at Skyline Exhibits in St. Louis, who interviewed me about trade show New Year’s resolutions for his blog.
For more help achieving your goals in 2012, read the What’s Working In Exhibiting white paper. This 32 page book will give you insight to the most effective strategies and tactics exhibitors are using today to boost their results and stretch their budgets. Click here to request your free copy.
Article by Mike Thimmesch
Imagine this: You had a great show, with a flood of booth visitors and a pile of leads. And yet after the show, your fine effort fizzled into nothing because your hard-earned leads sat gathering dust atop someone else’s desk.
Lead management is the least visible, yet most important final stage of your trade show marketing. To help you bring this essential step into the light, here are the 10 best tips that I’ve gleaned over the last two decades:
So much of good lead management starts with proper preparation of your booth staffers. Yet what happens after the show is just as important — but gets less attention once the urgency of the show is over.
I hope you enact some of these 10 tips and get even more value from your trade show leads. Your company has invested so much to get them — make sure you succeed at this critical final step.
This article is one of a series on Top 10 Tips for various key trade show topics:
> Top 10 Tips For Trade Show Promotions
> Top 10 Tips For Trade Show Exhibit Design
> Top 10 Tips For Trade Show Booth Staffing
Lead management is just one piece of the puzzle for successful trade shows. Read the What’s Working In Exhibiting white paper to find out more tips and tricks to get the most out of your exhibiting experience. Click here to request your free copy.
Article par Shawn Lacagnina
I have always loved music. And because my daughter is a singer/songwriter (www.darbishaun.com shameless plug), I am currently reading everything I can about the music industry. In that vein, while reading a book by Aerosmith’s drummer, this idea kept pestering me… so here we go…
How to “Aerosmith” Your Way to Improve Your Tradeshow Experience:
Keep these song titles in mind while planning your next trade show and you cannot help but improve your results.
If you’re thinking “I Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” in trade show exhibiting, read the What’s Working In Exhibiting white paper. This 32 page guidebook will tell you the most effective strategies from promotions to exhibit design to measuring your results. Click here to request your free copy.
You will see our booth just as you enter the exhibit hall.
Skyline would love to see you in our booth, #1325, at EXHIBITOR2012, March 5 to 7, 2012 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada. It promises to be an excellent show.
Many exhibit marketers have renewed their strong trade show schedules, and are looking to expand their booth spaces to take advantage of the face-to-face nature of trade shows.
But because our industry tends to lag the economic cycle, there are also exhibit marketers attending EXHIBITOR2012 who are in expansion mode, just now making up for the reductions they made during the downturn.
But all exhibitors have adjusted to the new reality: They need a responsive exhibit partner who can augment their smaller team, boost their trade show results, all the while maximizing their highly scrutinized budget.
We look forward to meeting with exhibit marketers who attend the show, to demonstrate how we can help enhance their exhibiting success. If you need a free pass to the exhibit hall, click here, and enter in promo code 4206 when registering.
5 Reasons To Visit Skyline At EXHIBITOR2012:
Free Trade Show Seminars
Skyline will host 12 “bite-sized” seminars in our booth. You can get the best nuggets on insights about 6 popular trade show topics such as promotions, social media, booth staffing, exhibit design, and more. We will present each 10-minute session twice during the show, every hour on the hour that the show hall is open.
Here’s our free seminar schedule (you may want to print it and take it with you to the show):
Expert Advice
After each seminar we will take Q&A from the audience, answering questions about the session topic or any trade show or marketing questions you have. You can also visit the booth at any time to talk with our experienced staff.
Useful, Elegant Gifts
Attendees to our seminars will receive a cool, aluminum-clad notebook. The elegant notebooks give you a place to jot ideas and reactions to our seminars. The aluminum covers also evoke the clean, elegant look of our metal exhibit systems.
Chocolate
To complement our “bite-sized” seminars we’re offering bite-sized chocolates. Stop by anytime during the show when you need a boost, and get a crunchy, creamy nugget of Ferrero Rocher chocolate.
Meet With A Trusted Exhibiting Partner
Whether you are an existing Skyline customer wanting to see what’s new, or an exhibit marketer looking for new ways to achieve trade show success, you can request a meeting with us. Just click here to ask for a date and time to meet, or stop by to visit us in booth 1325.
Trade shows are a valuable marketing medium. But they’re also hard work. You need help you can depend on to succeed. We hope to see you at our booth at EXHIBITOR2012.
Again, if you need a free pass to the exhibit hall, click here, and enter in promo code 4206.
Article by Jocelyn Sacco
I am part of a small Marketing Department at UGL Services with limited resources so we take every opportunity to repurpose content that we have already developed and tailor it for distribution through other marketing vehicles. In 2008 my team created an advertising campaign targeted to facility managers of corporations with the message that we understand how overwhelming building maintenance can be and we suggest outsourcing these responsibilities to UGL Services.
The Ad
The first ad in the campaign shows a facility manager lying awake in bed with a skyscraper tucked in next to him with the headline “You have a facility. Now it’s time for a life.” It is a literal depiction of a stressed out facility manager experiencing insomnia because he cannot get his mind off of work or the price tag on new upgrades needed in the buildings he manages.
In 2011 we exhibited at a conference managed by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA). When attendees registered for the conference online they were asked a survey question “What job-related issues keep you up at night?” IFMA took all of the responses and came up with topics for roundtable discussions conducted during the event. My team decided to sponsor the roundtable sessions as it was a vehicle for us to leverage the ad that was created in 2008. As part of the sponsorship we were able to put a full page ad in the show directory and posters were hung in the roundtable location.
The Trade Show
We decided to bring the ad to life and add an element of surprise at our trade show booth. I hired an actor to play the sleep-deprived facility manager dressed in his pajamas and chained to a building. All of the attendees were dressed in business attire so our actor really grabbed their attention and became a successful conversation starter. We gave away prescription bottles with jelly beans inside and a label with the text that said “For fast-acting relief and a better night’s sleep” and our logo underneath it. Posters in our booth featured the ad once again and supersized text that read “Tired of taking your work home with you? We’ve got the remedy.” Our actor handed out business-sized cards with the dates and times of the roundtable discussions to encourage participation and promote the problem-solving ideas that attendees would learn about.
The Response…
Overall it was a very successful promotion and a few attendees commented on how they related to the actor chained to the building. Many facility managers said that they try not to take work home with them but it is difficult to put down their Blackberrys especially when they are getting ready to turn in for the night. My response to them was “Have you considered outsourcing your facility services?”
For may ways to draw great leads into your trade show booth, read the What’s Working In Exhibiting white paper. This book will tell you what other exhibit marketers say the best tips and tricks are for successful exhibiting. Click here to request your free copy.
Thanks to Jocelyn Sacco for writing this guest blog post, sharing her experience as a trade show exhibitor. We welcome similar blog posts from Skyline clients who want to share with their peers new and inventive ways they’ve achieved greater trade show success. Click here to tell us your story!
