Author Archives: Jennifer Randolph

Trade Show Marketing Success, Choosing the Right Show-Part I

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With an estimated 14,000 shows to choose from, picking the right shows for your trade show calendar can be a daunting task. The following tips will help you prioritize and organize your trade show calendar.

  • Identify your target customers and the shows they attend – Work with your sales team to identify your product’s buyers, key decision makers and influencers. Reach out to some of your best customers and ask which shows they attend.

 

  • Consult industry listings – Trade Show Network News offers a comprehensive search tool that allows you to search by keyword, industry and location. The database lists number of attendees, exhibitors, show dates and links to show websites. Most show sites provide an overview of attendee demographics and purchasing authority.  While on the show’s website, check its history.  A good show will have a track record of drawing industry leaders and key influencers year after year.

 

  • Keep an eye on the competition – Most shows provide a list of previous exhibitors. If a particular show is drawing your top competitors, it is likely because a high concentration of potential customers will also be attending. Missing the show could put you at a competitive disadvantage. Exhibiting in the same venue as competitors will also give your booth staff the opportunity to roam the exhibit hall and gather competitive intelligence. In addition to the exhibitor list, check the speaker roster for competitive companies.

In order to maximize trade show success, every element of trade show marketing from targeting to followup requires a strategic approach. In our next post, we will discuss ways to further refine your trade show targeting strategy.

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you design and execute a successful meeting, contact Barbara Stroup BStroup@cepiexpo.com

The Impact of Millennials on the Events Industry

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As discussed previously on this blog, in seven years half the workforce in the US will have been born after 1980. Although most event attendees currently come from Generation X, conferences will become increasingly reliant upon the Millennial generation (also known as Gen Y) for attendance at expos and industry meetings. Fortunately, research shows that over 60% of young workers value the face-to-face interactions that exhibits and conventions offer.

To better understand the changing expectations of future generations of expo attendees, Amsterdam RAI recently published a study comparing Generations X and Y. It was found that Gen Y, like older generations, want education and engagement at events, but their needs and expectations are remarkably different. Gen X, balancing family and work, has more time pressure and are looking to justify the time and expense spent attending the conference. They are looking to gain very specific information as time efficiently as possible.

Millennials have been heavily influenced by having grown up with technology. Demographers suggest that they are so accustomed to multitasking and multi-screens that they literally think differently than previous generations. Exhibitors must create creative, visually compelling, engrossing experiences in order to retain their attention.

Gen Y has come to expect personalized interactions. They stream music and TV shows tailored to their likes, discover new products based on personalized recommendations and are served up Facebook ads based on their hobbies, interests and location. Everything is a reflection of their individuality. As a result they bring these expectations with them when they attend conferences. Amsterdam RAI’s research shows that too often the experience does not match their expectations.   They perceive typical exhibitor behavior as a negative, too pushy, too in your face, too carnival like.

Yet with strategic adjustments, our event marketing team can help transform your next expo or Association meeting into an event that will appeal to a wide variety of attendees, including Millennials. For more information, contact Barbara Stroup bstroup@cepiexpo.com.

In the Know: Industry News

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Association and corporate meeting planners often work in isolation and rarely have the opportunity to share information, experiences and ideas with their peers from other sectors. The Meetopolis conference which just wrapped up in Brussels gave meeting planners the opportunity to come together, learn from each other and be inspired. For part of the program, meeting planners were turned into session designers and were able to brainstorm new approaches to meeting design and engagement techniques.

Each element of meeting design was explored. The session resulted in the creation of The Meeting Design Toolbox. The Toolbox is divided into five categories, summarized in the acronym CHATTY (Conceptual, Human, Art, Technical, TechnologY)

  • Conceptual refers to meeting formats, flow, programs and techniques.
  • Human tools are facilitators, actors, speakers, producers, exhibit staff, etc.
  • Art encompasses themes, music, design, video and activities
  • Technical refers to audio-visual, set building, furniture, etc.
  • Technology includes mobile and tablet apps, social technology, hybrid meetings and the like

If you would like to learn more about how we can help you design and execute a successful meeting, contact Barbara Stroup BStroup@cepiexpo.com

Attracting Millennials to Your Next Conference

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Attracting Millienals to ConferencesAssociations and event marketers are preparing for a massive generational shift in the workforce which could have a profound impact on meeting attendance. By next year it is estimated that half of the employees in the world will have been born after 1980. The US workforce is expected to reach that benchmark by 2020.  

Therefore it is not surprising that association executives are searching for ways to attract, connect with and retain the next generation of members and conference attendees. In a survey, 74% of association executives said they were concerned about attracting younger members but less than half of them felt confident in their ability to do so.

Ye the answer may be surprising simple and easily addressed. A recent survey of Millennials found that more than half believe they would benefit from having a professional mentor, but only about one-third said their bosses or supervisors were willing to serve in that role. The desire for career guidance is a crucial gap that associations and professional conferences can fill.

Our event marketing team can help make create and market your next event to attract a wide variety of attendees, including Millennials. For more information, contact Barbara Stroup bstroup@cepiexpo.com.

Trade Show Marketing Success, Differentiate the Experience

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By some estimates, there are now over 14,000 trade shows servicing every imaginable sector and interest. With so many overlapping and competing shows, how can meeting planners and event marketers capture attention away from competing shows?

One of the most powerful keys to success is differentiating your show, event or meeting from competing shows in the same space. In order to successfully differentiate, meeting marketers must first know the audience their needs, motivations, wants and behaviors.

At ExpoPlus, we coordinate closely with Bodden Partners, our parent company that specializes in insight-driven marketing communications. Together we pour over membership data and registration data, review prior attendee surveys, consult with meeting managers, walk the exhibit floor, study traffic patterns, watch interactions, observe behaviors, talk with attendees, and interview exhibitors.

These observations result in tailored recommendations for measurably improving the success of future shows. If you would like to know more about how we can help you differentiate your next event, contact me at bstroup@cepiexpo.com

Trade Show Marketing Success

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The reasons for exhibiting are clear and compelling. According to industry research:

  • 84% of the attendees have some kind of buying power
  • More importantly, 49% came to shows with real purchasing intent
  • 91% of attendees say that trade shows impact their buying decisions because the competition is in one place allowing for comparison shopping in real time
  • 32% of attendees had more favorable purchase intentions after visiting a specific exhibitor
  • Trade show visitors will tell 6+ people about their experience

Given the promise of exhibiting at trade shows, how can marketers be more effective in their trade show marketing. This topic will be discussed in future editions of a new blog series we’ve entitled Trade Show Marketing Success, come join the discussion.

Make Your Business Case for Attending Industry Conferences

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It’s no secret that people are cutting back on attending conferences. Even if your organization has a bulletproof marketing plan for enticing your membership, it won’t work if prospective participants can’t convince the people holding the purse strings.

All too often, people who want to attend a conference simply submit a request and cross their fingers. As a meeting professional, you can help your members by showing them how to put together a business case for why they should attend your conference—and how to get the most out of the event once they’re there. (And note this: As a meeting professional, you also can use this strategy yourself, to get approval for the meeting industry education and networking conferences you personally want to attend each year.)

All prospective conference attendees should show their leaders how conference participation will relate directly to the strategies and objectives of their own organizations. That way, they can articulate the value of their continued professional development.

Imagine your organization sending an e-mail or pamphlet to your membership that contains information like this:

How to Get Approval to Attend This Year’s Annual Conference
In our current economic climate, getting approval to attend meetings may be more challenging for you now than it has been in the past. Here are three steps you can use to build a business case for attending our Annual Meeting:

1. Write down the three to five most important strategies or issues being addressed in your organization right now. Think about how you personally contribute to those strategies. How is your work aligned with the larger organization’s strategy or mission? Make a list of these “personal contributions to strategy.”
2. Review our proposed agenda for the conference and mark the sessions you want to attend that relate to your list of “personal contributions to strategy,” and also make a note of speakers or other people at the meeting you would like to meet.
3. Write a short business case for how attending these sessions and meeting these people will help you contribute to the organization’s strategy. Use this business case to make your request for attending the meeting.

For example, part of your business case might read as follows: “At present, our organization is highly focused on cost savings. My personal contribution to this organizational strategy is to be responsible for finding ways to reduce sales costs. At the XYZ annual conference there is a session entitled, ‘Using Technology to Maximize Sales Efficiencies,’ and an expert, Sarah Smith, will be running the session. I would like to attend Smith’s session and also meet with her privately in order to get ideas about maximizing the cost savings we could receive from using technology in my area.”

Preparing for the Meeting
Once you get approval, you should prepare properly for the conference because you’re going to need to demonstrate to the person who’s paying your way that you received the benefits outlined in your business case. Here are some things you can do to prepare for the conference:

1. Make a list of people you’d like to meet at the conference and why you want to meet them. Don’t be shy about approaching presenters and other “luminaries.” They are more accessible than you might think, especially if you make plans with them in advance.
2. About one to two weeks prior to the conference, contact the people on your list. Make a specific plan for a meal, coffee, or a time and place to get together.
3. One week prior to the meeting, make a personal agenda for yourself that includes the people you’re meeting as well as which sessions you’ll be attending. Be sure to include cellphone numbers or any other contact information you may need for any last-minute changes to your schedule.
4. When you’re at the meeting, try to stick to your schedule as much as possible and take notes during the educational sessions and during your private conversations. However, leave some “white space” on your calendar in case you encounter new people at the meeting with whom you’d like to spend some time.

After the Meeting
1. Immediately following the conference (perhaps on the airplane ride home), write or dictate a concise summary of what happened at the conference and how you will use the information you received and contacts you made to further the strategies of your organization. It’s important to write this one- or two-page summary quickly, while the information is fresh in your mind. Use the notes you took at the meeting to help you.
2. Submit the summary to the person who sponsored your attendance, thanking him or her for the opportunity. The purpose of this summary is to make your next conference request even easier than the first. Once your executives understand that you mean business when you attend a conference, they’ll be more likely to quickly approve your participation at future events.
3. If the knowledge you gained might also be useful to others in your organization, consider rewriting portions of your summary as a blog or Twitter post.

Attending conferences is one of the best ways of responding to times of increased uncertainty. Conferences are all about collaboration and learning—essential ingredients for innovation, economic recovery, and organizational success.

Mary Boone is president of Boone Associates, Essex, Conn. She has been an expert in interactive meeting design for over two decades. At the height of the meetings crisis in 2008, she wrote a white paper, The Four Elements of Strategic Value for Meetings and Events, which is included in the curriculum for MPI’s CMM designation. She is also the author of several books, including “Managing Interactively” (McGraw-Hill) and “Leadership and the Computer” (Prima Publishing), and numerous other award-winning articles and publications. If you have any questions about this article, please contact her at mary@maryboone.com or via Twitter @maryboone.
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3 reasons why digital campaign ideas fail

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JT Anderson ContactFollow this author

Creative Posted on October 01, 2012 inShare.864 PrintShareCommentAs I write this, I am looking at a poster. Every year, an industry publication releases a digital issue that contains some great posters and infographics that I often find useful and put up on the wall of my office for reference. One from 2011 had an ad on the bottom of it that read, “Creativity Meet Ubiquity.” The ad seemed to infer that you can achieve that advertising omnipresence known as “ubiquity” simply by blasting your ad across all digital platforms — as if ubiquity was some great Holy Grail that we advertising professionals (especially creatives) have been looking for our entire careers.

As the executive creative director of a digitally focused agency, my challenge is to come up with new and persuasive ideas specific to the online medium. I find myself staring at this poster on my wall, often late at night, while trying to devise an execution that will break through the clutter. What I need is something relevant, something useful, something entertaining and unique, something that will make a difference for my clients, something — creative.

Connect with the industry. Want to meet the companies that are driving the future of digital marketing? Attend the iMedia Breakthrough Summit, Oct. 14-17. Request your invitation today. Honestly, I am never really going for ubiquity.

Ubiquity has had many names: the “breakthrough,” the “Big Idea,” “Media Agnostic.” It has been associated with the notion that if we repeat a message or experience across all platforms, it will have a greater effect. In fact, ubiquity is something that just feels right. It feels so right that it can’t be wrong — right? And yet, we’ve witnessed countless cookie cutter executions over the years that pander to the lowest common denominator of what “the idea” is. On this road paved with good intentions, many mistakes are made. Here are three of the biggest:

Defining an idea too narrowly
Campaign ideas are concepts, sometimes great ones. They are themes that evoke thoughts and feelings and connect the person experiencing them to the heart of the message. You see execution after execution of a great campaign across numerous media and can just feel how they are all connected. Perhaps they share an actor or model, a visual style, or a few words of copy, and this provides a through-line that ties the executions together. But do they really have to share any of these things in order to convey the same idea?

This is a slippery slope. If using the same actor again and again was all it took to create a memorable and moving campaign, then TV spots could just be print ads that advertisers showed for 30 or 60 seconds. Great TV spots start with an understanding of the inherent power that this particular medium has to offer and what people want when they’re engaging with it. So too should campaigns that run online. Start your brainstorming with these questions: What is the core theme of your idea, and how is it best represented in each of the unique media you plan to include in your campaign? What is your audience doing with those media, and what does it want from them? Showing an ad made for TV to an online audience isn’t necessarily wrong. But it also isn’t necessarily right.

Believing that people want ubiquity
We don’t go to an Italian restaurant when we’re hungry for a burrito, nor should we expect consumers to embrace campaigns that aren’t specific to their media environment. While it’s true that with enough money, frequency, and repetition a marketer can make just about any execution memorable, most clients don’t have that luxury, and bombastic campaigns that win buzz and awards don’t always serve the needs of the client. I try to judge my team’s digital executions by asking if they are media-smart, media-simple, and media-specific. You might not make the biggest splash in the pond by following this rule, but you will catch the right fish. Digital and interactive are not one channel, but rather a collection of platforms and experiences that appeal not only to different people, but also to different states of mind. Not only do you have to ask who your audience is, but also what your customers are looking for when you connect with them.

Falling in love
Keep in mind that your “media-specific execution” is not a “media-agnostic idea.” Sometimes in this job you feel so great about the ad you’ve just helped create that you want to share it with the whole wide world, but you have to be careful not to love it to the detriment of your overall campaign.

During the Olympics, many of us were captivated by Nike’s “Jogger” ad — part of its “Find Your Greatness” campaign. Some experienced it for the first time on TV, while others saw it when a friend or loved one was inspired to share it through social media. Either way, this was positive exposure, because Nike’s message spanned all media: Find your own greatness. But Nike wasn’t blinded by its love of what is undoubtedly a great advertising message. If viewers were curious enough to continue to Nike.com after watching the ad, they were fed a set of challenges that unfold over time, inviting them to find their own greatness. Consumers were given an introduction to the range of Nike Plus products that might help them attain their own personal best. Online, it was those interactive challenges that made the campaign great — challenges that were presented in a way that was unique to the digital medium. Nike not only continued the journey, but it also led customers further down the buying path with an interactive experience that was its own node in the interconnected message.

We’ve all been down this path with other brands. We’ve all seen a TV spot and gone online, only to find the very same original message on the screen. Yes, we loved that TV ad — loved it enough to actively search out more information online — but do we really need to see it again? Nike’s creative team can be forever proud of catching lightning in a bottle and achieving a rare moment in advertising history where it found its own greatness. It can be equally proud of not selling its audience short online and allowing that amazing TV spot to be an appropriate part of an even greater overall campaign.

Now if you will excuse me, I have a poster to take down.

JT Anderson is VP executive creative director for Enlighten.

On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.

“Drawing three lamps in book on a black background” image via Shutterstock.

Five top tips to starting a successful business

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As LinkedIn is a business that started in a living room, much like Virgin began in a basement, I thought my first blog on the site should be about how to simply start a successful business. Here are five top tips I’ve picked up over the years.

1. Listen more than you talk
We have two ears and one mouth, using them in proportion is not a bad idea! To be a good leader you have to be a great listener. Brilliant ideas can spring from the most unlikely places, so you should always keep your ears open for some shrewd advice. This can mean following online comments as closely as board meeting notes, or asking the frontline staff for their opinions as often as the CEOs. Get out there, listen to people, draw people out and learn from them.

2. Keep it simple
You have to do something radically different to stand out in business. But nobody ever said different has to be complex. There are thousands of simple business solutions to problems out there, just waiting to be solved by the next big thing in business. Maintain a focus upon innovation, but don’t try to reinvent the wheel. A simple change for the better is far more effective than five complicated changes for the worse.

3. Take pride in your work
Last week I enjoyed my favourite night of the year, the Virgin Stars of the Year Awards, where we celebrated some of those people who have gone the extra mile for us around the Virgin world. With so many different companies, nationalities and personalities represented under one roof, it was interesting to see what qualities they all have in common. One was pride in their work, and in the company they represent. Remember your staff are your biggest brand advocates, and focusing on helping them take pride will shine through in how they treat your customers.

4. Have fun, success will follow
If you aren’t having fun, you are doing it wrong. If you feel like getting up in the morning to work on your business is a chore, then it’s time to try something else. If you are having a good time, there is a far greater chance a positive, innovative atmosphere will be nurtured and your business will fluorish. A smile and a joke can go a long way, so be quick to see the lighter side of life.

5. Rip it up and start again
If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture isn’t a success, welcome to the club! Every successful businessperson has experienced a few failures along the way – the important thing is how you learn from them. Don’t allow yourself to get disheartened by a setback or two, instead dust yourself off and work out what went wrong. Then you can find the positives, analyse where you can improve, rip it up and start again.

The Best Thing You Can Create in Life

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Achievement, success, a legacy. Everyone is finding a way to arrive at these three things. LinkedIn connects people through millions of messages, but I imagine that if you could eavesdrop on them all at once, you’d find the same thread. Achievement means attaining a goal that means something to you personally. Success means finding fulfillment in your goal. A legacy means leaving behind something that is valued and remembered.

Yet as much as the social network facilitates achievement, success, and a legacy, actually reaching them has become confusing. Thirty years ago, you and I would have seen a narrow, rather fixed path. Our lives were more local and not global. We knew about economic events far away, but they didn’t impact us personally. The people we knew were almost surely born and raised in the same country as we were.

Now the path has become much broader and walls have crashed down. You and I can live a life with much wider cope. The potential for expanded achievement, success, and a legacy are greater than ever. To survive in an expanded world, however, runs headlong into some things that we cherish and that are scary to let go of: familiar surroundings, a feeling of belonging, the security of the group, and the comfort of conformity.

As LinkedIn launches a new format for exchanging inspiration and influence between its members, I want to dedicate my part to this confusing picture of expanded promise. The title of this post is a teaser for the posts to come. What is the best thing you can create in life?

It’s not achievement, success, or a legacy. It’s a clear path to reach those things, and that path is available only by a conscious lifestyle. Expanding your awareness is the best thing you can create in life, because it serves as the foundation for meaning, purpose, inspiration, love, and personal evolution. Please stay tuned. This is the theme I will address twice a week. Let’s travel the path together.

Deepak Chopra MD, FACP, is the author of more than 65 books including numerous New York Times bestsellers. His latest novel, God: A Story of Revelation (HarperOne) released on September 25, 2012). www.deepakchopra.com