HOW TO USE ABM TO SELL LARGE EXHIBITORS
Exhibitors are challenged to justify all marketing and sales expenses more than ever, as they evaluate new technology solutions for lead generation and branding. This brings into focus the large trade show budgets, their value and ROI. Thus, you will need to not only sell harder, but more in depth at large clients to convince them to exhibit at your show. Fortunately, the new ABM strategy is available for organizers to steal from other B2B shows. It will be the smart organizers who use this strategy that will win!
ARE YOU AN ATTENDEE MIND READER?
The Buyers Mindset
We make most, if not all, decisions using a blend of Rational and Emotional aspects of how we view the decision to be made. We don’t think of making our decisions in these terms but it’s true. Some decisions are almost all rational – buying office supplies. Others are mostly emotional – the clothes we wear, but it’s always a blend.
So what might we define as the basic mindset of the potential attendees?
Use Personas to Craft Convincing Communications to the Top 6 Persona Profiles
REGISTRATION DATA – THE TIP OF THE DATA ICEBERG
The best marketing and marketers combine great creative with insightful quantitative knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. So the question to ask yourself is, do you want the superficial tip of the marketing iceberg or do you want to in-depth analysis to guide your marketing decisions?
2018 TRADESHOW QUESTIONS TO ANSWER
When 2018 is over it will be viewed as the year of the Tipping Point for trade show managers moving away from their traditional marketing methods to one of a data-driven strategy and execution? It’s not enough just to gather more data and think of it as Big Data and pass it to exhibitors. It is also imperative to harness all this data to increase registration results and on-site up-selling for the benefit of all – exhibitors and attendees. Ask yourself and team these questions...
IS THE SHOW WORTH IT?
There is a growing need to quantitatively evaluate trade show value. By using these three measurements, an objective evaluation for decision making can be provided. Not all may fit but surely one or two will, and that is better than using activity measure and antidotal opinions to answer to the question of “what did we get for all the money we spent at the show” especially when this tough question is asked several weeks after the show.
HOW TO USE TITLES TO DRIVE ATTENDEE REGISTRATION
When business people are asked to fill out any registration form, they provide their name, title and company without any hesitation for that is who they are in their business life. Other than correcting obvious misspellings, the title field is just recorded and used in future communications as inputted without further analysis and/or segmentation. Yet, the title field is accurate, descriptive of functional responsibility, an input into “personas” and totally underutilized. Why?
It’s because no one has categorized them into title levels and functional responsibility. This key descriptor thus remains underused. With DHM’s Title Maximizer this capability now exists.
EUROPEAN UNION GDPR: A NEW DATA IMPERATIVE FOR ORGANIZERS
By now you have likely heard or know about the new EU data privacy regulation GDPR, which stands for General Data Protection Regulation. Knowing about it is one thing, but are you ready for implementation on May 25th? That’s a little over three months away. In fact, a recent study by UBM and erwinin the fall of 2017 discovered that only 6% of North American companies are completely prepared for GDPR compliance.Are you in the unprepared 94% of companies?
If not, this white paper is intended to give you information and a guide on how you might want to proceed assuming you either have or want to market to European citizens. Even if you don’t target this audience chances are you have some of their records in your registration files now.
HOW TO USE TITLES TO DRIVE ATTENDEE REGISTRATION
Relevancy = Engagement
We all know that the more relevant the message and offer the better we engage our audience which then will lead to increases in response rates. In the case of trade shows and associations, the first response organizers are seeking is attendee registration. For most organizers the current engagement technique is based on promoting the features, benefits and information about the show. The engagement is forced-feed through frequency of communications, particularly email, direct mail and, at times, telemarketing. Unfortunately, after only few of these emails and mailings, the individual tunes out and ignores the rest – a colossal waste of time and money for organizers. They tune out because the messages are not only similar, but are not relevant to them. So what’s the option?
Use titles and function for micro-segmentation to increase relevancy.
EXHIBITOR LIFETIME VALUE
The trade show industry is much like many other businesses in that the most important measure of success is long term loyal customers. In fact, in Fredrick Reichheld’s ground breaking book The Loyalty Effect he quantitatively demonstrates that those companies who have the highest percentage of loyal customers will continually meet or exceed not only their own revenue and margin goals, but also beat the competition in the market. A combination that can’t be beat!
B2B DATA DECAY - THE IMPACT UPON TRADE SHOW REGISTRATION LISTS
WE REGISTER PEOPLE NOT COMPANIES The very term business-to-business (B2B) implies that companies buy from other companies. Well, not exactly. What actually occurs is that people make purchasing decisions to buy from other people at companies who are selling the product/service they are seeking. In other words, companies don’t buy anything – people do, and they generally buy from people based on some level of relationship. The “people buying from people” fact is increasingly true, as the nature of the B2B sale moves from commodity to complex products and/or services a more human interaction and trusted relationship is needed.
WHAT SELLS EXHIBITORS?
Your sales staff meets this question daily when making calls to new and current exhibitors, and are in need of ammunition to convince exhibitors that “it is worth it” to exhibit and/or sponsor at your show or event. Therefore, the title probably hit a sensitive nerve and caused downloads. So here are a few rounds of ammunition for the sales staff, and perhaps the marketing support team, to use when selling exhibitors.
So what sells exhibitors? Read on...
WHAT DO YOU DO WITH TRADESHOW LEADS?
The media might have changed – e.g. tablets with CRM software replacing business cards – but unfortunately the trade show lead follow-up process for many companies hasn’t improved much. Technology does not make a poor process better – only faster! Learn how to turn these names into good leads!
5 STEPS TO HIGH YIELD TRADE SHOW LEAD FOLLOW-UP & QUALIFICATION
Prior to the show much of the time and attention is paid to the booth display and logistics. Frequently, not enough effort is put into ensuring the right attendees show up at the booth. This is an important aspect in the quality vs. quantity balance of booth visitors. Simply put, the more qualified the attendees the better the lead generation results. Here are 5 pre-show marketing steps to consider along with preparing the booth and planning logistics.
BRANDING & DATA – THE NEW ALLIANCE
Old time B2B marketers would see the two words “branding” and “data” as polar opposites in the marketing continuum. To paraphrase the words of an equally old TV commercial – “We’ve come a long way baby”. Both the definitions of branding and data have changed, and we now have updated definitions such as branded content and big data. In Don Schultz’s book Integrated Marketing he makes the valid point, and I quote, “all the touches accumulate to a behavior”. I couldn’t agree more with Don except that I would amend it to read – “all the touches accumulate to a feeling and behavior”.
B2B Data: GET SMART - NOT BIG
We all have heard the buzz about Big Data, and in the B2C world it seems to make some sense considering the vast amount of unstructured social information/data that’s available. For 99.9% of B2B companies Big Data either doesn’t apply or is way down the road. Why is this true? For starters, most B2B companies haven’t even harnessed their basic data and developed a functional marketing database, or in other words their data is relatively “dumb”. So now you’re asking, what’s Smart Data? Simply it’s the combination of the most logical and available data that when used generates an improved result. Sound too basic? Not really and here’s why...
5 TRADE SHOW MARKETING MISTAKES
While the overall industry has grown, not all shows have seen this increase. Many are not growing and/or seeing a decrease in their margin/profit. Part of the challenge today for trade show marketers is to cost effectively attract attendees. Traditional marketing approaches such as direct mail and email are becoming less effective due to both clutter and poor targeting. This is evident by declining response and sign-up rates when sending communications to last year’s attendees list. Little, if any, in-depth data analysis of campaign effectiveness is being done even though the show organizer has the data in their registration system. Unfortunately these systems are nothing more than repositories of registration data, and do not provide the capability to perform analytics on the campaign results of cross channel and multiple communications. Therefore, trade show marketers are missing the boat to analyze what has not worked, and most of all what has produced the most cost effective results.
DATA-DRIVEN SALES 2.0
The introduction of CRM (for sales) and now MRM (for marketing) has brought sales people out of the “information on paper and in my head” era or sales 1.0 kicking and screaming, and into the age of technology and data. We’ve all heard far too many stories of the difficulties this transition created. The screaming is over, for the most part, as any competent sales person now records information on a CRM system. What these changes didn’t do was increase sales productivity...
MEASURING B2B LEAD GENERATION CAMPAIGNS
First, what to measure is the first question? On one end of the spectrum is the recorded data that marketing communications has on the number of inquiries generated and qualified leads handed to the sales group. On the other end are the sales groups who will generally point to the few leads that were “worth anything”, and frequently don’t provide the feedback necessary to measure sales results. Secondly, how to measure is fraught with even more problems, as when inquiries and/or leads are sent to the sales group they frequently disappear into a “black hole”. At best, some feedback is obtained from the field, but almost never is the feedback system tight enough to track all the inquiries or leads to their final disposition and thus measurement. Frequently, no closed loop process exists, and thus no measurement of results is possible. The following white paper details the acknowledged best practices found in B2B marketing.
THE SHOW'S OVER...NOW WHAT?
Successful marketing in all industries has its roots in good planning. Good planning starts with an in-depth understanding of past campaigns and results. No one disagrees with this.Yet, many show organizers leave the insights available from data analytics on the floor, and thus, simply put, data-driven marketing and sales starts with a post-show analysis immediately after the shows over. Read on for processes and recommendations to improve market planning and thus next year’s show results.
TELEMARKETING KNOWHOW: WHY ROBO CALLS ARE RISKY
Guest white paper by Angela Garfinkel, President of Quality Contact Solutions
Many associations and trade organizations use robocalls to blast messages to their potential attendees and members in advance of a trade show or conference. Your message is delivered the same way every single time. And, in addition to being fast and consistent, other than emails, there is no cheaper way to get your message to your target market.
However, it is little known that robocalls are a risky tool to use to communicate en masse with your target market. Read on to learn more...
CURRENT STATE OF EXHIBITOR LEAD FOLLOW-UP - Part 1
As an organizer of trade shows and events your job is to run the show or event, attract the targeted audience and provide exhibitors the opportunity to achieve their respective business objectives. It’s then up to the exhibitors to engage with attendees to generate sales leads, further customer relationships and create brand awareness. So how are exhibitor’s doing? Unfortunately, not good enough!
You should help exhibitors improve their lead system. In essence, view it as your method to improve customer relationships!
NO SHOWS – THE UNANSWERED QUESTION
The Unanswered Question: In B2B sales, the single most unanswered question is why didn’t they buy? As only 10-20% of qualified leads turn into customers, wouldn’t you think that companies would want to know why they lost the other 80-90%? Surprisingly, most B2B firms don’t determine the answer to that question and continue to plow forward without knowing. If asked, the sales staff will default to the standard reason – price. There are actually many reason leads don’t turn into customers and price is only one, and usually not the main one. Much is the same in the trade show industry as the unanswered question is why didn’t those attendees who registered not attend and become No Shows?
PROFILING - PART I
This white paper on Profiling is the first in a three part series Profiling, Targeting & Segmentation. Taken together they lay out a three step process that should be completed by all marketers before developing a marketing campaign. In marketing, as in many other disciplines, the first question is, “where do I start?” Frequently, marketers start where their strengths lie or feel comfortable. Database marketers start with data, creative types start with the creative, etc. Frankly, that’s why so much marketing misses the mark, and does not produce the desired results. Years ago, I was watching Ron O’Brien (a twotime NCAA diving champion and coach of many of our Olympic divers including Greg Louganis) learn a new dive. After his many attempts to “hit” a 3 ½ forward somersault with 2 twists, I asked, “how do you learn a new dive?” His answer was both insightful and appropriate, and one that I’ve taken to heart – Ron said, “If I put my head in the right position, the body soon follows.” When we develop marketing campaigns, we should take Ron’s advice. But what is our head position? My advice to marketers is that profiling and targeting combined with a segmentation process is it, and if we get it right, our marketing “body” will soon follow and “hit” the mark.
TARGETING - PART II
This white paper on Targeting is the second in a three part series Profiling, Targeting & Segmentation. Taken together they lay out a three step process that should be completed by all marketers before developing a marketing campaign. – WHERE SHOULD YOU GO? Of all three marketing processes – profiling, targeting and segmentation – targeting is often taken for granted but it absolutely critical for any firms’ success.
SEGMENTATION - PART III
This white paper on Segmentation is the third in a three part series Profiling, Targeting & Segmentation. Taken together they lay out a three step process that should be completed by all marketers before developing a marketing campaign. Knowing more about the company and individuals within the company leads to messages with a high degree of relevance and therefore greater impact. No longer will undifferentiated advertising and marketing messages get through the clutter, and the time crunch faced by everyone. Simply, the higher the relevance - the more the communication will break through this clutter - and engage the intended targeted decision-maker or influencer.
5 KEYS TO PROFITABLE EXHIBITING
justifying trade shows and measuring ROI is one of the most difficult tasks firms face. The question is “So what did we get for all that money we spent at the show?” Certainly, by adding up the orders written is the most logical answer and typically where the analysis ends. If the gross margin on show sales exceeds the total cost of exhibiting, most exhibitors consider the show a success. Yet, that is only part of the value of trade shows as future results may be many times greater. Longer term results add to the ROI. In addition to show sales there are several future results to that add to the overall success and measure of a show’s success.
THERE’S MORE MONEY IN REGISTRATION DATA!
If you’re a trade show organizer or event marketer you live on prior year’s registration data! Simply, remarketing to past attendees has been the best method to drive attendance. No news here! Registration data will forever remain the primary list source for next year’s trade show or event direct marketing campaigns. But are you getting the most out of this data to make even more money? In our 24 years of experience, only about 5-10% of organizers do. That’s a BIG missed opportunity. There’re at least two major “more money” opportunities available with registration data. Read on...
DATA-DRIVEN EXHIBITOR SALES – PART II
So what’s the solution? Frankly, it’s not an easy one as its highly unlikely and/or justified that organizers will significantly change the sales model to include expensive field sales calls – the best relationship building tactic. But, not all is lost as a rethinking of the sales coverage model that injects a significant dose of marketing communications will go a long way to increase exhibitor relationships and retention.
THE 5 PILLARS OF CLUTTER-BUST COPYWRITING
We’ve heard it before, and are experiencing it ourselves – “I get too many #*! Emails!”
Actually, that’s less than half the story, as between TV, radio, printed, digital and social media, plus the occasional airplane dragging a banner, Advertising Age reports that we see or hear between 3,000 – 5,000 messages a day. Yikes! And they’re all trying to grab our attention and cause us to do one of three things - remember, respond or buy.
B2B TRADE SHOW DATA – UNTAPPED OPPORTUNITIES!
The new world of B2B data! In the last 10-15 years we have seen an explosion in the B2B data world not only in the amount and availability of data, but the usages as well. Compared to the days when we had only compiled data from firms such as D&B and response lists from trade magazines, we now have many more sources and options. This has led to 5 significant trends in B2B database marketing. Read on...
5 BEST PRACTICES OF TRADE SHOW LEAD QUALIFICATION
Lead qualification is one of the primary jobs for B2B marketers, and a great deal of time and money is spent on this step of the sales cycle. This is particularly true for trade show marketers as the primary reason for exhibiting at shows is lead generation. Studies by a number of firms including Exhibit Surveys and Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) identify lead generation at 80-85% as the reason that companies exhibit at trade shows. This is closely followed by branding and customer engagement. We all know this! But what happens after an individual visits a booth, and has their badge scanned or their information recorded in some other way by the exhibitor?
THE 4 ELEMENTS THAT DRIVE B2B DIRECT MARKETING RESULTS
Do You Know the Basics? In the last several months I have gotten a number of calls from individuals who are seeking new sales leads for their company – a most frequent request. They range from marketing managers to sales managers and even presidents of smaller firms. Usually their questions center on how to obtain a list of specific individuals who they feel might buy their product or service. Beyond that, they not sure what to do with the list other than just send an email or call them (rarely do they mention direct mail). We then get into a conversation about the issues of developing a lead generation campaign, and it becomes painfully apparent few know the basics of how to develop a campaign that has even a small chance to generate leads. So with that in mind, this white paper is focused on the basics. If you’re an experienced in B2B direct marketer this is probably not for you. On the other hand, it’s always worth revisiting the basics, as we do forget or ignore then over time.