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How to Engage Your Audience to Engage Theirs
- 1. How to Engage Your Audience to Engage Theirs Tracy Garcia, CEM, Director of Exhibits, IFT Angela Carr, VP Professional Services, a2z, Inc.
- 2. Welcome!
- 3. Learning Outcomes • Learn about tools your exhibitors can use to enhance their presence before, during & after the event • Communicate options to your exhibitors to help advertise their participation • Tell your exhibitors why they want to engage their audiences pre-show to have a better trade show experience.
- 4. What do exhibitors want out of your trade show? Why do attendees attend trade shows? Perspective
- 5. Why exhibitors exhibit… Source: Red 7 Media Research & Consulting
- 6. Why attendees attend… http://www.expoweb.com/article/why-attendees-attend-and-exhibitors-exhibit#.UfGNtb7D8dU Source: Red 7 Media Research & Consulting
- 7. #1 Reason – The Show Floor!
- 8. What are other events doing to attract attendees? Attendance Acquisition and retention tactics with the worst returns: • Direct mail (67%) • Generic mass email • Telemarketing efforts • Social media • Lowering registration rates • List rental/acquisition • Print advertising
- 9. What are other events doing to attract attendees? http://www.lippmanconnects.com/files/ts_best _practices_2013.pdf - 64% of respondents give exhibitors tools to invite their attendees - 27% are offering a hosted buyer program
- 10. #1 Reason – The Show Floor!
- 12. Tools for Exhibitors to Engage their Audience and Enhance their Experience
- 13. How? • Provide Attendee Acquisition Tools • Ask your exhibitors to include your event on their website. Make it easy! • Provide event logo for their marketing materials • Provide email signature containing the event information • Provide complimentary exhibit hall only registration for their customers • Provide canned marketing campaigns • Make available the event’s attendee marketing emails that the exhibitors can download & send or so they can review the highlights
- 14. How? •Capitalize on word of mouth – social media •Provide the exhibitors with the event twitter hash tag and the event Facebook page information – Encourage them to post – Pull the feeds onto the homepage of your event website. •Provide rich content on your website so the exhibitors want to encourage their customers to visit the site •Have exhibitors promote the event mobile app •Use all the media channels you can, both traditional and emerging
- 15. How? Attendee Acquisition Tools for Exhibitors
- 17. Attendee Acquisition Widget Marketing Campaign 3/12 - 22% open 5/9 - 19% open 6/26 - 18% open
- 18. How? Provide email signature containing the event information
- 19. Exhibitor Email Signatures • Prior to registration opening Plan to attend! 2013 IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo July 13 – July 16, 2013 Chicago, IL • Once registration opens Register now! 2013 IFT Annual Meeting & Food Expo July 13 – July 16, 2013 Chicago, IL • After the event ‘Miss something at the 2013 Annual Meeting & Food Expo? Check out IFT Live for news and videos!
- 22. How? Rich content on show website
- 23. Rich Content: eBooth Sample
- 24. Rich Content: Product Showcase
- 25. How? Have your exhibitors promote the mobile app for your show
- 26. Mobile App Promotion: Sample
- 27. Tell your exhibitors why they want to engage their audiences
- 28. Tell Your Exhibitors Why They Want to Engage Their Audiences • Because tradeshows are the most cost effective way for face-to-face interaction • Makes them look like a partner to their existing customers • Average attendee doesn’t see every exhibit – make sure you are one of them • Overcome “bad booth location”
- 29. Communicate Options to Your Exhibitors to Help Advertise Their Participation • Getting exhibitors to listen and take advantage of the tools offered is always the biggest challenge. Year-to-year continuity is key. Start helping them with future show right now. • Develop a program aimed to communicate the exhibitor attendee acquisition tools you have available and how they're best used. • Guide them toward your show's most meaningful programs so they know what to promote. • Enlist the direct feedback of your exhibitors. Ask them what will work.
- 30. Questions? Angela Carr acarr@a2zinc.net 443-393-2450 Tracy Garcia, CEM tgarcia@ift.org 312-604-0242
Editor's Notes
- Welcome to the session. Angi Carr, short intro Tracy Garcia, and I am the Director of Exhibits for the Institute of Food Technologists. We have an annual event that attracts just under 24,000 attendees and over 1,170 exhibitors occupying 269, 238 net square feet. I have been in the industry for 25 years and have had the opportunity to work on both the show management and exhibitor side of the industry.
- Why do attendees attend trade shows? - Certification/Educational programs - Networking - The show floor! - Finding New Product and innovations The things they cannot get from the web…face to face interaction and to be able to experience the product with their five senses.
- What’s the take-away from this exhibitor information for show producers? The focus should be on the top three reasons exhibitors’ exhibit: 1. Raise awareness of company and brand. 2. Leads from new buyers and prospects. 3. Create and/or strengthen industry relationships or partnerships
- Why do attendees attend trade shows? - Certification/Educational programs - Networking - The show floor! - Finding New Product and innovations
- The number one reason attendees attend your event is to see exhibitors on the show floor. Face to face interaction and to be able to experience the product with their five senses.
- Interesting that we spend the most money on things that don’t work
- Here’s some insight into what other shows are doing.
- Getting back to the session – repeat…the number one reason people attend your show…sooooo….
- Use your assets! Attendee Acquisition Strategy can be defined as, "the tools that makes attendee acquisition simpler by understanding and leveraging the environment." Engaging your exhibitors to engage their customers is a low cost attendee acquisition tool.
- When you begin having your exhibitors assist in acquiring attendees be sure you understand and communicate the key attributes and drivers of your attendee audience to the exhibitors. Are they young/old, male/female, collaborative/competitive, digital/old school, serious/party animals, etc.
- We are going to go into more detail of a few of these. CEIR paper: Attracting Attendees
- The numbers increased significantly from last year to this year’s event. We launched the widget about 1 ½ months prior to the event last year. This year we had the widget available when registration opened (approx. 5 ½ months prior to the event). We sent special emails to the exhibitors to encourage them to download the widget early so their customers could take advantage of the early bird registration rate. 100 exhibitors participated which is just under 12%
- Our marketing campaigns are in conjunction with the complimentary Expo Only pass program. Through our registration company, we provide exhibitors with an automated system to generate email campaigns and provide a complimentary Expo Only registration. The automated system contains three different emails (Generic about the meeting, product specific and one for first time exhibitors) The system automatically populates the booth number, complimentary expo only registration code, event logo and how to register. All the exhibitors need to do is upload an excel with their customer’s email, add their with their logo, a picture and some introductory copy regarding their company and hit send. The exhibitors are able to view via an exhibitor dashboard the # of emails sent, the open rate, and the number of people registering using their code including full contact information. We incentivise them to use this service # of new customers from the exhibitor and they receive additional priority points, discounted booth space, free airline ticket or Ipad
- Encourage your exhibitors to beef up their presence on your website before the show. This affects SEO for your website and makes your show a valuable resource for attendees. Free News posting/press release on the Event website homepage. Create programs that make it easier for exhibitors to promote new products. . We even pull the new product information from the directory listing into the ticker We include the facbook and twitter feeds on our event website
- Launch your mobile app at least 2 months prior to event Encourage your exhibitors to include download information for mobile app in their marketing material or website. Provide the exhibitors with mobile app stats such as the # of downloads by device, the number of views of their listing, and the geographic information regarding the downloads.
- Attendees spend an average of 8.5 hours walking the IFT. Assuming an average conversation between attendee and exhibitor lasts 10 minutes, and an additional 5 minutes are spent traveling to the next exhibit -- then an average attendee will experience only 34 exhibits over the course of the show -- out of more than 700 (less than 5%). The only way make sure your exhibit is one of the 5%, is through pre-show marketing. Today's attendees are pressed for both time, and finding quality solutions to their problems so it's imperative for exhibitors to be sure they are one of the companies the attendees visit through pre-show marketing. Using pre-show marketing overcomes a perceived "bad booth location". Attendees will seek out every exhibitor they want to see, regardless of location. The key for exhibitors, is to make the right visitors want to see you.