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[This is a tran­script of the free audio pro­gram, Experiential Marketing Today. The audio ver­sion of this con­tent is avail­able at: Episode 002: Transforming Tradeshow Tactics into Experiential Excellence]

Announcer: Welcome to Experiential Marketing Today.

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Todd Austin: Welcome to this episode of Experiential Marketing Today. This show is about the the­ory and prac­tice of using expe­ri­ences to engage audi­ences with the authen­tic nature of a brand or com­pany. We believe that it may be the most pow­er­ful tool that mar­keters have, but it’s also some­thing of a mys­tery. My name is Todd Austin, I’ll be your host for this episode.

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Todd: Episode Two: Transforming Trade Show Tactics into Experiential Excellence. In this episode we’ll dis­cuss how, with care­ful plan­ning, you can trans­form your trade show mar­ket­ing into a pow­er­ful expe­ri­en­tial tool that gen­er­ates results.

In our pre­vi­ous episode, we defined expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing. As we con­cluded, we made the point that the eas­i­est place to start build­ing your expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing pro­gram is to look at your cur­rent activ­i­ties and iden­tify those areas where you meet with your cus­tomers and prospects face-to-face. Since involve­ment and par­tic­i­pa­tion are essen­tial to expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing, these in-person activ­i­ties are your best bet for get­ting a pro­gram off the ground.

Trade show mar­ket­ing is one such activ­ity and that’s the topic we’ll be dis­cussing today. John Roberson joins us again. John, it’s a lit­tle strange to talk about trans­form­ing our trade show mar­ket­ing into an expe­ri­en­tial tool just because trade shows seem to be all about expe­ri­ences to start with. Why does this need fixing?

John Roberson: Well, they’re about expe­ri­ences for sure, but it’s an expe­ri­ence in over-stimulation. It’s kind of like a really bad sit­com, Todd, a cross between “The Bachelor” and an inter­na­tional mar­keter bazaar, where all these ped­dlers are kind of com­ing at you and offer­ing their wares. It’s even rem­i­nis­cent of the strip in Las Vegas at night. Just so much bling, so much visual noise, and it’s an expe­ri­ence over­load. But it’s also an expe­ri­ence that most mar­keters don’t control.

Todd: And over time, we’ve reduced our trade show mar­ket­ing to: I show up, I set up my booth — which is just essen­tially, I guess, a big sign — I give away the Happy Funball with our logo embla­zoned on the side, shake hands, smile, pack up, and go home.

John: So we’re stand­ing there, or worse, we’re sit­ting there under our big sign, and it’s in the mid­dle of this gigan­tic room full of big signs, and we’re wait­ing on some­one to notice us and come up and pick up our brochure. This is not expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing. Experiential mar­ket­ing is about per­son­ally engag­ing our audi­ence in the authen­tic nature of our brand.

And I really doubt that the sce­nario we’ve described is the authen­tic nature of any brand. But it prob­a­bly hits close to home for a lot of folks, don’t you think?

Todd: Oh, I do. And there’s also this stat, which is sober­ing. Many of us, when we go to a trade show, think we’ve got three days to get the atten­tion of the per­son that we’re tar­get­ing. But sta­tis­tics show that the aver­age attendee only spends about one day walk­ing the trade show floor.

John: Todd, they’re going to see the peo­ple that they want to see first, either because of some agenda or some rela­tion­ship that they have already, or because some sort of solic­i­ta­tion or mar­ket­ing mes­sage that came at them rang with res­o­nance. And so then they’re just going to walk the floor, when­ever they can, the remain­ing period of the time.

The prob­lem with that is, we only have this small win­dow to rise above the visual noise and cap­ture their atten­tion. And the odds are that most of the peo­ple we want to talk with and meet with are not going to notice us, unless we do some­thing that really breaks out of the norm.

Todd: So, clearly, there is some work that we can do here. We painted a pretty bleak pic­ture, and yet you and I know that trade shows are a highly effec­tive way to mar­ket when done cor­rectly. So how do we get from here to there?

John: The key is to break out of the show floor men­tal­ity. We’ve got to start by chang­ing the way we approach trade shows. And the crit­i­cal ele­ment to chang­ing the way we think about trade shows is a 360-degree plan.

Todd, a 360-degree plan is pre-, at-, and post-show mar­ket­ing. Most peo­ple just don’t do it, and the results are mediocre at best. But if it can be done, I think our audi­ence will notice dra­matic changes in their results.

Todd: So, let’s break that down. What hap­pens in the “pre” stage?

John: The “pre” stage is about set­ting objec­tives. It’s about plan­ning, it’s about mak­ing con­tacts. You think about set­ting objec­tives. You might say, for exam­ple, you want to sign up 15 pre­mium deal­ers for your new prod­uct line. There are sev­eral things that that does for you right away.

First of all, it nar­rows your focus. We’re not going after deal­ers who might carry our mod­est or econ­omy prod­uct line. We’re going after deal­ers who want to carry the pre­mium prod­uct line. It also gives us some­thing to mea­sure. We can’t improve what we can’t mea­sure. So by mea­sur­ing, we’re able to set a stan­dard or a water­mark that we com­pare our results to next year, but that we also com­pare our invest­ments to this year, as we mea­sure our return on investments.

The last thing is — and this is huge — it relieves us from hav­ing to be every­thing to every­body. Because we don’t want to do busi­ness with every­body at the trade show. Now some peo­ple in the audi­ence will say, “Well sure we do, we want to do busi­ness with every­body.” We don’t. We want peo­ple who look like our best cus­tomers, or we want peo­ple who meet a cer­tain type of “fir­mo­graphic” or a cer­tain SIC code or indus­try code or size. And to do that effec­tively, we have to tar­get who we want to go after.

Todd: And that seems like one of the things that peo­ple have a hard time let­ting go of. “I have to send cards to everyone!”

John: Oh, totally. So much of what we do, we do because of habit. The thought of send­ing post­cards to every­one who’s com­ing to the show is equiv­a­lent to the thought of, as we encounter some of our clients who come in and say, “I’ve got to find a really great ink pen, because we always give away ink pens, and peo­ple look so for­ward to receiv­ing our ink pens.”

Why are we giv­ing away this ink pen? What’s the pur­pose of this blasted ink pen? Well, peo­ple get in a habit of doing these things. And sim­i­larly, they send out post­cards to every­body. In send­ing out post­cards to every­body what they for­get is, their com­pe­ti­tion is on that list, their fel­low exhibitors are on that list. There are a lot of dis­cre­tionary or non-target audi­ence mem­bers that are on that list that really shouldn’t be.

Todd: This set­ting objec­tives part of the pre-show plans sounds like it’s really impor­tant. And there’s this phrase that we hear from time to time from cus­tomers that we’ve both come to dread. The phrase is: “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” You fill in the blank after that.

The phrase comes before we’ve ever set an objec­tive. It’s a symp­tom of a cus­tomer get­ting tac­tics before strat­egy. The last time I checked, cool is not a strate­gic objec­tive. It’s not mea­sur­able for most businesses.

John: Coolness is not an objec­tive. And now what I think you’re doing is you’re really hit­ting on what sep­a­rates good com­pa­nies in expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing from great com­pa­nies. Because good com­pa­nies will use hijinks and tac­tics and efforts that are just novel. And great com­pa­nies will use strate­gies that are on-brand and on-message and cre­ate very mem­o­rable exchanges with their audience.

Todd: They find a way to be cool after they’ve decided what they want to achieve.

John: Coolness is the by-product of being on-strategy.

Todd: Let’s get back to your orig­i­nal point. You men­tioned two other parts of the “pre” stage: plan­ning and mak­ing contact.

John: Now that we know who we’re tar­get­ing and we know what we want them to do, we have to decide how we’re going to do that. And the first step in that process is plan­ning. We’ve got to cre­ate this oppor­tu­nity for our tar­get group to expe­ri­ence and inter­act and per­son­ally relate to the authen­tic nature of our brand.

Lots of options come to mind. It may be an off-site meet­ing that goes on in con­junc­tion with the trade show. It may be some sort of very impres­sive inter­ac­tive in-booth expe­ri­ence. But we also think about ques­tions like, “What is our com­pe­ti­tion going to do?” So that part of the plan­ning stage starts to for­mu­late. How are we going to do this? What is going to be our strat­egy for doing this?

Similarly, there is a con­tact strat­egy. And we think in our con­tact strat­egy about, what is the mes­sage that we want to relate and to what audi­ence do we want to relate that to? How can we make that mes­sage engag­ing and full of impact and mem­o­rable? How can we offer it to the audi­ence in a way that really under­scores this expe­ri­ence that they’re hav­ing with our brand?

Todd: It feels like that this mes­sag­ing piece is eas­ier if we’ve done the first part, which is set­ting the objec­tive and nar­row­ing our tar­get. We can get someone’s atten­tion if we can spend more on how we can com­mu­ni­cate with them, and we can spend more if we do it for less people.

John: I totally agree with that phi­los­o­phy. This is really about now tak­ing the resources we have and hon­ing them very precisely.

Todd: So it seems like most of the men­tal heavy lift­ing hap­pens in the pre-show stage. We’ve set our objec­tive, we’ve made our plan for what we’re doing at the show, and we’ve done our con­tact strat­egy. Let’s spend some time on the at-show part of the 360. What hap­pens here?

John: The at-show part of the 360 plan is all about the exe­cu­tion. In the pre-show activ­ity, we devel­oped the plan. Now we have to “work” the plan, as they say. And sev­eral things come to mind, Todd.

First, we’ve got to allow for the unex­pected. There’s a great quote — I can’t pro­nounce the name of the guy who said it, I think he’s a famous Viking from days gone by — but he said, “No bat­tle plan sur­vives con­tact the enemy.” And the thought there is, we’ve got to adjust the bat­tle plan when we’re right there on the bat­tle floor engaged in com­pet­i­tive strate­gies with every­one who’s com­ing to the exhibit.

Todd: That’s impor­tant, because as any­one who’s ever been to a trade show knows, there are way to many mov­ing parts for us to expect that our care­fully laid pre-show plan is going to come off per­fectly. So I guess is makes sense that we have to expect the unex­pected. What else hap­pens at-show?

John: The sec­ond thing to really con­sider is that every­thing must be on-message. If we fail at any­thing, we can’t fail at deliv­er­ing the key mes­sage to the tar­get audi­ence that we’ve cho­sen. We’ve also got to think about part of the exten­sion of that mes­sage and part of the exten­sion of the brand are the peo­ple who are rep­re­sent­ing us within the booth. And they’ve got to know what the objec­tives are that we’re going for. We’ve got to train them in good boothmanship.

Good booth­man­ship is very dif­fer­ent than good sales­man­ship or being effec­tive at doing a pre­sen­ta­tion. They’ve got to know how to engage with an audi­ence in that brief period of time on the trade show floor. And they also have to be equipped to rec­og­nize our tar­get audi­ence. And there are strate­gies for how to do that.

Todd: OK. So, we’ve got to expect the unex­pected, we’ve got to stay on mes­sage, and we’ve got to train our peo­ple well. Is there any­thing else that hap­pens at-show?

John: We’ve got to track every­thing we’re doing at-show against our objec­tives. Doing that gives us a great feed­back loop where we can make improve­ments for the future.

Todd: OK, let’s talk some now about the post-show stage. What hap­pens there?

John: The post-show stage is about follow-up. Here’s a sim­i­larly gloomy sta­tis­tic for you: would you believe that of those folks that get leads at trade shows, only about 25% of those fol­low up after a trade show?

Todd: That’s a very dis­ap­point­ing statistic.

John: And what’s that all about? They have worked so hard to get these engage­ments, these oppor­tu­ni­ties, these leads, and then some­how the sys­tem breaks apart. I have a the­ory as to why that hap­pens. It hap­pens because we haven’t planned on the front end what the follow-up strat­egy will be on the back end. Are you track­ing with me?

Todd: I think so. If I haven’t planned ahead of time, I go to the show, I come back from the show, I’m exhausted, my desk is piled up with all the things that need to take place when I get back that have been wait­ing for me, I don’t have a plan for fol­low up, so I don’t do it.

John: That’s right. Just by the act of doing fol­low up, you’re going to be bet­ter than the aver­age exhibitor on the trade show floor. But we’ve got to cre­ate that follow-up plan in advance.

The other things we’ve got to do as a post-show strat­egy is we’ve got to ask our­selves: how did we com­pare against the objec­tive? So many com­pa­nies, trag­i­cally, for­get to close the loop in the 360-degree process of get­ting that feed­back in so we can improve things going for­ward. We’ve got to think about: what did we learn and how do we apply that for next time?

And that tech­nique of get­ting that feed­back and apply­ing that feed­back loop, Todd, that tran­scends size of com­pa­nies. Any size com­pany can learn and gather feed­back from show to show or year to year to make improve­ments for the future.

Todd: And if you do that, it doesn’t take very long for you to start see­ing dra­matic improve­ments in your results.

John: Really dramatic.

Todd: Let’s walk through an exam­ple of this 360 plan in action.

John: Sure. We’ve got a health­care client who deliv­ers online learn­ing and con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion to nurses through­out health­care sys­tems across the coun­try. As we met with this client and went through an exer­cise we call a “dis­cov­ery ses­sion,” what we con­cluded was that the key point of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion for this client in the way in which they deliver online learn­ing — which a num­ber of com­peti­tors do — is their per­sonal, nur­tur­ing approach.

Todd: That’s unusual for an Internet company.

John: It’s very unusual. But they believe very strongly that that’s what sets them apart. So as you see this dif­fer­en­tia­tor come to life, you see that being ele­vated now to set a stage for how can we cre­atively col­lab­o­rate with this client to bring about a very mem­o­rable mar­ket­ing experience.

Todd: If that nur­tur­ing ele­ment was the authen­tic nature of the brand, then we’re try­ing to cre­ate an expe­ri­ence that allows some­one to know that about the brand.

John: Exactly. What’s inter­est­ing about this client is that they were very habit­ual in their trade show strate­gies, in that they were kind of doing the same old, same old. They were — as you described ear­lier — they were putting up the booth, they weren’t doing much in addi­tion to just show­ing up at the trade show.

As we col­lab­o­rated with them in iden­ti­fy­ing these key brand dif­fer­en­tia­tors, we then per­suaded them to think about how we could re-tool some of the resources they had how we could invest in addi­tional resources that were very mea­sur­able, that we had very much the abil­ity to track, into ini­tia­tives that would bring their tar­get audi­ence in con­ver­sa­tion with them, would allow them to engage with their tar­get audience.

Now, notice I’m choos­ing my words care­fully. Because in this case, it wasn’t about bring­ing their tar­get audi­ence to their booth, although we did deliver against that, it was really about pro­vid­ing a way to engage and inter­act with and con­verse with their tar­get audience.

We thought about that tar­get audi­ence. They wanted to go after these nurse super­vi­sors, but they wanted to go after the industry’s best: large health­care orga­ni­za­tions, not an average-size health­care orga­ni­za­tion, but the larger ones. And we knew that those nurse super­vi­sors were highly under-appreciated, like most folks are in the health­care industry.

What we devel­oped was a spa event. And a spa event was devel­oped such that it was held prior to the show hall open­ing. This worked very well because the entire trade show was held at one hotel loca­tion. So, work­ing with the client, we secured one of the hotel’s meet­ing room facil­i­ties. We trans­formed that room into our own branded spa for this client.

And we then pro­ceeded to tar­get the high-value prospects that we wanted to engage with. We sent them very high-impact solic­i­ta­tions, an invi­ta­tion to come by this spa event for per­sonal, nur­tur­ing care. Then when the folks arrived at the hotel, we gave them another invi­ta­tion to come by our event. We even gave them a t-shirt, we gave them aroma soap, we gave them an aro­mather­apy can­dle, all branded, all fur­ther­ing our mes­sage of per­sonal, nur­tur­ing care.

Todd: Let’s talk about some­thing there for just a sec­ond. You nar­rowed the focus from all the peo­ple com­ing to this show to a small group of, I would guess, mostly women — nurse super­vi­sors sounds like it would be mostly women — from large com­pa­nies. So by focus­ing on this much smaller group of women, you were able to cre­ate a spa event, which wouldn’t work for 95% of the peo­ple attend­ing the show, but does work for this smaller, select group. By nar­row­ing our focus, we were able to come up with an idea that would really get atten­tion for the peo­ple we were targeting.

John: Correct. Several things there. One, it would be too expen­sive or cost-prohibitive to invite every­body to this event. But more impor­tantly than that, it shows bad mar­ket­ing. Because again, we want to get and tar­get high-value cus­tomers, the cus­tomers that are most likely to be very prof­itable for our firm. So that was this small grouping.

Well, the result, Todd, was 78% — 78% — of the folks that we were going after came to our event and had per­sonal con­ver­sa­tions with our health­care ser­vices firm staff. What was so inter­est­ing was — of course we had a cer­ti­fied mas­sage ther­a­pist there, we had beauty care folks there, they were chang­ing nail color and doing man­i­cures and pedi­cures — but our health­care staff was serv­ing these nurse super­vi­sors with smooth­ies and home­made lemon­ade and cool spring water.

And they were tak­ing the time, while they were cap­tive there in that mas­sage chair or there get­ting their nails done, to just chat with them and inter­act with them. Our staff was branded in very dis­tin­guish­able ways so that they were clearly iden­ti­fied. To get into the event, you had to wear a branded t-shirt.

And so it was this ter­rific, level play­ing field where the whole event, the whole room, was a brand expe­ri­ence that was highly mem­o­rable, highly emo­tional, and com­pletely on the true, authen­tic nature of the brand.

Todd: I love this image of try­ing to put myself in their competitor’s shoes for when that show opens. Because this spa event hap­pened right before the show opened, correct?

John: Right.

Todd: And you men­tioned that they had to wear our customer’s t-shirt to get to the spa event. So here I am, a com­peti­tor to this cus­tomer, sit­ting on the show floor and wait­ing for it to open, and in walk the best cus­tomers that I would likely want to tar­get wear­ing my competitor’s t-shirt, going to my competitor’s booth, and I’m won­der­ing what just happened.

John: That just shows you how, if we accept this at-the-show-floor tac­tic of always doing it the same way, we’re never going to cre­ate dif­fer­ent results. But by totally rethink­ing the way in which we engage with and inter­face with that audi­ence, we can be more com­pet­i­tive and have greater strides toward cre­at­ing bet­ter results.

Todd: There was a sec­ond exam­ple I would have like for us to have gone into here, but we’ve gone over time. Maybe we’ll just post a link to that in the show notes. Any final thoughts?

John: What’s so inter­est­ing about each of these, Todd, is you start to see that pro­gres­sion we’re talk­ing about, about a 360 plan and approach to trade show effec­tive­ness, and over­lay­ing expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing on a trade show.

In each case there’s the pre-show: the tar­get­ing, the con­tact strate­gies. There’s the at-show: the expe­ri­ence. And in many cases we’re win­ning against our com­pe­ti­tion before the shows are even start­ing. And in the post-show there’s these great sta­tis­tics, these great out­comes and great bench­marks and great feed­back that we use to improve the process for the next time.

Todd: Right. And just to restate the big sta­tis­tic from this exam­ple, this health­care com­pany got a 78% response rate from its tar­get audience.

John: Once again, that’s out­stand­ing; it’s record-setting. But I think what it shows is that effec­tive plan­ning pro­duces great outcomes.

Todd: And plan­ning is some­thing that any­one can do. John, how would you like to wrap this up?

John: I want to remind the audi­ence that this can work no mat­ter the size of you com­pany. You can find strate­gies and work through this 360 plan of pre-, at-, and post-show mar­ket­ing. And you can do it and over­lay and inter­ject into that whole plan ways that cre­ate these mem­o­rable, per­sonal, involv­ing engage­ments with the audience.

And the result of those is you’ve got great ways to have good con­ver­sa­tions, to cre­ate good leads that result in prof­itable busi­ness down the road.

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Todd: That con­cludes Episode Two. We hope you found some­thing use­ful that will help you be more suc­cess­ful. You can find links to any of the resources men­tioned in this episode in the show notes on our web­site. For this episode, that includes a link the “Saturday Night Live” Happy Funball clip on You Tube, as well as the famous Viking quote that John used, who — as it turned out — was actu­ally German. You’ll also find a link to the full tran­script of this program.

Our web address is www.experientialmarketingtoday.com. As always, if you have ques­tions or com­ments, we wel­come those. There are three ways you can get those to us. We have an email address set up, that is feedback@experientialmarketingtoday.com, or you can post com­ments on the web­site beneath each episode. Finally, you can call us on a com­ment line. That num­ber is 615−742−3355.

On the next episode, we’ll talk about what may seem like expe­ri­en­tial heresy to some, the con­cept of using your phys­i­cal office space as an expe­ri­en­tial mar­ket­ing tool. We hope you’ll join us.

Announcer: Thanks for lis­ten­ing to Experiential Marketing Today.

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