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CHAPTER 2

ARE TRADE SHOWS THE RIGHT TACTIC FOR YOUR BUSINESS?

All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.

—Sun Tzu, c. 6th century BCE Chinese general, military strategist and philosopher, The Art of War

In the previous chapter we provided you with some compelling evidence as to why trade shows remain a crucial part of the marketing mix even in this digitally engaged world Hopefully now you’re feeling enthused, energised and ready to get started on planning your next trade show. However, before you dive in and start investing your hard-earned cash in branded giveaways and bespoke animations to play on your 100-inch plasma screen, there’s another piece of the jigsaw you need to make fit – and that’s to consider whether trade shows are even the right tactic for your brand and your business. You might find it strange that in a book that strongly advocates the role of trade shows and seeks to inspire exhibitors to deliver better events, we’re even suggesting that trade shows might not be the best tactic. This comes from decades of working with a wide variety of brands and organisations that have spent tens of thousands on individual trade events that were never going to return much value. Before we get into the excitement and specifics of making your trade show brilliant, let’s talk about whether it even has the potential to be brilliant to begin with.

Where is your business now?

Before you invest in any trade show or event, or any marketing tactic in general, stop and ask yourself where your business is now and where it is going. If you’re the owner of the business, where do you want to be in the next 3–5 years and who are the customers and stakeholders who will help you get there? If you’re employed by an organisation, do you understand the corporate vision and mission and are you clear on where the business is looking to grow?

For example, imagine you’re working in a business that develops a product or service that will exclusively be sold online to the end user without the need for an intermediary wholesaler or retailer. Your business is based on an e-commerce model where the consumer visits your website or app to buy your product or service and can receive additional content and information about you direct to their inbox. You are the only provider in the market for your niche product and your target audience, while incredibly loyal, are spread across the globe. Having recruited a consumer, usually by referral from within their online community, they are frequent and high-value buyers and you build a relationship by adding value to their experience with you. Your ambition is to grow your current sales by extending your portfolio of services.

In this set of circumstances, it would be difficult to justify the cost of investing in trade shows as a marketing tactic. Certainly, a B2B event would deliver little value as your route to market is directly to the consumer and therefore visitors who are attending an event on behalf of their business would not be relevant for your specific growth objectives. A B2C event might have more potential if it were in a complementary industry but the relative costs versus the limited number of possible customers you might meet would make it a very expensive and low-value investment. Building online advocacy and enhancing the user experience would be far more relevant in these circumstances than a trade show would be. Understanding who and where your audiences are is a critical first step in deciding whether trade shows will be the right tactic for your business. Before even thinking about which trade show to attend, what your stand looks like and who’s going, ask yourself honestly if trade shows are a tactic that could reach an audience that can contribute to your growth aspirations?

Case study: ASOS

1. Organisation: ASOS – As Seen On Screen

Objective: To become the number one global online fashion destination for 20-somethings

Execution: ASOS delivered revenues in 2017 of £1.9 billion, exclusively through an online platform of affordable, trendy and authentic clothing ranges, aimed at 20-somethings but purchased by a much wider age group. ASOS’s success has been driven by significant investment in delivering a brilliant online user experience, supported by good customer service and seamless integration across desktop and mobile. Their audience grew up surrounded by digital and live their life on and through their devices. Although some advertising has been executed offline, with print and outdoor media, it is largely done online, where their audience spend most of their time. In these circumstances and with this objective it would be difficult to argue the merits of investing in trade shows with the possible exception of perhaps some consumer clothing and fashion events.

*Even despite this digital success, ASOS has been a victim of the consumer desire for a more in-depth and tactile relationship putting-out a profits warning 17th Dec 2018 based on slowing sales growth.

Are you ready to sell?

The key long-term objective of any trade show is to establish new relationships, or build on existing ones, in order to achieve profitable sales growth. But what if you don’t have anything ready to sell? Many new businesses, or existing businesses with a new product, rush to exhibit at their industry trade show with a few mocked-up samples and a rough product cost but without any thought to a solid route to market strategy. One of the most common complaints we hear from visitors is that they have found an amazing new product at an event, but they can’t actually buy it yet. Or they can only buy it direct from the manufacturer in either small or huge quantities which just aren’t appropriate. When you’re passionate about your product or service, and need it to start earning money for you, it’s tempting to get lost in the excitement and forget about the practicalities of getting your product to your customer. However, if you disappoint a potential new customer during the first interactions you have with them, it is much more difficult to rebuild that trust when you are ready to sell. As we will keep coming back to throughout this book, trade shows are not about what’s important to you or your business, but what’s important to your customer – and if you can’t make the transaction easy you might question whether you should wait.

This also raises the question of scalability. Trade shows attract a range of visitors with very different buying authority from different sized businesses. There is always the potential you might meet someone who wants to order more stock than you could ever produce based on your current capacity – how would you manage that conversation so that they work with you rather than taking your idea and asking a company with a larger capacity to manufacture it for them? Equally, if everyone you meet wants to place orders for immediate delivery would you be able to service the demand? We’re not suggesting that you wait until every piece of the jigsaw is in place before you unleash your brilliance on the market, in business things are rarely ever perfectly finished. The point is to really think about whether you’re ready enough to be exhibiting and whether you have good enough responses for the areas where you’re not quite ready yet?

The No. 1 reason for visiting (not exhibiting at) trade shows is to see new products. More than 90% of trade show visitors say they are looking for new products. It has been the No. 1 reason to attend for 25 years! Trade shows are a great place to introduce or feature your newest products.

(Lincoln West, 2016)

Is your customer ready to buy?

You may have put in all the hard work to ensure that your product or service is market ready (or as close to market ready as possible), but do you know that your customers are ready to buy? If you’re operating in an established category or industry, where your product is an enhanced version of something already available, there is less risk. You know your customer wants this product or service and as long as you can clearly articulate why your proposition is better (faster, cheaper, easier, adds more value) than the competition, you have grounds for a credible commercial conversation.

However, if you’re looking to build an entirely new category or industry with your product or service can you articulate why this is currently missing in their life? In these situations, customers and consumers might not even realise that they have a need for your product, meaning you will have to educate them about both the need and why yours is the best solution. A crowded trade show environment, with lots of distractions and minimal space to articulate your message might not be the most conducive place to start engaging with your audience.

Again, this comes back to grounding your trade show investment in customer need, understanding what their problem is and clearly articulating how your product or service provides the best solution for it. Therefore, in considering whether trade shows might be the best tactic for your business, it is helpful to think about the likely problem a visitor is going to be bringing to your stand and whether you can clearly articulate the solution you offer.

Forty-six per cent of trade show visitors are in executive or upper management roles. That’s a lot of valuable attendees with top titles walking trade shows. They certainly have the authority to make buying decisions!

(Lincoln West, 2016)

What else do you have in your toolkit?

We talked in Chapter 1 about using trade shows as a marketing tactic in an aligned, strategic plan and it’s important to think about this further when considering whether exhibiting is right for your business. There will be several different sales levers you are likely to manipulate in your quest for sales growth, including pricing, promotions, discount structures, product variations, volume bonuses, etc. Each of these need determining before you can effectively manage a wider portfolio of customers. For example, if you’re a manufacturer of tools you may offer a different discount level to an independent high-street DIY store than you would to a national wholesaler such as Screwfix – but you might meet both at the same trade show. Understanding how you will profitably manage different customer requirements and needs within your portfolio will not only help you to better filter visitors at the trade show itself but enable a quicker and more productive follow-up after the show.

In clarifying your sales strategy, it is likely that some obvious marketing tactics fall out of this to reach your audience and add value to the conversation you have with them. Let’s go back to the tool example for a moment, potentially this could be a complicated purchase for your end user in selecting the most appropriate tool for his specific job. In that case, providing factsheets with details about what types of job each tool is most appropriate for will help them make an informed decision and ensure they are happy with their purchase. Although that is an example of a consumer marketing tactic, it’s important to your trade show plan in demonstrating to your customer how you will help them sell through the products that you’re selling directly to them. Developing a clearly aligned marketing plan across all channels will add value to the conversations you have at trade shows and build credibility and trust with your customer. Trade shows are rarely an effective tactic if used in isolation, or because you have always exhibited at them, or just because they sound like a good idea. The power of trade shows comes from alignment with a range of other trade and consumer marketing tactics that support each other as part of a proactive and strategic plan.

Can you afford it?

Corporate events and tradeshows usually fly under the radar when times are good and then are scrutinized when times are bad. But it’s clear that reducing exposure at events is risky to future sales, and that attendance has recovered solidly following the past two economic downturns.

—Michael Hughes, MD, Research and Consulting, Access Intelligence

Trade shows are notoriously expensive – there’s not really any other way of saying it. They’re not easy, and to do them well takes time, money and energy. If you’re not prepared or in a position to invest a lot of all three, then trade shows may not be the right tactic for your business. We will talk more about monetary budgets in Chapter 3, but if you’re going to invest in a trade show then invest well – in time and money. So often we hear from companies who have invested thousands of pounds in space on a trade show floor, then don’t want to spend any more money on a stand or marketing so turn up with a couple of pop-up banners and one person to man the stand. At the end of the show we hear such exhibitors complaining about the lack of traffic at their stand, the conversations they haven’t had and why they’re never attending the show again – before signing on the dotted line for next year for fear of missing out (FOMO).

It is true to say that trade shows are difficult to evaluate and quite often businesses can be reluctant to spend big on them for fear of a lack of transparency on return. It may be difficult to demonstrate a return, certainly an immediate one, but it is not impossible. The setting of specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely (SMART) objectives and a clear follow-up strategy are crucial to the process of calculating return on investment (ROI) and we’ll help you understand how to do both throughout the book. But don’t be afraid to spend money on trade shows – just be sure you’re spending it well and squeezing every single opportunity out of the cash you’re putting in. If, however, you’ve only got the budget to book your space and nothing more, we’d advise you to think twice about whether trade shows are the right tactic for you. There are clever ways to spend a small budget, there are no clever ways to spend no budget.

In terms of resource, exhibitors can often be quite surprised at how much time needs to go into delivering an effective exhibition. Planning for a trade show can never start too early and ideally would be at least 12 months out from the start of the show (don’t panic if you’ve a show coming up in a couple of weeks and you’ve done nothing yet, this book can still help). The time spent on executing a trade show well becomes more intensive as the show approaches and in the last few weeks can almost feel like a full-time job – but investing the time into getting the right people to your stand on the day gives you a much greater potential for demonstrating a return on your investment. If you’re a single business owner trying to wear the hat of production manager, marketing manager, HR, finance and logistics that could understandably sound daunting! The trick is to get organised, plan early and be prepared for the amount of time it’s going to take – or call in the experts to help ease the load!

Are you excited?

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming after all is a form of planning.

—Gloria Steinem, writer, lecturer, political activist and feminist organiser

If you’re not excited yet (even if it’s nervously excited), then we’d suggest closing this book and handing it all over to someone else who does get excited by trade shows and who can manage your exhibition ambitions for you. Quite often there’s an assumption that everyone loves doing trade shows and everyone knows how to do them. That’s simply not the case and for some people just hearing that statement can come as a relief. Trade shows are hard work, physically, mentally and emotionally both in the run-up to and during the show itself, and they’re not for everyone. If you don’t enjoy the process, if you’re not buzzing on build day and enthusiastic about all the new contacts that you’re planning to meet, then visitors will see it in how you and your stand are presented. It will look forced and contrived and visitors won’t feel welcomed or comfortable engaging with you. If strategically trade shows are important to your business but you’re not the right person to project manage it, you have options, either within your own team or through outsourcing to partners who can organise absolutely everything for you. As Richard Branson has said many times, one of the qualities of a great leader is surrounding yourself with people who are better than you at the things you can’t do.

If you’re nervously excited, that’s great and something you should definitely embrace. The excitement will give you the motivation and energy to get you through and the nervousness will help you consider all the elements to make well-balanced decisions. One thing that might help at this stage is understanding what specifically is making you nervous. Is it the fact you will need to justify spend to your manager and you’re not sure how? Have you got a very functional product or service and you’re worried about how to create impact and attract attention? Is this your first time and you’re worrying about everything? All of these are perfectly understandable concerns, but none are insurmountable with some planning, some time to think and a bit of friendly advice (all of which you can find between these pages).

Summary

So, while this book is all about how fantastic trade shows can be in boosting your sales pipeline, we’ve been around long enough to know that for many businesses it’s just not the right tactic or the right time to help them achieve their long-term goals. As enthusiastic as you may be about heading off to Las Vegas with your mega-stand in tow, if the team back at the ranch haven’t yet nailed how they’re going to actually make your product in any great quantity, you may just fall at the first hurdle. Here are a few things in summary from this chapter to help sense check that trade shows will work effectively for your organisation:

• Consider your organisation’s objectives for the next 3–5 years and identify what role (if any) trade shows play in reaching the right audience to achieve those aims.

• Be honest about how ready your business is with the product/service you’re looking to sell and the capacity at which you can produce it. You don’t want to create more problems for yourself by over-promising to potential new customers.

• Review your customers’ readiness to buy your product and consider what else you might to do to help them realise they have a problem to which your product/service is the answer.

• If you know you have some gaps in the finer details of your product launch but are keen to exhibit to build momentum, make sure you have refined the answers for all the tricky questions visitors might ask about when and how they can get their hands on it.

• Review your whole marketing plan in the context of how trade shows maximise the other tactics you’re using and make sure you have alignment across the core objectives, messaging and actions. Trade shows rarely work in isolation and are most powerful when all the different levers work together to promote each other.

• Be honest about the amount of time, money and resource you’ll need to execute a trade show brilliantly from the start and where you don’t have enough of any consider how you can find more internally or get the external expertise you’ll need.

• Listen to your gut – if you’re not feeling butterflies, either from excitement or anxiety, think about passing the project management onto someone else. Trade shows are tough enough without feeling as though every decision, every form and every day on the show floor is a chore – it will show in every aspect you deliver if your heart’s not really in it!

With this book still firmly in your grasp, even though it may be with some nervous tension, over the following three chapters your exhibition journey truly begins, and we are here for you all the way. As mentioned in the introduction, although we have presented it as Planning, Implementation and Evaluation, it’s not a directly linear process and there are some elements in Evaluation that you’ll need to consider as part of your Planning. So, our advice, if you can, is to get to the end of the book before you start on your journey and everything will make more sense!

Follow your dreams, let them guide you. Who knows where they may take you.

—Nico J. Genes, Magnetic Reverie