MISSING PIECE OF THE JIG-SAW
Most organisations who exhibit need to address the issue of pre-event mailings and ‘phone calls. It is an essential part of the exhibiting process and can make a large impact upon the success of your attendance and more importantly, the attendance of your would be visitors. If you think about it, most exhibition organisers spend a significant chunk of their promotional budget on attracting visitors through the doors to their event. Without an effective visitor promotion campaign there would be no show – at least not for the second year. So it follows that you too should take a lesson from their books.
The difficulty facing most exhibitors is that the sales person from the organising company waxes lyrical about how fantastic their own visitor promotion campaign is going and how their pre-registered visitor numbers are already swollen. . . The hapless exhibitor thinks, “In that case, why should I bother to generate my own traffic. The work has been done for me.” That is the first assumption to squash. Organisers generally attract visitors – your job is to attract the right type of visitors for you. In line with your objectives for exhibiting in the first place, you need to identify whom you wish to see and then think about what they would consider to be a suitable invitation. In some cases it may be simply that – an ‘invitation’, in others the promise of some hospitality or a ‘secret’ to be revealed on the day. The particular case study I am going to outline was typical of circumstances faced by many exhibitors. Xibex are an IT consultancy whose main offering was a service rather than a product. They wanted to get to speak with small businesses that ran between 5 and 30 computers. They offered certain products like broadband, web hosting and suchlike, but most of their revenue would come from a subscription to their support service. They knew that if they could engage visitors for more than a few seconds, they would be able to arrange an appointment to visit and sell to them. They had tried a gimmick on their stand previously, but it made visitors smile and then walk away.
They bought in a thousand pounds worth of promotional goodies (mouse mats, pens, stress balls and so on) and spent just under seven hundred pounds designing their mail shot. They photographed their promotional goodies (£500 photography fee) against a white floor and produced a colour photo, which was then enlarged and overlaid with a regular jigsaw pattern. This became the template, which filled the back wall of their stand. A second copy was made and made into card and was cut out along the jigsaw marks. Their mail shot contained a letter inviting them to attend the show and enclosed a piece of the jigsaw. Whatever the jigsaw piece matched on the day would be their prize. There were 1200 pieces sent out in the post, one hundred and seventy eight were ‘redeemed’ on the stand. That’s a staggering 15% response. Moreover sixty appointments were made, fifty-two were kept and 31 new customers signed up for the subscription service.
Makes you think.