These events provide a unique opportunity for networking, brand exposure, and lead generation.
According to Conference Source, companies can expect a 4:1 return on investment from their trade show spending. Among Fortune 500 businesses, 14% reported a 5:1 return on investment (ROI) from trade show presentations. This means they made $5 for every $1 spent.
However, your strategy will determine your level of success. We'll walk you through some methods and techniques in this post that will help you make the most of trade exhibitions.
Start With a Clear Strategy
To make the most of a trade show, you need a well-defined strategy. Ask yourself what you aim to achieve. Are you there to generate leads, close deals, or build brand awareness? Your objectives guide your approach.
For instance, if lead generation is your goal, focus on creating engagement opportunities. If brand exposure is key, prioritize eye-catching branding elements. According to Fit Small Business, customers want brand consistency in addition to brand familiarity. Strategies that emphasize brand consistency can increase revenue by 20%.
Having a clear strategy ensures that your resources and efforts are directed effectively, ultimately contributing to a better ROI.
Budget Wisely and Plan Ahead
Trade shows can be costly affairs, so prudent budgeting is essential. Consider booth rental fees, travel expenses, promotional materials, and staffing costs. Ensure you have a well-planned budget that takes all these factors into account.
By planning ahead, you can mitigate the risk of cash flow issues and make sure your trade show investments are financially sustainable. A well-managed budget allows you to allocate your resources effectively, optimizing your ROI.
Craft an Unforgettable Booth Design
When it comes to trade shows, your booth design plays a pivotal role in making a lasting impression. The competition for attention on the showroom floor can be fierce, with countless companies vying for the same audience. To stand out, you must consider incredible trade show booth design ideas that capture the essence of your brand.
Think of your booth as a three-dimensional representation of your business. According to Classic Exhibits, vibrant colours, interactive displays, and memorable aesthetics can draw a crowd. The design should harmonize with your brand's identity and message, creating a cohesive and compelling visual experience. This cohesiveness can encompass everything from the colour scheme and layout to the choice of materials and lighting.
Interactive elements are a great way to engage visitors. Incorporate touchscreens, demonstrations, or product samples to encourage interaction. The more engaged attendees are, the longer they'll spend at your booth, and the more likely they are to remember your brand.
Remember that your booth should not only be visually appealing but also functional. It should facilitate conversations with potential clients or partners. Consider the flow of traffic and ensure that your staff has ample space to engage with visitors comfortably.
Generate Buzz and Anticipation
Building anticipation for your trade show presence is essential. Leveraging pre-event marketing can make a significant difference in foot traffic to your booth. To educate your audience about your involvement, use social media, email marketing, and press releases.
Teasers, countdowns, and sneak peeks may help you keep your audience interested and thrilled. Encourage your audience to visit your booth with the promise of exclusive offerings or experiences. The more people know about your participation, the more foot traffic and potential leads you can expect.
Leverage Lead Generation Strategies
While it's tempting to collect as many leads as possible, remember that quality trumps quantity. Engage in meaningful conversations with attendees, qualifying their interest in your products or services.
Use techniques like surveys or interactive demonstrations to gather leads genuinely intrigued by what you offer. According to SmartBug Media, 57% of marketers utilize interactive content to generate leads. These leads are more likely to become clients, resulting in a larger ROI from your trade show participation.
Building Relationships
Trade shows provide a fertile ground for networking. Beyond the booth, make the most of after-hours events and breakout sessions to connect with industry peers, potential customers, and partners.
Building relationships is essential for achieving a favourable ROI. Engage in meaningful conversations, share contact information, and, above all, follow up with your new connections after the event. These connections may lead to opportunities, referrals, and partnerships that directly affect your cash flow.
Measure Your Success
After the trade fair, it's time to assess your performance. Analyze the quality of leads generated, the number of conversions achieved, and the overall impact on the company. Use this data to determine what works and what needs to be improved.
Analyze the event's ROI by weighing the benefits against the expenditures. The knowledge obtained will be essential in refining your plan for future trade exhibitions and assuring a consistent increase in ROI.
Final Word
The effective utilization of trade shows can significantly enhance a company's ROI and cash flow. A well-designed booth, a strategic approach tailored to specific goals, and pre-event marketing can set the stage for success.
Quality over quantity in lead generation, coupled with relationship-building and post-event follow-ups, can translate leads into valuable opportunities. Careful evaluation post-event helps refine future strategies.
Prudent budgeting and advanced planning mitigate financial risks. Ultimately, these strategies can transform trade show participation from a costly undertaking into a sustainable and lucrative investment.
Take Coke, with its average ad spend of $4b a year. Wow. However, a vast area of advertising is hitting a spot of difficulty. This may mean that the time is right for another alternative: OOH advertising.
Web Woes
A few years ago, there was a much-vaunted growth in interest in internet advertising. The future was supposed to be all about interactivity and personalisation, with businesses able to target people most likely to buy, giving their online behaviour a once-over in order to assess affinity.
Then things started getting tough. Customers started regretting the wholesale abandonment of privacy and made noises about clawing some personal space back. After a while (and some government encouragement), businesses have started to listen.
Things will come to something of a head in 2023 when Google starts to phase out cookies. These tasty titbits of data will no longer be able to divulge customer information to corporations, leaving marketers kicking their heels or beseeching customers to give up their details voluntarily (known as zero-party data).
Digital Delivery
One of the beauties of internet advertising has been the interactivity it boasted. If only there was a way of using that interactivity at the same time as protecting the privacy rights of the viewer.
Well, there is. Out-Of-Home (OOH) view advertising can do just this. Such are the possibilities delivered by digital technology that it’s perfectly possible now to have, say, bus stop ads that come to life when viewed by an individual who can stay as anonymous as they like.
The great thing about digital OOH is that it’s possible for marketers to use them to gather demographic data without the privacy of the consumer being affected at all.
Digital ads can assess viewers’ physical characteristics in order to place them in the correct socioeconomic, age or any other pertinent segment. The willingness to interact with the ad can then be mapped against this segment, to give valuable information on that demographic’s interest in the product.
Static Supreme
However, effective promotion doesn’t depend on digital. It’s perfectly possible to deliver impact with static ads too – it just takes creativity. Take Specsavers’ billboard that seems to have been put up carelessly, trapping a ladder behind the poster. The strapline? ‘Should have gone to Specsavers’. Of course. Brilliant.
Impact with static is more difficult to measure but can be assessed by questionnaire subsequent to the exposure, or by growth in engagement with the website, especially if there’s a QR code somewhere on the piece.
An End To Invasiveness, Not Information
With OOH advertising, marketers can still elicit valuable customer data, even in a world of enhanced privacy provision. This is why it’s so popular now and becoming more so - £901m was spent on this form of advertising in the UK in 2021, which is remarkable given the lockdown pattern during 2020-21. Overall, OOH advertising triumphs by being a form of promotion that grabs your eye, not your identity.
ByteDance, the Beijing-headquartered owner of TikTok, is set to meet its advertising revenue goal for the year, which will place it firmly as the second-largest giant in China’s digital advertising market.
According to Reuters, the tech company is on track to make at least 180 billion yuan (or $27.2 billion) in annual advertising revenue, making up the bulk of its $30 billion revenue goal for 2020. In terms of ad revenue, it is beaten only by Alibaba.
Though TikTok is ByteDance’s flagship product internationally, the social media app contributes little to its parent company’s overall cashflow. Of ByteDance’s ad revenue, nearly 60% comes from Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. A further 20% comes from ByteDance’s news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, and less than 3% from its long-form video platform Xigua.
These final numbers will be adjusted by the end of the year, as many of the company’s most important campaigns – including year-end sales – have not yet been officially launched.
ByteDance continues to struggle with an order from the Trump administration ordering it to divest its US operations of TikTok by this Thursday. While a deal between ByteDance and Oracle appears to have been settled, the company lodged a petition with a US Appeals Court late on Tuesday challenging the administration’s order and seeking an extension to the deadline.
[ymal]
Outside of TikTok, ByteDance is looking to other avenues of growth, with plans to invest 10 billion on its Xigua platform next year. The company intends to increase Xigua’s count of daily active users to over 100 million, while its Douin eCommerce platform is expected to reach roughly 150 billion in gross merchandise value by the year’s end.
Up to $15 billion is expected to be spent by brands investing in influencer marketing by 2022. Influencer marketing brings a significant boost to many industries, and many B2B and B2C businesses now rely on influencers to extend their reach. This trend doesn’t exclude the fintech industry, and many digital banks, including Starling and Revolut, now use influencers in their marketing strategies. However, using influencer marketing requires careful thought, and there are certain rules regarding its use, which need to be considered carefully by fintech companies.
Fintech companies can benefit from influencer marketing
So long as the influencers are chosen to suit the niche, influencer marketing can be as beneficial to the fintech industry as it can to any other business. Influencers have the power to improve a business’s reach and visibility, demonstrate authority and target the right audience immediately. This is a valuable asset to any business operating in the fintech niche, but to be used to full effect, businesses need to choose an influencer whose lifestyle and message coincides with the brand’s ethos. Potentially, when used well, this gives fintech companies a chance to reach a much wider audience than they can through traditional advertising. However, although advertising standards authorities have guidelines for influencers, none of them relate specifically to financial products or services, which means those working in the niche need to tread carefully.
[ymal]
Advertising regulations for influencers
Advertising guidelines state that influencers should use ‘#ad’ to tag any post they’re paid for: this is the minimum an influencer needs to do to legally promote a product or service. They are required to consider the demographics of their audience, as age-restricted products must not be promoted to underage followers. Although this rule doesn’t apply directly to financial products and services, companies and the influencers they work with must be aware of the demographics of the audience, as many financial products do come with age-related criteria.
Lack of regulations for financial services
There are no regulations for fintech companies using influencer marketing, but this is problematic because the majority of an influencer’s reach extends to a young audience. Advertising guidelines are currently focused on influencers labeling ads rather than on the products and services they’re promoting. For regulations to be established, close co-operation would need to be achieved between the advertising and financial regulators, but this has not happened yet. While this may be good news for fintech companies who can find influencers willing to promote their products, it’s more problematic for the consumer. The ideal situation would be that influencers truly believe in the companies they’re promoting. However, the algorithms on social media make it difficult to know for certain whether influencers or the brands they work with are operating with a full awareness of what they’re promoting. Consumers, therefore, are urged to research all products promoted by influencers before making a commitment.
Influencer marketing is one of the most successful marketing strategies any business can employ, but regulations are minimal. This is particularly problematic in the financial sector, as there are ethical considerations to be aware of in the promotion of any financial service or product. Consequently, although influencer marketing is a valuable tool for a fintech company, consumers must be wary when choosing products promoted by influencers. However, providing consumers conduct independent research, influencers can be helpful in informing them about new financial products.
Facebook, Google, and now also Twitter have all moved to ban cryptocurrency-based adverts on their sites. This means that any ads pertaining to ICO platforms, bitcoin wallets, token sales, crypto-trading etc. will be banned.
Much of this spouts from illicit ads and fraudulent activities. Therefore, there will be some exceptions and policies are still being put together. Analysts currently believe dips in market values and trading of crypto are being caused by the regulatory scrutiny and ban on ads.
This week Finance Monthly hears from BrokerNotes CEO Marcus Taylor on what this means for the crypto market as a whole: “The cryptocurrency market is taking a battering at the moment. It’s being viewed by consumers and big businesses as a wild west environment riddled with risk and instability. Google’s move to ban cryptocurrency ads, following Facebook’s decision last month, will light a fire under the industry to introduce the regulation needed to make the crypto market one consumers can trust in the long term.
“But what about the short-term impact? A recent report shows that 58% of online cryptocurrency traders are millennials and it seems logical that removing advertising from social media channels like YouTube and Facebook should have a major impact on their overall interest in the market. The reality will be different though.
“Although 18-30s represent a huge chunk of the market, 52% identify as experienced traders. The ban will simply serve to protect the ill-informed making bad decisions and bring market stability, rather than put a stranglehold on cryptocurrency trading.”
Police now hold more than 20 million facial recognition images. Included on the databases are the faces of hundreds of thousands of innocent people - which the Government says don't need to be deleted.
Sky's Technology correspondent Tom Cheshire reports.
