Exhibiting at Conferences to Field Test Your Marketing Message

I read a blog post this morning by Rebecca Corliss at Hubspot talking about how they are no longer going to be exhibiting at events. If you are planning on exhibiting at an upcoming event you might want to take a glance at it. They point out some very good reasons for not spending your marketing dollars on a booth.

We don’t exhibit at many events, mainly because of the high cost in dollars and time. And as Rebecca says in her post, “Event marketing yields the the highest cost per lead of all of our marketing.”

But I think that at a certain stage in the growth of your company an event can be very valuable, not for the leads you generate, but for the real-time market research you can perform. It becomes even more valuable if you then apply what you learn to your web presence.

Your booth at an exhibit functions much like your website should. You want passers by to not only glance at your booth, but to step in and engage with you. Let’s look at the stages of interaction an attendee goes through in relation to your booth:

1. They Decide Wether or Not To Approach the Booth
2. The Commit to a Short Engagement
3. They Commit to a Demo
4. They Want to Know Everything

1. The Event Attendee Decides Whether or Not to Engage You

Attendees will wander by your booth and decide if they want to learn more. Here is where you find out how effective your initial messaging is. When we attended our first conference our message for ScreenSteps was “Snap, Snap, Type, Type, Lesson Done!” That proved to be somewhat ineffective as it made people think we were just selling a tool for teachers. (We were fortunate that we have a great company name. I would say well over half of the people who approached our booth wanted to know about the name of our company, Blue Mango Learning Systems.)

Lesson learned: Company name is great. Product tag line stinks.

This is equivalent to someone who lands on a page at your website. As a marketer you want them to engage you rather than instantly moving on. You want them to get to the next stage. On the web you can’t really tell why a user arrives at your site and then almost instantly leaves. At a conference you can see it in people’s eyes. You can tell how close you are to getting it right. If they pause and look at your booth for a second and then move on you are close. If they don’t even give you a second glance then you have a long way to go.

2. The Attendee Engages You

At this point the attendee has decided that they want to get more information, but they aren’t sure how much. They are still deciding how long they want to stay. It is important to layer the information you are giving to the attendee. You want to give them, in less than 20 seconds, an overview that covers everything important about your product – what it is and what it can help them do. The sole purpose of this engagement is to get them to want to view a demo. Think of this as the first paragraph or two of text or the bullet points a user sees when they first come to your site.

This is an area where you can do a lot of experimentation. Throughout the day Trevor and I would discuss what phrases people were responding to. By interacting with one person after another and trying out small changes in our messaging, we began to figure out what descriptions helped people “get” what we were doing with ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live as well as which ones made them want to learn more.

3. The Attendee Watches a Demo

Now the attendee wants to learn more so they consent to the 30 second demo. You don’t want to go through the entire product. Just enough to get them to ask more questions.

This is analogous to a demo video on your front page. It needs to be short enough that the attendee doesn’t feel overly committed, but engaging enough that they want to learn more. In fact, it should purposely leave some questions unanswered. That will spark more conversation and foster more engagement.

Once again, we went through a lot of variations on this finding what worked and what didn’t. After the conference we converted our demo into the intro video that we put on our website.

4. The Attendee Wants to Know Everything

If the attendee gets past the demo and is still engaged we found that a fundamental change happened in their thinking. Up to this point they were deciding wether or not they wanted to stay. If they stay past the demo then they will usually stay for a significant amount of time (5-10 minutes). They now want to get as much information as possible. This is where you can really spend time finding out about what they do and explaining how your solution could benefit them. You will probably go back into the product demo and show them things in more detail.

This is equivalent to all of the more detailed information you have on your website. There might be videos that explore specific product features in more depth, webinar recordings that discuss key concepts, or case studies on how different customers are using your product.

We found that you didn’t have to refine this part as much. It was really just about talking to the customer, finding out what their needs were and answering the questions they had.

Conclusion

So what is the value of exhibiting at a conference for a small company? It is instant market research. As your company grows you will probably have many other venues where you could accomplish this in a more cost and time efficient manner. But when you are in your early stages, a conference can be a great option.

So, if you are exhibiting anytime soon:

1. Break down your interactions with attendees into these four stages.
2. Try out different approaches at each stage.
3. Choose the ones that work best and further refine them.
4. Take what you have learned and update your website marketing accordingly.

You will receive a lot of instant feedback that you simply can’t get via web metrics.