Trade Show Strategies: Ways to Get Bigger Bang from Your Marketing Buck

Presenter: Ruth Stevens
Broadcast on Thursday, January 19, 2006
Duration: 90 minutes
Cost: $129

U.S. businesses spend somewhere around 18% of their marketing budgets — $21 billion annually in aggregate — on trade show marketing. Marketers often justify the expense with rationales like "We do it every year," and "Our competitors are doing it." Most companies have no idea what value they are getting for that investment.

Worse, many marketers tend to think of trade show marketing in merely tactical terms. Certainly there are a lot of moving parts involved; the logistics can be overwhelming. But for best results, trade shows also need to be considered strategically, as part of an integrated go-to-market plan. When it's soaking up nearly a quarter of your budget, you had better be thinking way bigger about this important element in the business marketing toolkit.

Using examples from HP, Northrup-Gruman, King Industries and others, this seminar will help you understand ways to get the most value from trade show marketing.

You Will Learn

How to set the right objectives, with specific, realistic metrics
How to select the shows that will give you the best results
Booth strategies: design, signage, staffing
The secret weapon: pre-show promotion and post-show follow-up
The 5 best trade show marketing measurement tools, and when to use them
The top mistakes trade show marketers make, and how you can avoid them
5 case studies on what works and what doesn't
Offline and online event marketing resources

Who Should Attend

Marketing professionals using trade shows for lead generation.

About The Presenter

Ruth Stevens is author of Trade Show and Event Marketing: Plan, Promote and Profit, published in 2004 and The DMA Lead Generation Handbook, with a second edition published in 2005.

Ruth consults on customer acquisition and retention for both consumer and business-to-business clients. She began her direct marketing career in 1986 at Time Warner, where she spent seven years in marketing, new business development, and general management at Book-of-the-Month Club and Time-Life Books. She then went to Ziff-Davis as Vice President of Marketing for Computer Library, the electronic publishing division. From 1996, she spent three years in direct marketing management at IBM, and then worked in senior marketing positions at two Internet startup companies in New York City before starting her consulting company in 2000.

Crain’s BtoB magazine named Ruth one of the 100 Most Influential People in Business Marketing in 2002. She teaches marketing to graduate students at Columbia Business School. She has studied marketing management at Harvard Business School and holds an MBA from Columbia University.

What Participants Said

Of the participants who evaluated this seminar, 86% would recommend it to a colleague. Some of their comments:

"I'd recommend it to those who are just getting started in the process of tradeshow planning. I think there was some good overall strategies that can be applied if you are new to this task."

"Great seminar on Event Marketing strategies. Opened my eyes to some ways we can improve our program and get better results."

"I learned a useful equation to determine the cost/potential qualified contact which will be used to justify future trade show participation. Furthermore, I was encouraged to increase my pre-show promotion considering that the exhibit house's efforts are so under-leveraged."

"Good overall, in depth analysis of increasing trade show effectiveness and payback."

"This seminar was an excellent blueprint/checklist that they absolutely go through before thinking about attending a tradeshow. This was not your typical laundry list of kitchy things to do - it was a smart, strategic approach to events marketing as a whole."