Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Virtual events are a long term selling tool - a way of reaching lots of market without having to personally travel to each location. If promoted effectively and the product or service or idea is good -- the outcome can also be good with lead generation, sales, traffic to your offerings, etc.

I've "attended" one or two, and I didn't like them. For me they were: Too slow. Too impersonal. Too gimicky. I'd rather see people, enthusiasm, and interactively ask questions to a real person.

No serious executive is going to put in more than a quick “look-in” to a virtual exhibition – it doesn’t meet any of their criteria.

If a person with real purchasing power wants the excuse to have some time out, he goes to an exhibition. Guilt and a big lunch with all his fellow alpha males (Ladies do the same thing) means that useful information will have been exchanged, new competing products will be looked at, possible suppliers given the once over, clandestine talks with the inevitable “visiting” head-hunter will take place and all the sales directors swap war stories about salaries, bonuses and how useful / useless their team and finance director are.

That is why stand staff have to work so hard, to be so alert and proactive if they want one to attract one of these guys’ attention for an introduction. No-one sells anything on the day unless it is choreographed in advance.

If it is a seriously big exhibition, like the Electronics and Instrumentation one at the NEC in Birmingham, they will stay the night to have further meetings, drink a lot and knock-off their PA or better, someone else’s PA.

Virtual trade shows look like a good idea on paper but they don’t actually deliver anything concrete. They can’t compete with attractions of the flesh they are not a substitute for face to face interaction. Most of the reasons for setting up a virtual exhibition are fatuous. Yes it brings many disciplines of supplier together under one theme or trade, but so do Google web-searches and the relevant trade organisations.

Yes, they are publicised, but publicity is only worth something if there is a sales point to it. Getting potential buyers to visit a web site on a particular date because of a web event is pretty silly from a sales point of view as the visitor should be on the seller’s website at the time when they are contemplating making a buying decision not at a time when some show organiser has deemed they should pay a visit.

The aim of all sales organisations is to identify prospects with an interest in their products, a viable application to which they can be put and the budget available to make the purchase and that isn’t going to happen when a date is plucked from thin air and a virtual event is created.

For these and other reasons I don’t think that the format works

Steve Alker
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