Trade show ROI expert and friend of Trade Show Feed, Richard Erschik is gearing up a for a series of seminars and workshops at events around the country. It starts with the Exhibitor Show later in March and continues at Texas Library, IMTS, Fire Show, and ConExpo among others through June. Richard prepared this video as a preview.
Thanks Richard!
February 17, 2010 (Mentor, OH) – The Rogers Company (www.therogersco.com) has expanded its presence in the Northeast by opening a sales office in Rochester, New York. Brenda Newman will be heading the East Avenue office. Newman brings over 17 years of experience to her new role having worked with a range of national and global clients from Fortune 500 companies to small startups and everything in between.
“We are very excited about this expansion,” said Jeffrey Blackwell, president of The Rogers Company. “Newman brings the expertise and dedication to customer service that we need to capitalize on opportunities as the economy begins to recover.”
Newman is enjoying the culture of The Rogers Company, which emphasizes building partnerships with its clients, employees and suppliers while fostering its goal of helping clients achieve the highest return on investment possible from trade shows. This philosophy is highlighted by the company’s recent launch of Return on Exhibiting, an approach that guarantees 100% lead follow-up post show.
“We ultimately want our clients to succeed in the short and long term,” said Newman. “Rogers’ partnership approach fits perfectly with my mantra of putting client service first.”
Newman is looking forward to working with clients in a wide range of markets, but sees opportunity in green technology such as wind and solar power.
“I have experience working with manufacturers and suppliers to the wind energy sector and I see growth opportunity in industries that supply green technologies,” said Newman. “I can also work with any company on making their exhibit displays more green. The design and build teams at Rogers are a terrific resource for finding green materials that fit budget and design requirements.”
About Rogers
For over 65 years, The Rogers Company has been an award winning designer and manufacturer of branded environments for trade show exhibits, corporate events, lobbies, show rooms and retail environments – essentially any place where communicating a brand is vital. In addition to its 3D marketing services, The Rogers Company is also a full service trade show and event implementation partner providing turnkey services and support for its corporate clients throughout the country.
With its complete design staff, skilled craftsman and construction facilities, Rogers can custom build a wide range of branded environments to suit any need. Through its strategic partner network, the company also provides a wide range of portable and modular display solutions, support and logistics for international trade shows and an extensive rental inventory of both custom and portable display products.
Additionally through its partner network, Rogers provide Eventelligence TM, a technology, infrastructure service for event registration, event mapping and way-finding systems, lead retrieval, lead tracking, fulfillment services and various RFID solutions for focused trade shows and events.
For more information on the Rogers Company, please visit www.therogersco.com or contact Brenda directly at brendanewman@rochester.rr.com, (585) 698-5229.
The following is first in a three-part series on Trade Show ROI. The Rogers Company just launched an initiative on Trade Show ROI called Return on Exhibiting.
Determining trade show ROI is a long road paved with facts and stats, but like the old saying goes, every long journey starts with the first step, so when beginning the journey of determining trade show ROI, start with what you know.
Instead of beginning with so many unknowns, start with something you do know. Ostensibly you know your customers — they’re a wealth of knowledge about your trade shows and events and your overall marketing program. They can tell you what’s working and what’s not.
So it’s easy, right? If a customer says: “I met you at a trade show and liked what I saw. Three months later, I purchased your product.” then you can put them solidly in the trade show ROI column, right? Hold on! What about the brochure they received? What about the advertisement? What about the call from the salesman? Doesn’t all that count? Isn’t there a way to determine which of those things contributed most to the sale?
There’s no easy way to tell because at that point you’re trying to get inside your customer’s head. Asking them to determine which marketing tool had more influence would require some very sophisticated survey techniques that may not get you to the truth. So how do you get useful information from your customers?
1.) Start with a profile
Divide your customers into broad categories: Completely new customers who basically “walked in the front door”; returning regulars who seem very loyal to your brand and methodical clients who researched a long time before making a decision. These can be anything you want, but limit it to four or five categories. These profiles will help you organize information more easily as you identify what kinds of customers you have and why they bought from you.
2.) Look at Their Stories
Why did these customers buy from you? What influenced their decision? Where did they talk to you or first hear about you? This “customer narrative” gathers the facts about how and why you made a sale and continue to make sales.
Existing sales can also tell us what the gateways are to a sale and how they’re connected. So if a customer says that they were influenced by an advertisement, a trade show, and a sales call, try to put that together into a story. Which came first and what followed thereafter? What wouldn’t have happened without the other?
3.) Look at the Facts
It’s important to create some pertinent facts about your sales and marketing. How many companies that appear on your lead list, are actually already customers? How many customers came to your booth at a trade show? How many leads did you collect? How many of these leads were followed-up?
These hard facts help separate theory from reality. Many times people at all levels of business have pet theories about marketing activities. Make sure that, at the very least, you understand some of the things that are working. There will still be a lot of holes in your knowledge, but at least you’ll know what you know and what you need still need to learn.
4.) Determine What You’re Losing
There’s a story from WWII that is possibly fanciful, but could shed some light on this problem. Looking at returning bombers from missions over Europe, aircraft designers were trying to figure out which parts of the planes to add extra armor. They could see heavy damage in certain parts of the planes more than others, but finally decided to place armor exactly where the damage didn’t exist. Why?
The theory was that the planes damaged in those areas, simply didn’t return from their missions.
You have the same issue in determining ROI or the effectiveness of your trade show campaign. Your customers can tell you which tactic worked for them — but look for the piece that is consistently missing. Where are you not reaching customers? Why aren’t they finding you? If you’re getting customers A,B, and C, why not D,E, and F? Build on what’s working but also examine if some of things that aren’t effective for customers A, B, and C might work for the others. In the end focus on what works with each specific market or customer and leave everything else behind.
Finally, there’s no magic answer to ROI. But there is a process for determining what is working within your company and what is not. It may sound simple to do more of what’s working and less of what’s not — but that’s the essence of successful marketing. A trade show is no different. Your quest for ROI really is a quest for more leads and, ultimately, more sales. Instead of cutting based on lack of ROI or poorly defined ROI, use the tools above to determine where the shortfall is and concentrate on fixing it.
The Rogers Company has announced a new service that begins to answer many of the Trade Show ROI questions that companies have. Are we seeing value from this show? The answer, it seems, may be in what you’re doing with the leads you are getting from the show. From the press release:
The Rogers Company, a designer and builder of trade show exhibits and other branded environments, announces Return On Exhibiting, a new approach to lead management to substantially increase sales resulting from trade shows. This new offering comes from a partnership between Rogers and Richard Erschik, founder and CEO of Leads to Sales, Inc. (www.leadstosales.com) and RICHARDERSCHIK.com (www.richarderschik.com). Erschik and the Rogers team are working closely together to unite booth exhibit design and fabrication with lead management and post-show follow-up. The result is a one-stop shop for better trade show ROI.
You can read the rest of the press release here: Link
Sukki Jahnke from The Rogers Company interviews Chris Hopkins about exhibiting at AHIMA. He gives some quick strategies on their approach to face-to-face marketing. So is tradeshow exhibiting really just about brand positioning and ’showing your face.” Not so, according to Hopkins, AHIMA provides some very real relationship building opportunities and some on-floor sales.
Look for more From the Show Floor interviews from Sukki coming soon.
Often, marketing and sales people tear out their hair trying to figure out what customers and prospects are thinking.
So here’s a radical idea: Ask them.
Survey tools today are cheap, simple to implement, and sophisticated enough to gather some incredibly helpful information. There’s a really helpful article at idealware.org that outlines some of tools available to you that are free or cheap. The article also outlines a few features to look for: Read the full story
Life Science Leader recently ran an article on Franklin & Seidelmann’s work with The Rogers Company to design an effective booth for its tradeshows — the RSNA (Radiological Society of North America) show in particular. The article focuses on the F&S need to create a space to build relationships. Since the company’s main business is teleradiology, it doesn’t have the chance for face to face branding or even to build relationships with its own physicians. The article outlines how the need to build relationships was built into the design.
As more and more companies, once traditional, move to online services, it’s possible that the need for face-to-face relationship building will become more important. In the past, meeting the people you already know at a tradeshow was a secondary goal. It may become or may already be a primary goal if it’s the only chance to connect a human being to your brand.
You can read the article here: Link
“Partnership” has become a throw-away word these days. Years ago, before working in the exhibit industry, I worked for a consumer products company. In my position I worked with a lot of plastic injection molders since our products were largely made of various types of molded plastics. A number of our vendors were also big suppliers to the automotive industry, in particular the US automotive manufacturers. The owners of those companies would talk to me about their “partnerships” with the “Big Three”. How they were invited to participate in “Vendor Days” and quality symposiums. Some of them were considered “tier-one” suppliers; others won vendor-of-the-year awards or were given plaques for superior quality. They were called “partners”, so in theory these business owners really thought they were partners with these huge corporations.
What most of them unfortunately learned later-on, was that this partnership was really a one-way street. Yes they got the business and yes they got their plaques and certificates, but in the end what they really got was dictated to. Many of them told me that they would be given a three year contract and that each year after the initial year they were REQUIRED to lower their price, regardless of material increases, regardless of labor increases, regardless of energy cost increases. They were basically told that in order to remain a “partner” they had to improve efficiencies each year and pass those savings (real or not) on to the customer. So the partnership was really not a partnership at all but rather a typical old-fashioned vendor-customer relationship where no matter how much circumstances had changed for the vendor the customer was really calling all the shots.
Eventually the pricing pressure and the lack of a real partnership drove a lot of these injection molders literally out of business. Others simply decided to stop selling to the car-makers because they were basically shipping dollars out the door with every truckload of parts. This isn’t a partnership. This is a dictatorship. True partnerships are win-win, and this was “win” (for the customer) and “lose” (for the vendor).
A true partnership starts with the understanding that both sides have needs. A true partnership allows one party to share those needs with the other and to have those needs understood and incorporated into an agreement that very simply allows both parties to make money. There is this misguided sentiment that even if a company loses money on every order, they can “make it up in volume”. All this philosophy does is allow a company to go out of business faster – but with a nice résumé – to serve as its epitaph.
I still believe in partnerships, but in this world I wonder how many other people actually embrace this concept? True partnerships require a level of transparency and an even deeper level of trust.
A great vendor partner looks for ways to save their clients money. They provide free stuff – advice, ideas, samples, and prototypes. They don’t take advantage of last minute orders by tacking on rush charges when they themselves aren’t incurring any extra cost.
Meanwhile, a great client partner recognizes the value a great vendor adds to their business. They have a sense of loyalty, share sensitive information and demonstrate their trust by living up to their end of the bargain. I wish we lived in a world where the term “fair profit” was more clearly defined and agreed upon. But since we don’t, we have to rely on partnerships that live up to the real meaning of the word. In the end, in a true partnership, both parties share the risk and both parties share the reward.
And as Henry Ford once said, “The reward for a job well done is the opportunity… for more work.”
That’s JB’s space for now. Thanks for visiting.
You decide. The website twitterhandbook.com thinks that it is, but they would, wouldn’t they? Twitter is, indeed, a fast, cheap way to communicate and it may just be email 2.0, but you also have to consider your audience. Some industries are slow to adapt technologies and others are on the cutting edge. joycemckee writes about how she uses Twitter to research an upcoming event and also to promote her presence at a tradeshow through give aways: Read the full story
This lengthy video posted on FORA.TV is from the The Argyle Executive Forum. It features four marketing folks from different backgrounds discussing the recession and its impact on marketing. It’s interesting that there is so much talk of software and social media. This trend seems to have coincided with the worst economic environment in decades. Does social media and online marketing shield us from an ugly reality that people are buying less? It seems that marketing could use at least some kind of historical lesson on how companies succeeded in past economic hard times without Twitter and Facebook? Some of the world’s most enduring brands, after all, survived and thrived during the Great Depression.
Social media is a powerful tool and it’s changing marketing — but so did radio, television, highways, and jet travel. Aren’t there lessons to be learned from past companies that have succeeded in tougher times without Twittering? Read the full story
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