Tradeshow Marketing: The Message Gets Personal

Anybody interested enough to check the show Web site in the days before the Intl. Sign Expo opened April 11–14 at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino got a surprise.

The home page had a walking, talking, fully flash-animated version of Intl. Sign Assn. President and CEO Lori Anderson welcoming people to the site and encouraging them to click on her to find out more about a relatively new marketing tool: BDMetrics' Face2Face Interactive.

It's one of several new ways technology is helping show managers and exhibitors invite prospective attendees to their events.

BDMetrics was already helping to match attendees up with exhibitors. Now show organizers and exhibitors have the ability to virtually introduce themselves, or their products, to attendees before an event even opens.

"Exhibitors who go to shows are always looking for a new way to get attention from the attendees," said David Haas, BDMetrics vice president of strategic services.

So the company developed a product for filming exhibitors in front of a green screen. Then, when an attendee looks up a certain keyword through BDMetrics' program or through a show's search engine, an exhibitor matching that keyword would "walk out" onto the computer screen and introduce him- or herself to the attendee.

"At Pack Expo Intl. last year one of the exhibitors (who used Face2Face) told me people kept walking up to him and saying 'Hey Bob, I've already met you online,'" Haas said. "It's a unique way to personally greet people."

The effectiveness of Face2Face can be measured by how many attendees watch the entire greeting online or click through to hear more about a product or show, according to Haas.

"Display ads have less than a 1-percent click-through rate," he added. "With Face2Face, over 50 percent let it run all the way through or click on it."

BDMetrics isn't the only company thinking outside the box when it comes to using technology to market a tradeshow more personally. Unisfair, ListeNation and Experient are three more offering products that can promote a show directly to attendees.

More than 2,000 people attended a June 13 MarketingProfs virtual fair geared toward marketing professionals. Unisfair developed the technology that allowed attendees to sit in on conference sessions, talk with exhibitors in online booths in real time and visit the resource center at the fair.

"Just like a real tradeshow, everything is for sale here," said Don Best, Unisfair's marketing director. Besides organizing the show, Unisfair bought its own booth to show off its virtual fair product.

Three employees were in the online booth ready to do live chats with attendees the minute the site went live the day of the show.

"A doorbell rings when someone comes in the booth," Best said. "We can click on the person and see all of their info, then chat with the person, or the attendee can click on the communication button and send us a message to chat online."

Eloqua, another marketing company, was the lead of seven sponsors in all, each of which had an online booth.

"From my point of view as a marketing person, it was the best marketing experience I've ever had," Best said.

MarketingProfs has a physical event, MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Marketing Conference, coming up in Chicago Oct. 1–3 with about 350 attendees expected. Best said the company was able to use the virtual fair to not only promote its upcoming show, but also allow a significant number of people who wouldn't be going to Chicago to still experience aspects of the event online.

"It's possible to move beyond just having a two-day event and rent an exhibition all year long," Best said. "I can tell you by the growth we're having that (the product) is taking off. Right now there's a wow factor, but in another two years it will be commonplace."

That kind of news could be enough to make the palms of traditional tradeshow organizers sweaty, wondering if their shows could be rendered obsolete if virtual shows actually take off. Despite the success of Unisfair and its virtual fairs, Best doesn't think they have anything to worry about.

"Face-to-face events will never go away. You'll never replace that interaction," he said. "You can't shake someone's hand (online), and people will still want to go to Tucson to play golf."

Even so, virtual fairs do offer a significantly more cost-effective way to either hold a standalone event, or to promote a physical one. Unisfair has signed up close to 300 clients, including Penton, which now hosts 20 events online.

ListeNation has also figured out a way to help tradeshows market themselves more efficiently — by reaching out and touching someone over the phone lines. Show organizers can pre-record a message (though it sounds live when a caller hears it) that is sent to a database of possible attendees to tell them about a show, encourage them to check out the event's Web site or direct them to look for an e-mail.

Ray Baum, director of client relations, said the company introduced the product to the tradeshow industry — it was already being used in the mortgage business — at the then-Intl. Assn. for Exhibition Management's Expo! Expo! IAEM's Annual Meeting and Exhibition in 2003.

"We told them they could use the technology for free," Baum added. The response was positive, and the next year the company was named Rookie of the Year by IAEM.

ListeNation uses voice mail broadcasting technology to create a personal, customized voice mail message in first-person singular that is sent to the entire database of tradeshow contacts. Baum said usually it's deployed after hours, so as not to disturb people during the work day, encouraging them to take some action, such as look for an e-mail about the show. If someone does pick up the phone, he added, 99 percent of the time the line will just disconnect.

"We can do the alternative, which is to deliver a live message, but we suggest not to because you never know the mood of the person answering the phone," Baum said.

As a marketing tool, Baum added, the ability to call people with a personal message about the show is invaluable. The technology can determine whether the call is answered by a live person, gets a busy signal, goes to a fax line or is disconnected. As a result, ListeNation is also able to provide a detailed report on how many calls actually go through.

Baum said, "Unlike direct mail, we can turn this marketing campaign around almost instantaneously."

The trick, though, even with the ability to tell show organizers exactly how many people get their message, is for the organizers to follow through. "Companies need to be able to track marketing on their end," Baum said.

Messages need three important elements to be effective: relevance, a perceived benefit to the recipient and a call to action. Another way to track the campaign's success, according to Baum, is to see how much traffic a show's Web site gets after a call goes out.

A number of TSW 200 shows now use the product, including NAB, MAGIC Marketplace, World of Concrete and CONEXPO-CON/AGG.

"ListeNation's goal is to brand the ListeNation Call," Baum said. "We're rising above our competitors, and we'll become the industry leader."

Experient also developed a product that uses a show's existing database for marketing purposes, while demonstrating to organizers that a targeted campaign can have provable results.

The product, called ACRM (Attendee Customer Relationship Management) and released in March, is based on the idea that "the better you know your attendee, the better you will be able to market to them," said Terence Donnelly, Experient vice president of tradeshow markets.

For example, Experient took all 600,000 contact records in MAGIC Intl.'s database for its upcoming MAGIC Marketplace Aug. 27–30 at the Las Vegas Convention Center and married them into the ACRM product. It allowed organizers to send out a specific query that would qualify certain potential attendees — and then tailor a specific marketing campaign to them.

"At the end of the day it allows (a show organizer) to have all the data queried in a number of different ways," Donnelly said. "You can also use it to get people to register."

ACRM allows organizers to quantify exactly how many people respond to a query based on whether they clicked on, say, a link to register.

"Every time we show this to people, they are just going crazy," Donnelly added. "They sense the information is so important." In fact, he said, it has other functions besides generating marketing campaigns.

When MAGIC organizers used the product, they found out a number of their attendees were classified into buying tiers in their database incorrectly, and the show was losing a lot of money in registration fees. "Advanstar found about $200,000 worth of errors in registration types where people should have paid more for their tier," Donnelly said.

Experient hasn't begun actively promoting ACRM in the industry yet.

"We want to get this show cycle under our belt," Donnelly said. "We haven't been loud about it until we get through MAGIC. We'll really see the fruits of our labor there."