Trade Show Alternatives


In these days of digital, high-tech, social media, we can’t forget how important the one-to-one is – that is the human element of the buyer-seller relationship. Trade shows may seem to be in the consummate position for this interaction. They certainly offer the largest industry venues with seemingly thousands of buyers willing to take a look. However sometimes you may feel that you can get lost in the crowd so the time may be right to look past your trade show experience and re-adjust your budget. That is not to say that you should shun your annual, bi-annual, or tri-annual largest industry exposition but you might reconsider trade show alternatives to meet your current clients across the country for more intimate gatherings where just you are the center of attention.
How do you accomplish that task? There are so many ways to think outside the box. Some come with a hefty budget and others are a pittance compared to regional outreach or visiting one client at a time. We have many ideas to share and many ways that we can help you to be a success with your marketing efforts.
Read these articles and you will be an expert in trade show alternatives as well.

Go Mobile:  Rethinking your Trade Show Spend


Mobile marketing tours are an enticing alternative if you’re looking to save big, create more one-on-one engagement, and reduce your trade show appearances. You get complete client/prospective customer attention, intimate interaction, and littlefrustration. Like most companies, you’re not made out of money so finding ways to stretch a budget is important.We’ve all had jaw-dropping moments when our actual trade show expenses rolled in and realized the return oninvestment was way too low. The trade show is over and you’ve spent your budget, so now what? Here is a new wayto think.
Many companies have turned to mobile marketing tours to maximize their trade show budgets andspending. Creating a branded mobile vehicle not only makes for an eye-catching trade show exhibit but allows companies to travel afterward to prospective clients. This not only allows you to re-purpose show exhibitory items, it also can reduce trade show appearances overall. Rather than spending your budget on a booth, you cantake your mobile vehicle and create your own tour. A mobile tour also allows you to reach customers that are no longer attending trade shows, allowing for even more brand exposure and potential sales.A mobile marketing touris an exciting alternative to trade shows that provide greater flexibility and a platform from which to sell allyear long. We have had the experience to do this for you. It is not as simple as branding and wrapping thevehicle – we will work with you or your marketing agency to create the most impactful trade show alternatives that can roll out to your clients – and we can even offer the drive team to handle moving and displaying your products.
Remember what field trips felt like when you were a kid? You actually looked forward to going toschool because these adventures broke the monotony of your daily routine. By embarking on a mobile tour, yourbrand can provide a similar feeling to decision makers within your target audience. Simply load up your product into a van, truck or trailer and visit every company on your dream list of clients on their turf. Offering a fun, interactive experience for the whole office could capture each individual’s attention for anywhere from 45minutes to two-plus hours.When a mobile tour visitsan office, prospects leap at the opportunity to get away from their desks for a while. Because it is on-site,decision makers are present alongside their support teams, so conversations happen on the spot. The ROI on amobile trade show is incredible, as you’re speaking to a captive audience of just the right people at just theright time. Clients have told us that mobile trade shows have doubled their pipelines and halved their salescycles.
Hands-on experiences created by mobile tours are successful ways for brands to stand out. Althoughtrade shows held a special place in B2B marketing events for many years, it’s time to take their best educational elements and transform them into captivating experiences that can be executed anywhere. The potential of mobile tours is enormous, and it can be as simple as giving hardworking adults the kind of fieldtrip their inner children would rave about.

[read more]

Hosting your own Hotel Event: Do you Nurture your Clients?


When you look at the amount of money spent nurturing prospects to become customers, do you spend the same amount, or even remotely close to the same amount, for your current customers? Sources say that the cost of acquiring a new customer is up to 30 times that of keeping an existing one. And the good old 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of your customers bring you 80% of your revenue.
Customers not only value product, but also value the fact that you are subject matter experts in your industry. Customers want more product information. They do not want to wait for once a year or less industry trade shows and conferences. They want answers now … and most possibly with a hands on touch. This is why hosting your own event is one of the more popular trade show alternatives. 
Customer retention should be a major focal point for your company. Therefore Customer Marketing comes into play. Customer marketing targets activities and campaigns designed specifically to drive retention, customer loyalty, advocacy, growth and community participation for current customers. You must educate, inform, and assist customers at every stage of their journey, whether newcomer or professional, and to provide outstanding customer service to enhance their experience with your company. In this day in age, technology is our main source of managing communications with our customers. We rely heavily on email and online chats to provide support to our customers. Let’s face it though: nothing beats a face-to-face interaction.
Try out a live, in-person event. Take your expertise that customers know and love, and bring it from the vast trade show floor to a more personal event. With these trade show alternatives, customers benefit from great educational presentations, showing the latest equipment, exposing technology to a hand-picked group, or adding a mobile component and bring your company to their door. Listening to customers face-to-face and getting direct feedback on your products or services will be invaluable. If you’re not ready for a big event, try testing out some small local meetups as trade show alternatives. Taking the relationship to a more personal level is a great marketing strategy because it creates this “humanized” experience with your customers. We’re people working with people, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.

[read more]

Video Marketing:  Fish Where the Fish Are


If the clients cannot come to you or cannot or will not attend a market industry event then bring your company to them. Video marketing events are popular trade show alternatives, allowing businesses to log in and connect from the privacy of their offices. Look at these statistics and remember that every bit of video can be repurposed in your exhibit display or at a hotel event, as well. We offer top of the line video production from award winning video producers. Our video is full line production from initial meetings to script writing, professional voice over, production and editing and delivery. This is not your nephew’s best friend with a handheld camera!

After reading through these stats, ask yourself if you can afford to skip out on video as trade show alternatives.
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users
• More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when it’s in a video vs 10% when reading it in text
• More video content is uploaded in 30 days to social channels than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.
• 82% of Twitter users watch video on Twitter
• Youtube has over 1 billion unique users… the internet has 3.5 billion
• 45% of social media users watch more than an hour of video on Facebook or Youtube every week
• 1/3 of online activity is spent watching video
• Over half of online video content is viewed on a mobile device
• 92% of mobile video viewers share videos
• 59% of executives say if there is a text version and a video version of the same content, they will choose video
• Social video generates 1200% more share than text and images combined
• 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound
• As recently as 2019, video traffic accounted for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic

[read more]

Regionalize and Do Your Own Show: an Incredible Lead Generator


A personal invitation to a nearby hotel venue or maybe a popup-shop in an open-space at a local mall may just be your best lead generator. Popup-shops are popular trade show alternatives, driving conversation and brand awareness across the country. To be more specific, 1/2 day regional events are excellent. You own and operate the event. Invite a sponsor to share the cost of these trade show alternatives. Start with a quick breakfast invitation and use the morning to extoll your virtues. Add another group for lunch, you are already all set up and do it again. Take the most important clients or prospects to dinner or drinks. Get the right 10–15–20 prospects and customers in the room. In — out. Hello — goodbye. Much, much less expensive than a trade show, and you’ll probably walk with a pocket full of business cards and leads.

At their best, trade shows are a brilliant way to interact with all your customers and prospects face to face in an enjoyable setting, but at their worst they can be an expensive and time consuming gamble, that often result in you spending a huge amount of money to stand on your booth for a few days and hope for the best. Don’t make that gamble- invest in lead generating trade show alternatives instead. Pick one trade show a year for participation and use the rest of your budget to drill down to the clients you absolutely want in your pocket.

[read more]

Trade Show Alternatives: Start the Party from Casino Nights to Carnivals


Although big companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to exhibit their products at industry trade shows, some small-business owners who have been disappointed by sales generated at the shows are creating their own events as trade show alternatives. Sponsor a regional event, now go with this idea. You can create a carnival, have a casino night, rent a waterpark or a game venue, or a brewery. Anyway, you see fit – however, make certain that this event is a reward for sitting and walking through your company presentation. Maybe breakfast in the morning or lunch in the afternoon followed at the same venue with a video presentation, product or service experts, product displays and meeting areas. Then on to your event. The key to these kinds of trade show alternatives is to connect the reward to your information so they get excited about both your product and the entertainment. 

Or consider a golf tournament followed by a barbecue. Again breakfast and product and service presentations – then sales people and company experts in the foursomes. As trade show alternatives, these provide a great benefit of edutainment. Events to remember and to remember who did this for them and the product they represent. “Here’s this little old Charlotte company that became a national company by going to a three-day trade show,” Whitley said.

[read more]

 Trade Show Alternatives


In these days of digital, high-tech, social media, we can’t forget how important the one-to-one is – that is the human element of the buyer-seller relationship. Trade shows may seem to be in the consummate position for this interaction. They certainly offer the largest industry venues with seemingly thousands of buyers willing to take a look. However sometimes you may feel that you can get lost in the crowd so the time may be right to look past your trade show experience and re-adjust your budget. That is not to say that you should shun your annual, bi-annual, or tri-annual largest industry exposition but you might reconsider trade show alternatives to meet your current clients across the country for more intimate gatherings where just you are the center of attention.
How do you accomplish that task? There are so many ways to think outside the box. Some come with a hefty budget and others are a pittance compared to regional outreach or visiting one client at a time. We have many ideas to share and many ways that we can help you to be a success with your marketing efforts.
Read these articles and you will be an expert in trade show alternatives as well.

Go Mobile:  Rethinking your Trade Show Spend


Mobile marketing tours are an enticing alternative if you’re looking to save big, create more one-on-one engagement, and reduce your trade show appearances. You get complete client/prospective customer attention, intimate interaction, and littlefrustration. Like most companies, you’re not made out of money so finding ways to stretch a budget is important.We’ve all had jaw-dropping moments when our actual trade show expenses rolled in and realized the return oninvestment was way too low. The trade show is over and you’ve spent your budget, so now what? Here is a new wayto think.
Many companies have turned to mobile marketing tours to maximize their trade show budgets andspending. Creating a branded mobile vehicle not only makes for an eye-catching trade show exhibit but allows companies to travel afterward to prospective clients. This not only allows you to re-purpose show exhibitory items, it also can reduce trade show appearances overall. Rather than spending your budget on a booth, you cantake your mobile vehicle and create your own tour. A mobile tour also allows you to reach customers that are no longer attending trade shows, allowing for even more brand exposure and potential sales.A mobile marketing touris an exciting alternative to trade shows that provide greater flexibility and a platform from which to sell allyear long. We have had the experience to do this for you. It is not as simple as branding and wrapping thevehicle – we will work with you or your marketing agency to create the most impactful trade show alternatives that can roll out to your clients – and we can even offer the drive team to handle moving and displaying your products.
Remember what field trips felt like when you were a kid? You actually looked forward to going toschool because these adventures broke the monotony of your daily routine. By embarking on a mobile tour, yourbrand can provide a similar feeling to decision makers within your target audience. Simply load up your product into a van, truck or trailer and visit every company on your dream list of clients on their turf. Offering a fun, interactive experience for the whole office could capture each individual’s attention for anywhere from 45minutes to two-plus hours.When a mobile tour visitsan office, prospects leap at the opportunity to get away from their desks for a while. Because it is on-site,decision makers are present alongside their support teams, so conversations happen on the spot. The ROI on amobile trade show is incredible, as you’re speaking to a captive audience of just the right people at just theright time. Clients have told us that mobile trade shows have doubled their pipelines and halved their salescycles.
Hands-on experiences created by mobile tours are successful ways for brands to stand out. Althoughtrade shows held a special place in B2B marketing events for many years, it’s time to take their best educational elements and transform them into captivating experiences that can be executed anywhere. The potential of mobile tours is enormous, and it can be as simple as giving hardworking adults the kind of fieldtrip their inner children would rave about.

[read more]

Hosting your own Hotel Event: Do you Nurture your Clients?


When you look at the amount of money spent nurturing prospects to become customers, do you spend the same amount, or even remotely close to the same amount, for your current customers? Sources say that the cost of acquiring a new customer is up to 30 times that of keeping an existing one. And the good old 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of your customers bring you 80% of your revenue.
Customers not only value product, but also value the fact that you are subject matter experts in your industry. Customers want more product information. They do not want to wait for once a year or less industry trade shows and conferences. They want answers now … and most possibly with a hands on touch. This is why hosting your own event is one of the more popular trade show alternatives. 
Customer retention should be a major focal point for your company. Therefore Customer Marketing comes into play. Customer marketing targets activities and campaigns designed specifically to drive retention, customer loyalty, advocacy, growth and community participation for current customers. You must educate, inform, and assist customers at every stage of their journey, whether newcomer or professional, and to provide outstanding customer service to enhance their experience with your company. In this day in age, technology is our main source of managing communications with our customers. We rely heavily on email and online chats to provide support to our customers. Let’s face it though: nothing beats a face-to-face interaction.
Try out a live, in-person event. Take your expertise that customers know and love, and bring it from the vast trade show floor to a more personal event. With these trade show alternatives, customers benefit from great educational presentations, showing the latest equipment, exposing technology to a hand-picked group, or adding a mobile component and bring your company to their door. Listening to customers face-to-face and getting direct feedback on your products or services will be invaluable. If you’re not ready for a big event, try testing out some small local meetups as trade show alternatives. Taking the relationship to a more personal level is a great marketing strategy because it creates this “humanized” experience with your customers. We’re people working with people, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that.

[read more]

Video Marketing:  Fish Where the Fish Are


If the clients cannot come to you or cannot or will not attend a market industry event then bring your company to them. Video marketing events are popular trade show alternatives, allowing businesses to log in and connect from the privacy of their offices. Look at these statistics and remember that every bit of video can be repurposed in your exhibit display or at a hotel event, as well. We offer top of the line video production from award winning video producers. Our video is full line production from initial meetings to script writing, professional voice over, production and editing and delivery. This is not your nephew’s best friend with a handheld camera!

After reading through these stats, ask yourself if you can afford to skip out on video as trade show alternatives.
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users
• More than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube every day
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when it’s in a video vs 10% when reading it in text
• More video content is uploaded in 30 days to social channels than the major U.S. television networks have created in 30 years.
• 82% of Twitter users watch video on Twitter
• Youtube has over 1 billion unique users… the internet has 3.5 billion
• 45% of social media users watch more than an hour of video on Facebook or Youtube every week
• 1/3 of online activity is spent watching video
• Over half of online video content is viewed on a mobile device
• 92% of mobile video viewers share videos
• 59% of executives say if there is a text version and a video version of the same content, they will choose video
• Social video generates 1200% more share than text and images combined
• 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound
• As recently as 2019, video traffic accounted for 80% of all consumer Internet traffic

[read more]

Regionalize and Do Your Own Show: an Incredible Lead Generator


A personal invitation to a nearby hotel venue or maybe a popup-shop in an open-space at a local mall may just be your best lead generator. Popup-shops are popular trade show alternatives, driving conversation and brand awareness across the country. To be more specific, 1/2 day regional events are excellent. You own and operate the event. Invite a sponsor to share the cost of these trade show alternatives. Start with a quick breakfast invitation and use the morning to extoll your virtues. Add another group for lunch, you are already all set up and do it again. Take the most important clients or prospects to dinner or drinks. Get the right 10–15–20 prospects and customers in the room. In — out. Hello — goodbye. Much, much less expensive than a trade show, and you’ll probably walk with a pocket full of business cards and leads.

At their best, trade shows are a brilliant way to interact with all your customers and prospects face to face in an enjoyable setting, but at their worst they can be an expensive and time consuming gamble, that often result in you spending a huge amount of money to stand on your booth for a few days and hope for the best. Don’t make that gamble- invest in lead generating trade show alternatives instead. Pick one trade show a year for participation and use the rest of your budget to drill down to the clients you absolutely want in your pocket.

[read more]

Trade Show Alternatives: Start the Party from Casino Nights to Carnivals


Although big companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to exhibit their products at industry trade shows, some small-business owners who have been disappointed by sales generated at the shows are creating their own events as trade show alternatives. Sponsor a regional event, now go with this idea. You can create a carnival, have a casino night, rent a waterpark or a game venue, or a brewery. Anyway, you see fit – however, make certain that this event is a reward for sitting and walking through your company presentation. Maybe breakfast in the morning or lunch in the afternoon followed at the same venue with a video presentation, product or service experts, product displays and meeting areas. Then on to your event. The key to these kinds of trade show alternatives is to connect the reward to your information so they get excited about both your product and the entertainment. 

Or consider a golf tournament followed by a barbecue. Again breakfast and product and service presentations – then sales people and company experts in the foursomes. As trade show alternatives, these provide a great benefit of edutainment. Events to remember and to remember who did this for them and the product they represent. “Here’s this little old Charlotte company that became a national company by going to a three-day trade show,” Whitley said.

[read more]

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