Debanter

What’s the first thing you want to do after a tradeshow?

Hibernate for a month? Spend a couple hundred bones at the spa? Intensive twenty-four hour therapy to hopefully repress the whole thing?

All good options…but if you pick one, you’re going to miss out on a big opportunity to make a difference in your marketing program. Because remember…CES 2009 is only twelve short months away.

Are you cringing/rolling your eyes yet?

Right - it feels like you’ve got tons of time. All spring…all summer…then you might need to work a teensy bit harder around October-November and you’ll be able to breeze into January…arms full of chatchkas, fresh piles of business cards, stacks of product sheets, and an army of perfectly trained booth babes by your side.

Excuse me while I take a minute to laugh so hard I fall off my chair.

Here’s a better idea, and a few simple measures that will make a big difference in keeping things on track. In order to actually have a holiday before CES, you’ve got to be committed to the show all year round…especially in the first few weeks that follow.

1. Booth traffic: you can guess who came by, or you could actually measure it. business cards aren’t enough - you need to measure what your visitors were interested in. This will help in your team’s followup and it will help you tweak and adjust how you attract visitors. If I’m a B2B company and I come back with only 10% of my cards interested in my enterprise offering, then we’ve got some work to do. But I wouldn’t even know that if I didn’t take the time to categorize and measure, measure, measure.
2. Count your paper: how many product sheets did you hand out? which ones were used the most? what about business cards - do you need to reorder more and how many should you plan on people having the following year?
3. Gather feedback: they’re just as tired as you are, but this is where you need your booth staff’s help the most. While you’re waiting to pack up the booth or having a “yay! we’re done!” dinner, take the time to ask questions. “What would you do differently next year?”, “What question did you hear the most?”, “What would have helped you in your demo?”…etc, etc. Ask these questions informally and scribble down the answers. When you get home, make sure you ask the same questions (and more) again in a more formal survey. Hopefully you’ve taken care of your team and they won’t mind helping you out and being honest in their feedback. You don’t want to hear “Everything went super fantastic! Wouldn’t change a thing!” You want ideas. Suggestions. These people were on the front lines and could see what worked and what didn’t work. Swallow your pride and listen.

Your metrics are your best friend, but they’re useless if you don’t start the tracking/brainstorming process right away. The memories and interesting ideas fade all too quickly. It may seem like overkill and is probably the last thing you want to think about…but in eleven months, you’ll thank yourself.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Work, tradeshows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.