If you exhibit at trade shows, or help clients who do, check this out
June 13th, 2008 by Allen Voivod
Skyline Exhibits is one of the biggest providers of trade show booths, from pop-up styles to full-blown installations. And as a lead generation strategy, they’ve taken it upon themselves to help educate their target audience on how to get the most out of their trade show investment.
Isn’t that smart? An appearance at a trade show can be quite expensive - one client of ours spent close to $100,000 last year, for booth space and all the expenses that go along with it. And they rented a booth (not from Skyline) for about $15K, not including the production of the graphics for it.
If you’re gonna make that kind of investment, you’d better feel good about it. That’s what Skyline’s trying to do, by offering free seminars for people responsible for making trade show appearances count.
As of this writing, they’re currently promoting seminars in 26 states (including l’il ol’ New Hampshire!), plus a few in Canada and one in Australia. I went to the “Successful Trade Show Marketing Strategies” session yesterday with Katie Oddy, Karina Giordano, and Debbie Carbone from Acorn Creative (and had a very happy meeting with someone to whom I’d only spoken with over the phone while she was a client last year, Cynthia Mailhot of G.M. Roth).
In a two-hours-plus presentation, we did get a sales pitch of sorts, but it was about as light as you could expect - a slide show of different booth designs they’ve done, which lasted about 15 minutes. With the rest of the time, presenter Frank Leggio from Skyline North answered a bunch of audience questions, gave us a good overview of trade show marketing, and sent us home with multiple booklets of information, forms, checklists, and more good stuff.
This is Dignity Marketing™ in action. Skyline has a ton of experience with trade shows, and instead of making an outright sales pitch for their booths, graphics, and consulting services, they offer free information of tremendous value to their potential customers. (Customers who, as a result, don’t mind at all when Skyline shows a little slide show in exchange for the value Skyline delivered.)
Of course, Skyline’s big enough that they can offer sessions like these dozens of times all over the country. For lifestyle entrepreneurs, this may not be so easy. But you can probably do something similar, on a local scale. for example, another client of ours, ClosetPlace, invited a professional organizer to give a workshop in their showroom. Pretty neat-o, I’d say.
Give it some thought, and see what kind of educational opportunity you could offer!
