When Big Budgets Don’t Matter: Social-Media & Trade Show Marketing


Jeremy Waite shares priceless truth & wisdom on social-media marketing, but it’s not exclusive to social media.


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By Fausto Mendez

    Waite’s graphic above (and quote below) explains why social-media marketing is not so reliant on massive budgets. The same principal can also apply to trade-show marketing too.

jeremywaite:

“Too many brands running around trying to join the dots between all their different properties and hoping that one day they may be able to compete with the top brand in their industry.

Social business doesn’t work like that. It’s a level playing field. It’s like moneyball economics. Social “media” or whatever we chose to call it these days is still one of the only areas of business where you don’t need to outspend your competitors in order to beat them.”

    The big disconnect between trade-show marketing  and social is that having a big budget can make a pretty big difference at trade shows. Fortunately, trade show marketing is not all about big budgets, massive booths and extravagant displays.

    A little creativity can go a long way, and the fact that your smaller company shares the same space and traffic as much bigger companies really helps to even out the playing field despite budget differences. You don’t get that kind of “equality” on TV, paper ads, billboards or any other marketing space except for social media. Of course, it’s not an easy feat to outshow a showy brand like Sony or Samsung, but you can attract massive amounts of attention anyway. 

    There are lots of ways to do this, and you’re only limited by your creativity. One relatively easy way is to flood the trade show with attendees that are wearing your company shirts, hats or other apparel. But how can you coerce masses of people to wear your promotional apparel?

    One way is to launch a contest that requires participants to wear your shirt during the trade show to win prizes. I put together a detailed plan on that strategy at a previous blog post titled, “How to Get Everyone to Wear Your Promotional Shirt at the Next Trade Show.”

    The basic idea is to bring along some extra employees to walk and search the show floor, randomly handing out prizes – such as free products, gift cards, money or coupons – to attendees wearing your shirt. In order to attract the most attention from each prize giveaway, the key is to use bold extroverts with a showman’s attitude as your prize patrol. They should be loud, attractive, attention-grabbing people that you can’t ignore – perhaps accompanied by music, a short siren and/or light effects. Like I said, you’re only limited by your creativity.


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