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Monday, January 4, 2010
Ssssssh! The Event Industry's got a Secret!
Twitter. LinkedIn. Facebook.... and the AEO spending vast sums to create research that will make us all rich by "proving" to marketeers that events actually work. Sometimes reading the exhibition media you could be forgiven for thinking that we as an industry have now become internet-obsessed data-intensive web marketeers who are now all using Twitter and Facebook-enabled show wesbites to feed a constant stream of data to our customers as they clamour to calculate the ROI on their exhibition stands down to the last penny.
The reality of course is somewhat different. Many UK exhibitions operate in industries where (believe it or not) the internet is not all-pervasive, and many organisers themselves are rightly more concerned about being plugged into their industries than being plugged into the latest social media fad.
No matter how web-literate the industry in which you operate your trade show, what’s not changed is the importance of the basics – understanding your customers, creating a killer proposition and selling the features (and benefits) of your show clearly. Where we once all used brochures and direct mail, it’s now a website and an email shot, but the principle is still the same.
Isn’t it?
Apparently not.
Based on a survey of nearly 80 websites of B2B shows taking place in the UK between January & May 2010 nearly 40% of UK shows do not think that their show attendance figure is worth mentioning in the “interested in exhibiting?” sections of their show websites.
What’s more, event pricing sees almost as much secrecy as attendance with just under 30% of shows apparently believing that exhibitors have no need to know how much (or how little) it might cost to exhibit.
For some reason in the move from “brochure” to ”website” something very strange seems to have happened to B2B tradeshow sales in the UK. Having a brochure without attendance figures and pricing would have been inconceivable – yet by moving online it’s apparently become commonplace. In making the shift online it’s as if a sizeable slice of the UK exhibition industry have completely forgotten what it is selling when it asks customers to exhibit at its shows.
The list of UK shows with “secret attendances” and “mystery pricing” includes shows in pretty much every sector and in every venue, with all the “major” organisers featuring at least once in the list. Some of the shows in question even provide a range of colourful graphs and charts illustrating in considerable detail a breakdown of the various visitor groups in their audience breakdown – but omit to mention their total number of attendees.
Why is this?
Whether it’s audited or not (and the extreme difficulty of extracting any information whatsoever from the ABC website is another issue entirely) the visitor attendance at a show is the only reason why exhibitors spend their marketing budgets with us? And the price per m2 is also pretty sure to come up at some point in the sales process - isn’t it?
Assuming these omissions are not just down to carelessness and forgetfulness (which is possible – but surely not for 40% of the UK industry?) this would seem to indicate that a significant proportion of UK show organisers have taken a deliberate decision to omit this information – which indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of how customer behaviour – never mind customer behavious on the internet - actually works.
So, what possible reasons are there for omitting this vital content?
“I want people to phone my sales team to ask for the information they want”
Ever used the internet to shop for anything online? Did you end up calling the company who’s website had almost no information on the product and no pricing, or buying online from the one who’s site told you everything you needed to know down to the quantity they had in stock and the time of day they could arrange to deliver it? Guess what – your customers think the same way as you and they will expect your website to answer almost all their questions before they are prepared to call you. And just like you, if they find that they need to pick up the phone just to get basic facts (such as overall attendance and pricing) they may well conclude that you have something to hide - and then look elsewhere without getting in touch.
Even the idea of using the phone may be a step too far for many marketers today. In an age of intrusive 24-hour call centers, company switchboards with “no name” policies, 3rd party opt-out rates touching 50% and always-on Blackberry email addiction the act of calling up and speaking to a sales team also represents a much bigger commitment for many of your customers that it ever did before – and is one they may be unwilling to make unless they feel armed with all the information they need before they dial.
But aside from this basic psychology, a website rich with useful information allows you to improve your sales process in a way which sales calls - and brochures - could never hope to achieve. This is because whenever you are in contact with a customer by phone or face to face, they are very rarely making decisions in a vacuum. Behind every marketing manager your team call up sits a whole network of influencers and budget holders - sales people, senior managers and “Head Office”, PR companies, stand builders, product engineers, designers – all of whom will play some part in the decision to exhibit.
These are people who will never call you up, and who’s names your sales team will never even know. But they can all access your website and use it to form an opinion on your show, which will then feed into your prospective customers’ decision-making process. So, by leaving out key information you are not only discouraging customers to call you, you are forgoing an opportunity to sell to people you would otherwise never reach at all.
These are people who will never call you up, and who’s names your sales team will never even know. But they can all access your website and use it to form an opinion on your show, which will then feed into your prospective customers’ decision-making process. So, by leaving out key information you are not only discouraging customers to call you, you are forgoing an opportunity to sell to people you would otherwise never reach at all.
“I don’t want my competitors to find out my pricing / attendance figures”.
Is the m2 price you charge really that important compared to all the other elements of the show proposition that it is the only differentiating factor for your customers? Can your salespeople not sell a “quantity vs quality” pitch? The reality is that most UK shows in similar industries are similarly priced – if your show’s price differs wildly from its competitors it’s because either you messed up when you picked the price at launch, or something in the audience and exhibitor profile, history, venue, dates, exhibitor list, organisers experience, association support, sponsors and media partnerships you have can justify a difference – not because you have somehow kept it secret from a competitor who is so incompetent that they have no-one on their staff capable of making a spoof call to your sales team, and who has not one relationship with any of your exhibitors good enough to find out that way either. Otherwise, see point 1.
“I don’t want potential exhibitors to look at the website, get put off by the pricing/attendance levels and leave without contacting my team”.
Your website is a sales presentation, in just the same way as a call, a face-to-face meeting or a brochure. If you expect your team to be able to sell the features and benefits of your show during a sales call, why would you not expect your website to be able to do so as well? Again, think of your own behaviour when shopping online - all you are probably doing by omitting attendance and pricing information is sending out a subliminal signal that you feel your product is overpriced or poorly attended.
Even if your show isn’t sufficiently differentiated from it’s competitors to justify any pricing or attendance variance, hiding this from potential customers until you can tell them over the phone is unlikely to be any more successful than posting the information online. If this is your genuine concern, really you need to be concentrating on addressing your show’s positioning and pricing strategy, not working out how best to try and hide the facts from your customers.
So where’s all the clever web / internet / social media stuff then?
I’m afraid there isn’t really any in this article. The only real behavioural change the internet has brought in over the era of the brochure and sales call is that your customers now expect to be able to gather more information, not less, before they are prepared to get in touch with you – and will draw their own conclusions if you don’t provide it for them. All the other arguments are just basic business common sense about how to sell and market exhibitions, which are all as true now as they have ever been. No Tweeting, no Linking-In, just moving a brochure onto a website.
But if it is truly this simple, why does it seem that so many organisers have forgotten how to re-invent the wheel when they moved into the internet age?
Labels: internet, UK exhibition industry
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