By Linda Forrest
A lot of our clients include conferences and trade shows as part of their market-facing activities. In fact, the last few weeks have been filled with such events for our clients across an array of sectors, including BioPartnering Europe, ECOC, Call Centre Expo, Consumer Healthcare Informatics Summit, the 2007 Financial Services Technology Forum and Fall VON.
These events provide various promotional opportunities that range from hosting a booth on the trade show floor to presenting a case study or participating in a panel discussion. Conferences and trade shows are a good way to collect leads and to gain some competitive intelligence but often vendors are not aware of, and so not taking advantage of, the best opportunities to promote themselves to the media and analysts who are in attendance.
If your company is participating in a conference, it is inferred that you have done the complex cost-benefit analysis and established objectives to allow you to assess your return on investment and return on objectives. Experts like Cummings Mitchell can provide you with the tips and tools to help make the most of your trade show investment. We feel that in order to truly maximize return on your trade show investment, it is important to pursue all promotional opportunities, including PR.
While we would never counsel clients to participate in conferences and trade shows solely as a way to engage target media and analysts, if you are already making the immense investment to participate in the show, it is worthwhile to see what opportunities exist to advance your public relations objectives in conjunction with your other show activities.
There’s nothing quite like a face-to-face engagement to build a relationship and improve mutual understanding. What’s true for your customers and prospects is equally true for media and analysts. Since conducting a media and analyst tour can be an expensive proposition, we typically advise clients that their marketing dollars would be better spent elsewhere. A high-profile conference, on the other hand, provides an excellent opportunity to meet with target contacts in one place, at one time. Over the course of just a few days at a conference, vendors have the opportunity to meet with influential analysts and journalists in attendance. This can be an introduction to or a good opportunity to bring them up to date on developments with your company and product lines. This personal interaction can be either the beginnings of, or the culmination of, a valuable sustained conversation with those media and analysts that can impact the decision-makers in your market. In our experience, these sorts of meetings have led to valuable coverage for our clients.
