Exhibiting at life science events makes up a significant percentage of the industry’s marketing mix and proper preparation for an event often makes the difference between a successful venture or an expensive failure. Exhibiting success can be achieved through a combination of the following:

* Effective exhibit display design
* Effective pre, during & post event promotions
* Effective printed materials & promotional
collateral
* Effective event booth staff coaching

To make things simpler, you can think of the above four as: Display, Print, Promotion and Visibility.

Display.

Display can be broken down to three important parts: Graphic, Hardware and Staff

Graphics: Next to your staff, your graphics are your most important communications tool. You have a maximum 3 to 5 seconds to communicate your message. A common mistake people make is thinking design is decoration.

Hardware: When dealing with trade show hardware, buyer beware. There are many things to consider before buying and inexpensive products on the market are often inferior. It can be difficult to know what is the right choice.

Staff: The staff you choose to represent you is very important. A good trade booth staff member will understand and practice the 80/20 rule. Listen 80% of the time and talk 20% of the time. Seeing how the staff is only talking 20% of the time, it’s important they use the 20% correctly. The staff member asked the prospect effective questions to determine if they are a quality lead. An effective staff member will also have the correct body language and booth etiquette. Like any team, success starts with good coaching.


Print

Print can be broken down into the following categories: Marketing & Collateral, Advertising, Packaging and Reports & Publications. No matter what category, the goal is to make a lasting impression. There is no point spending money on print if it doesn’t impact your prospect. A way to make an impression is to focus on prospects solutions. In one way or another, prospects are looking to solve professional problems. The way to achieve success with all your printed materials is to have a professional design and produce them for you. This will ensure that your brand is competing at the highest level.

Unfortunately making an impact is not enough. You also have to a “call to action.” A call to action is an advertising and marketing concept, a request/direction to “do something”— often the next step that a consumer could take toward the purchase of a product or service.

Finally, it’s important to make sure the visual component is professional and pleasing to the viewer. Again, this is a great reason to leave the worry to a professional. A professional well ensure that your visual design is consist throughout your exhibit.



Promotion

Promotion is done at three different times: Pre-Event, During the Event and Post Event.


Pre-Event

A common mistake is relying solely on walk by traffic to fill your booth. Pre-event promotion will ensure that your booth is a must see at the event. The goal is to increase traffic to your booth with quality prospects rather than just draw a crowed. Pre-event incentives is one of the many ways to increase quality prospect traffic.


During the Event

The first rule of promotional giveaway spending is; it’s not how much you spend but how wisely you spend it.This is another great reason to leave your trade show worries in the hands of a professional. www.lifesciencecreative.com is a good example of a specialized professional that can maximize your budget’s effectiveness.


Post Event

Leads are highly perishable. Following up is very important and urgent. It’s a fact that few event attendees place orders on the spot. proper follow is key to capitalizing on leads. Follow up preparations begin before the trade show.


Be Visible


The three main ways to stay visible is E-mail, personal contact and direct mail.

E-mail contact will ensure that your organization is top of mind with clients and potential clients. I good tip to ensure people read your emails is offer something of value. E-mail is an integral part of sales effort today. It can be a time consuming to manage a e-mail campaigns, luckily there are agencies that can handle that for you.

Personal contact is key in building a professional relationship. (Needs More)


Direct mail contact is another effective way to keep your organization top of mind. When setting up a program, it’s important to set up one that gets results. A good to rule to remember is that targeted mailing reduce cost and increases results.

Those are the basic rules to archiving succus at a life science trade show.

I don’t own a smart phone. In fact my cell phone was in a remedial class eating glue when I found it. But it serves my purposes at this particular time in my life. I am fully aware that a smart phone is in my imitate future but I am a creature of necessity. That being said my experience with mobile marketing is limited. I will say, however, that I was texting a friend last year during the NBA finials and explaining how Kobe Bryant shares free throw abilities with my grandmother when a little while after I received a text from Bell Canada. The text was informing me of an online sale of NBA Jerseys 30% off at nba.com. This was obviously no accident. It was a great example how intimate mobile marketing is. I was taken with how the nba.com tip could have been from friend.

Not having a smart phone means I have not participated the world of smart phone applications. To be honest, the most fun I have had with a smart phone application was when Dave fell asleep in class and Brian had an iPhone and the iPhone application that told you what song was playing by simply placing the iPhone up to the music source. Noticing that Dave was snoring, Brian put the phone up to Dave ‘s face and it turns out, Dave snoring was closest to Elvis Hound dog. That was great.

I can say that I have not really incorporated Mobile marketing with my past projects. I could however, see many opportunities for this intimate marketing technique. With the advent of integrate location aware technology, advertising of locations such as restaurants could be seen as helpful rather than intrusive.

I have always had a theory that the advertising people find annoying and intrusive is advertising that is not directly pointed at them. The intimate nature mobile marketing could remedy an amount of this annoyance

The Revolution will not be televised

The broadband revolution is a reality. I spend very little time watching television, but I keep my digital cable for the simple fact that I’m a huge sports fan and watching sports online is not yet up to par. I can assure you that this is true for the fanatic, trust me. But when it comes to any other content, watching online is much easier than watching on television.

I did however notice an interesting side effect. In theory you are more plugged in to mainstream culture but you can no longer be a passive observer. I’ll give you an example of what I mean. Recently I was talking to two people whom I consider “plugged in” to mainstream culture and pride themselves as “in the know”. I was asking their thoughts on the Christian Bale “freak out” on the set of the new Terminator movie and neither of them had any idea what I was talking about. Now I’m not saying that everyone should know about this event but it was all anyone was talking about on television talk and news shows. Unless you are emailed the event or actively look for it, you will not be in the know. My point is that with all of us becoming able to customize our entertainment experience we are becoming less connected. The music industry is in serious trouble due to downloading but I believe another byproduct is that all of our taste is spread out over a larger field. This is good for the consumer but we are becoming less connected. Now I have never been someone to rebel against the evolution of technology and culture but I see advertisers finding more difficulty reaching large audiences through pop culture.

Idea Utility Company

As many examples of brands utilities you can think of, there is an endless amount of untapped opportunities not being utilized by popular brands. The few I can think off the top of my head would be Nokia having an online phone directory, UPS making digital stopwatches, Sharpie providing blank white cardboard signs and markers at sporting events. These ideas are just off the top of my head, and are not even very good, but should be seen as examples of how brand utility ideas could be created for every brand. It is difficult for brands to build relationships with an audience and the overall goal is to have your audience live your band. Brand utilities are a great way to have an audience view your brand as useful.

Before sitting down to write this I opened a bottle of wine with my Naked Grape wine opener and filled my Inniskillin wine glass, and was pondering what makes a great brand utility. Clearly there should be a connection between the brand and the utility they are offering. The new frontier, however, is online widgets and services. As I peruse the numerous widgets on my Mac desktop, I noticed an endless amount of lost opportunities. No one is sponsoring my weather, dictionary or translator widget. These would be perfect for Firestone, Scrabble and Go Travel respectively

Getting Guerrilla

Reading the Natural blog, I discovered the new frontier of guerrilla advertising. Roof top adverting that will be viewed by people using Google maps. This new guerrilla advertising is called “roofvertisements”. Outdoor advertising that will normally be on a billboard is placed on a flat roof top. This was a progression from company that brought us mobile laser advertising that consists of a mobile unit that can project messages (”graffiti”) onto the sides of any large structure using a computer, laser projector, and a bicycle-powered generator. They recently tooled around Barcelona doing this up until the police apparently ticketed them and confiscated the projection equipment.

Reading advert box I was starting to think about the negative effects that Guerrilla advertising could have. Appealing to more primal feelings in your audience could also unleash a backlash. It seems only logical that the room for great success that guerrilla advertising has it must posses the same ability to anger an audience enough to boycott a product. When Guerrilla advertising interrupts someones daily routine, there is a possibility of a negative reaction.

DKNY paint a bunch of bikes orange and printed a URL on them and placed them all over New York. People didn't see them as interesting but rather annoying. The police were called in to collect them and the ones that were not picked began to have the paint chip away and just a broken down bike was left looking like garbage on the street.

Everyone is a critic

After perusing the wilderness that is blogsville, I have discovered a couple of universal truths about this new form of communication. First of all, we are an opinionated species and second, blogging is a useful tool in the arena of advertising and marketing. I followed Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post, and www.adverblog.com.

Both of these blogs are very different and entertaining. I was surprised how much I enjoyed Aarianna huffington’s opinion, even though I have no idea why people care about her opinion (her husband was someone right?). It seemed to be a daily list of her own personal opinions on political gossip and Washington political direction.

Adverblog I followed and was a collection of trends in advertising mostly revolving around technology. I enjoyed this one a great deal. I found it very informative and interesting. I must say I will follow this blog from now on. It was reading these two blogs that I realized the potential of this medium.

One of the virtues that blogs posses, is that they feel like they are unsolicited opinions. Major news networks and other large corporate media outlets have lost all creditability when speaking about products or advertising trends. The audience has gotten wise to the fact that reviews have become nothing more then a practice in corporate synergy. Reading a blog feels like someone you know giving you information on something they truly are enamored with.