Category: Marketing

Oct 30

Don’t Just Be At Trade Show To Make Up The Numbers, Be There To Make A Business Impact.

Trade shows and exhibitions are not for everyone. Before deciding to invest in a trade show, you must answer certain questions to safe-guide your time and money investment.

Ensure that the Expo focus align with your target industry and you have developed the right service/product that is required by the audience. Review all activities to be in-line with your business niche.
Failure to thoroughly review the relevance of event to business niche, may lead investors into bad decision making. Getting clarity about your trade show investment would also make it easy for the sales team to chart a rewarding plan for their activities, generate leads and evaluating performance.

Team succeeds by setting SMART goals that would guide them through strategic sales outing; they need to be prepared and equipped with products knowledge and know what to present, where to present it and how to present it.

Don’t just be at a trade show or exhibition to make up the numbers, be there to make a business impact.

 

Ask about the objective of the trade show to check if it aligns with your business goal?  research before setting SMART goals. Why are you spending money, resources and valuable time to attend a show? The ROI must be realistic and measurable.

Define your objective and stick with it. Why is your organisation attending the event?:
• For Publicity.
• To build awareness.
• To showcase or unveil new product.
• To generate lead from the trade show.
• To connect and network with other industry professionals or vendors in your business line.

 

Are you looking for a market to exhibit your product/service in 2020? Click here to learn more about The Total School Support Seminar/Exhibition (TOSSE 2020). Africa’s biggest Education trade show and conference. 

 

Apr 10

How To Build Efficient Trade Show Follow Up Emails

During a major Exhibition event like TOSSE, optimism and motivation are through the roof. You talk with lots of people, receive valuable feedback and hear promises of future orders.

But as the trade show ends and you return to your office, what happens?

On an average, it takes 5 working days to follow up on potential customers. . In many cases, there is no follow up at all and the business cards end up in a folder somewhere.

Exhibitions are resources consuming hence, it’s important to maximize gains immediately.

Follow up emails must start with instant follow up – the best way to do this to send a “thank you” message. Just after your discussion, send a short email with basic background information, making sure that your potential customers remember you.

Continue with thorough follow up – send in personalized messages that remind them of your business and answer their business questions.

Make follow up emails Stand out – leverage on the conversation you had with your potential customers in the stand, make them know you care.

Record Customer data using the right business tools – this simplifies you email dispatch and helps you understand the chronology of your data. There are various online tools like “myfairtool”.

All this process will succeed in helping you transition efficiently from trade show setting to daily business schedule and activities.

https://tosse.ng/tosse-visitor-information/visitors-registration-form/
Mar 20

How to Attract The Media To Your Stand At Trade Shows

The main objective of exhibiting your business at trade shows is capturing leads to acquiring new business and brand awareness. However, attracting the media to your stand is certainly the best way to achieve such objective, but how do you achieve this?

Prepare Media Kit

To get the media to talk about your products, the first thing to do is to provide them with valuable contents. Unless your company is very famous or your news incredibly powerful, journalists won’t spend time searching for information and material to talk about you. You must provide them with everything, make it easy for them.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

What should my Media Kit contain?

A good Media Kit contains the following information:

  • Company introduction
  • Company factsheet (figures, facts, graphs – key elements about your business that make it worth talking about)
  • Company timeline (your historic, major dates and milestones)
  • Major products / services / innovations introduction
  • Bio of the founder / CEO / key employees
  • High-resolution Photos and Logos (a good article always comes with a photo, if you don’t provide it, you risk losing control over your content or losing the article altogether)

The strategy is to always provide something very short to give a quick overview with links to find out, make it easy to grasp your documents within seconds, don’t lose your reader in pages of text.

Build your story

Most companies have no story to tell, hence no PR coverage.

Unless you have some incredible innovation to share or an internationally famous brand, why would people talk about you?

You need to have a story that will captivate your audience.

The story can be about your company and what it stands for or about your CEO or founder on his own journey or unique personality.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Make use of PR (Press Release)

Write a Press Release announcing that you will be exhibiting at the show. Make it bold. Use your story as the backbone of your release and add some suspense into it. Talk about innovation, announcement, exclusive information, etc.

If your press release is boring, don’t even bother publishing it. It would have no impact and would only waste your time. Write something worth reading that makes people (and media) want to come pay you a visit.

Once written, publish your PR and relay it through your own networks (website, Social Media, blog, newsletter, etc.), send it to journalists within your network and invite your partners to help you spread it.

Prepare Question & Answer Forms

You did everything right and some journalists stop by your booth, well done!

Then what?

They start talking to your staff. Your team members have been trained for capturing leads and educating visitors, but do they have a clue on how to handle media? Most probably not.

You will certainly ask them to direct journalists to you, but what if you’re not here or the journalist has no time to wait?

Prepare a Q&A sheet for internal purpose. This sheet should contain the top 10 questions you expect journalists to ask about your business and the “correct” answers your staff should be giving.

Use this document to standardize your numbers (you don’t want a person to claim a number and another one say something different) and make sure everyone is on the same page. Distribute this Q&A document and tell your team to read it and memorize it carefully

YOU ARE READY FOR THE TRADESHOW

HIGHLIGHTS OF TOSSE2018

Mar 12

How to Harness the Power of Social Media at Trade Shows

We may continue to dispute the true power of social media as a professional marketing tool, but there is little doubt that it remains an incredibly effective way of driving your business forward. This applies to all aspects of business promotion, including offline marketing methods such as attending trade shows and exhibitions, as social media can help to drive consumers to your event and create a buzz around your entire brand.

With this in mind, how can you harness the full power of social media to create a memorable and productive trade show? Consider the following: –

Register To Attend

Prepare Thoroughly and Access Social Media Prior to the Event

Preparation is crucial if you are to successfully utilise social media at a trade show, primarily because it enables you to promote your event and create interest around your brand. By sharing updates and information through an integrated online profile including sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, you can alert your audience well advance of the exhibition in question. When using Twitter, you should also remember to include your official brand name a unique hashtag for the event in every communication.

Focus on the Quality rather than Quantity of your Posts

During the show, it is often tempting to subject your followers to a barrage of updates and tweets. This can easily disorientate the customer, however, while also increasing the risk of issuing bland content that is poorly structured or grammatically incorrect. To avoid this, you should focus on creating quality updates rather than producing them in high volume, using creative and engaging content that seeks to drive traffic at specific times of the day.

Post Pictures and Videos While Embracing Multimedia Resources

If you have invested heavily in creative banners and colourful display panels for your trade show, it is crucial to utilise these through audio-visual media and images. These eye-catching design elements can be extremely effective in enticing potential customers, especially if they are shared in real-time through a number of visual social media sites. By sharing this media across high traffic sites such as Pinterest and YouTube, it is possible to narrate a theme throughout the day and enable your customers to share in an interactive trade show experience.

With this in mind, the content of your videos and imagery is also important, so be sure to capture different elements of the day to convey a genuine experience to customers.

APPLY FOR A STAND HERE

Feb 08

4 Core Principles of Customer Relations That Fuel Business Growth

Companies in all industries and all of sizes understand that customers are perhaps their most valuable asset. Improving the overall customer experience is vital for continued success and survival of their business.

APPLY FOR A STAND AT TOSSE 2019

Customer relation is a way business relates to its customers, clients and patrons. Some business organizations hire people specifically to manage how the company interacts and communicates with people. The goal is to retain existing customers and to gain new ones by providing the best customer relations and clients’ services.

There are some core principles to relationship management that any company can and should follow:

Communication: Listening is just as important as telling. Think about how often you actually speak with your customers. Focus on less financial-driven communication (whether it’s E-mail, phone or face-to-face interaction) if you make your customers feel involved, they feel as though they actually have a stake in your company, and feel like you care about more than just trying to make sales.

TOSSE 2019 EXHIBITOR INFORMATION

Rewards: Every company should initiate and make provision for reward programs. It is a very simple form of saying “Thank you” and particularly it is a viable and measurable marketing tool that big companies and small businesses can use to retain their customers and grow their business.

Be flexible: Be quick and attentive to customer’s complaints: The objective of customer relation is typically to interact with the customers in order to answer questions, resolve support issues, establish credibility and nurture relationships.

REGISTER TO ATTEND TOSSE 2019

Here are strategies that Improve Customers Relations and building customer’s loyalty, from simply opening up communications channels to implementing elaborate point systems that reward loyalty enhanced customer communications.

Be prepared to meet and interact with lot of customers at TOSSE 2019.

SPONSORSHIP/PARTNERSHIP

  • Providing customer feedback forms
  • Asking about customer needs in general when customer calls with problems
  • Training call-center staff to handle disputes
  • Encouraging a service culture throughout the organization.
Jan 18

HAND FLYERS ARE SPECIAL TOO, TOSSE 2019 WILL BE A PROOF

TOSSE is all about exposing your brand (alongside your products & services) to a specialized audience in the Education community. Handbills distribution is one of the best ways to take your products/services farther than your marketing team can. Start designing and redesigning your flyer for TOSSE 2019.

EXHIBITOR INFORMATION

Organisations like yours try in all possible ways to develop marketing strategies to sell their products or services and also build their images around certain percentage of market shares they currently occupy while aiming to expand beyond their present status.

Let’s talk about utilizing the marketing tools at your disposure.

Have you asked yourself;

  • How do I make my marketing/ads connect to my customers?
  • How do I make my product the best?
  • How do people perceive my product?

How do I get to retain my customers and get them to make referrals?

EXHIBITION STANDS

Handbill distribution might just be one of the tools that will take your products and services farther than your marketing team can. 

A flyer or handbill is a form of paper advertisement intended for wide distribution. It is posted or distributed in a public place, handed out to individuals or sent through the mail (e-flyer). In 2010, small scale businesses and organizations start using flyers to gain more market traction.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Flyers range from inexpensively photocopied leaflets to expensive, glossy, full-colour circulars depending on your budget and taste for a design.

TOSSE provides you a platform where you can distribute your flyers to a large audience. Take advantage of this opportunity by calling us now to book a space at the 10th Total School Support SeminarExhibition.

VISITOR INFORMATION