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.

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

Apr 09

Creating Virtual Opportunities in Business During Lockdown

Quite a number of places had some degree of lockdown imposed on them in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This has sorely affected most businesses, big or small. In a previous article, we visited the possibilities of making social media a veritable tool for your business marketing and visibility. This article will discuss important steps to digitise your business.

Working from home has gained popularity over time, however, it has been a slow process. Running a virtual business has numerous benefits, not least of which is that it costs arguably less to run. Despite reservations about the idea from many, it has become a necessity for businesses to explore this mode of running a business as the restrictions to movement lingers. The following are some steps that can be followed in creating a virtual workspace.

Create Online Awareness

This is a very obvious step, so it goes right on top. For the same reason you would expect your physical business to be known around its physical location (unless you run a shady business of course 😉), your virtual business can do with online publicity. Social media remains a primary tool for this. This space gives you visibility and engagements, as has been discussed earlier.

Social media does not do it all, though. Your business needs its own private space, space where all your offerings and information can be seen. You need an up-to-date website that is easy to navigate. Websites do not personalise your business, however. For this reason, it is encouraged to run a blog also. Blogs provide a personal feeling about your business. People are more likely to patronise you if they feel there is a person behind it and not just a “mindless bot”.

Create a Business Plan

You need to identify what your business offers in terms of goods and services – what your business CAN offer. You need also to have a clear vision and set boundaries, create an effective working process, and have realistic targets. This helps you and members of your team to be able to be effective and have the best possible ROI in the shortest possible time.

Let all employees understand how working remotely differs from working in an office environment. Be selective when picking members of your team; not all are well suited for remote assignments and not all tasks can be handled by all members of your team.

Keep the Communication Line Open

This works for both customers and employees. There should be an open channel of communication across the designated hierarchy of your organisation. All members of your team should be comfortable coming up with ideas and putting them to those higher up the ladder. This gives them a feeling of belonging and drastically improves their input as they feel like a part of the system and not a misfit.

Regular meetings should also be set up. This will help to keep tabs on the progress of the team, communicate new plans to all, and maintain a personal relationship. Virtual meetings can be held using various platforms. Popular ones include Zoom, Skype for Business, Slack, Zoho Meeting, and WhatsApp.

Measure Productivity

Your business must first and foremost be productive. So you must have set down metrics to analyse the productivity of your business. Try not to only focus on the final outcome of a particular process. Evaluate various stages of the process. Use quantifiable data to measure how well you are doing. Analyse key performance indicators (KPIs) diligently and be willing to make changes to certain areas that seem to be lagging.

For every observation, you need to be willing to train members of your team to make them improve in that area. Do not stop at measuring the team as a whole, observe individual members of the team and help any such who might be behind to keep up. Make sure to have a rewards system as well as extra motivation.

Be Realistic

It will not be easy getting used to the remote working system for sure. There might be some losses along the way, maybe more. But with proper planning and determination, a virtual workspace will yield dividends. Overall, it’ll pay off!

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Nov 14

Top Technological Innovations for Business Transformation

Innovation and Technology are key parts of business today. In fact, they both work hand in hand. Here are some technological innovations that made waves in recent times:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A lot has been said about Artificial intelligence and its impact on businesses. It has significantly affected and improved the way customers interact with businesses via intelligent websites and chatbots. According to Forbes, 80% of enterprises are now investing or planning to expand in AI platforms.

“The largest impacts across all industries—from retail to healthcare, hospitality to finance—are felt when AI improves data security, decision-making, employee output, trainings, speed and accuracy,”

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Maddy Martin, community vice chair and head of growth and education for Smith.AI, said. “With more capable staff, better-qualified sales leads, more efficient issue resolution, and systems that feed actual data back in for future process and product improvements, companies employing AI technologies can use resources with far greater efficiency. Best of all, as investment and competition increase in the AI realm, costs are reduced.”

Ultra-Fast Internet

There is an insatiable appetite for super-fast internet by most individual users of it. This need is even greater for businesses, either big or small. This helps improve business efficiency and provide reliable communication tools for companies that rely on remote workers. To satisfy this need, there has been the invention of 5G, which is exponentially faster than 4G. The effects of this technology, though, are up for debate with some quarters labelling it as dangerous.

Virtual Reality (VR)

While Virtual Reality might be seen as an innovation solely beneficial for gaming and entertainment, it has recently more widespread applications in businesses. According to Flatworld Solutions in an article on “Virtual Reality and Its Impact on Business”, the following are impacts of VR on business:

An all-new level of product prototyping
Reduced business travel & efficient business meetings
E-commerce advertising will see a new side
VR can provide competitive advantage to businesses
Interviewing candidates will be easier
The future of retail will be very different
Virtual conferences and meetings will be popular
VR will be an important tool in training
Affordable virtual designing of structures to visualize the project better
Offering virtual tours will be possible

Blockchain

A blockchain is, in the simplest of terms, a time-stamped series of immutable records of data that is managed by a cluster of computers not owned by any single entity. Each of these blocks of data (i.e. block) is secured and bound to each other using cryptographic principles (i.e. chain). Originally devised for the digital currency (Bitcoin), the tech community has now found other uses for the technology. Blockchain technology can be used to create a permanent, public, transparent ledger system for compiling data on sales, tracking digital use and payments to content creators, such as wireless users or musicians. It has also found application in financial services and video games.

Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things, which is commonly called IoT, refers to the billions of devices around the world that are connected to the internet through sensors or Wi-Fi. It’s basically a giant network of objects that connect to the internet. Each device collects data, and this data, known collectively as big data, is exchanged and analyzed. IoT-connected smart devices can be an everyday item such as a phone, car, watch, washing machine, or refrigerator. IoT devices can also be components of machines and systems, such as on an oil rig or airplane engine.

A Forbes article explained the massive benefits of this innovation on businesses, and quite a number of businesses have jumped on board this fast-moving train.

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Jan 14

Tips for Boosting Business Productivity in 2020

The year 2019 has ended, with it, a decade. Putting the year 2019 under review, there are couple of lessons to be learned when it comes to handling businesses. Below are highlights for boosting your business productivity in 2020.

Some ideas might seem basic at the surface and business owners may tend to ignore them, but these “little things” should not be taken for granted. This brings us to the first tip of having a productive business in 2020.

Know Your Customer

Know your consumer needs and develop products that help satisfy those needs. The all essence of creating a business is to provide solutions to solve other people’s problems.

One big pitfall most businesses have run into is getting comfortable with a routine, forgetting that the tastes of the consumer are ever-changing despite its originally eclectic nature. Business owners should always find a way to tweak already existing products to meet these changing demands. Ever wondered the need for Coke Zero when the normal Coca-Cola was selling by the truckloads?

Identifying consumer needs is not as difficult as it might sound. It takes engaging your consumers in discussions. Encourage them to give feedback on the products. As much as it depends on you, keep your services as personalised as possible. Always acknowledge these comments; it just might encourage them to send another.

Boost and Nurture Customer Relations

Most businesses, if not all, want new customers. But what is a new customer if you lose two of your old ones! Old customers are usually the source of new ones, directly or indirectly. So nurture those old clients.

You can do this by staying in contact with them via different means. Newsletters, emails, text messages – these are just a couple of ways to do this. Try to always make these means of correspondence personalised.

Grow Your Network

Invest time in building your networks. Who you know is more important than what you know. Therefore try to get to meet more people. Attend networking events and do not be hesitant to put your business out there.

Possible benefits of networking include the possibility of customer referrals by word of mouth; it is a form of marketing. Another benefit is that you could get positive ideas on how to further grow your business. If possible, have discussions with your fellow competitors. It almost always pays.

Utilize Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool for businesses. It provides an easy platform to conduct market research, get consumer feedback and even promote and advertise your business. The best part is that it is relatively easier and cheaper to run when compared to other traditional methods, and it undoubtedly yields better results.

As common as social media is, some businesses have overlooked this goldmine. It so happens that some don’t have a social media presence while some others have not gone through the process of growing their brand’s visibility on the network. What this means is that those ventures miss out on prospective clients that are teeming on social media, feeding off scraps. Hence, try to boost your visibility on social media. Take advantage of Brand Influencers, create sponsored ads, grow your following by posting relevant and fun posts, and so on. Your clients are on the timeline.