Improve Event Marketing Performance– Do More with Less!

Posted on July 18, 2013 by KaonTrendSpotter

In a time when marketing budgets are decreasing, event marketers are struggling to do more with less, while still maintaining high-quality face-to-face interactions.  The stakes are higher and participation is more expensive than ever. Nice collateral, a trinket giveaway and a winning smile are no longer enough. You must be more creative in attracting and engaging attendees to effectively compete.

New technologies and techniques are helping innovative marketers to improve event marketing performance and make the most of your presence at trade shows to generate scorching hot leads. Technological advancements have changed the trade show game.

Here are a few strategies on how to improve event marketing performance, take advantage of new technologies, and make the most of trade show leads:

  • Plan early and make sure the audience of the show is a good fit— even if an event is in your industry, it may not have the individuals you are looking to target;
  • Declutter your booth—give prospects room to roam and breathe, rather than attempting to fit so many physical products in a booth;
  • Trade in the gimmicks and tchotchkes with your company logo on them for something relevant to your business—help prospects remember your name AND what you do;
  • If you’re giving something away, don’t waste your money on something that will be in the garbage moments later—something a prospect puts on their desk can remind them of your brand daily;
  • Interactivity works — so use it for a purpose! Interactive games and touch tables are cool, but since interactivity boosts knowledge retention make sure your prospects are gaining knowledge about YOUR products while interacting, rather than just having fun;
  • Integrate more technology into your booths. Use several iPads to demo your products so exhibit staff can demonstrate new products, one-on-one with attendees, anywhere in the booth (or even in the aisles).  You’ll see shipping, drayage and storage costs go down due to the ability to now display and demonstrate products without actually bringing them to the show;
  • Send requested literature or samples immediately—listen to what interests prospects and follow up with relevant, personalized information quickly, while their memory of your booth is fresh;
  • Hold a post-mortem on the show and don’t be afraid to try a different event next year—analyze the quantity and quality of leads, get feedback from sales, and decide if the show is worth a re-investment next year;
  • Capturing and curating social media content will connect you with attendees at the event, and leave you with a great way to connect with them post-show.
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The Agency Post:Your Marketing Budget is Cut. Now What? 3 Ways to Do More With Less

Posted on May 29, 2013 by KaonTrendSpotter

Agency Post logoIt’s become the new normal in business: do more with less. And for B2B marketers, it is more than a catch phrase — it is reality. Recent surveys of large corporate marketing departments yield the following common challenges:

– Imperatives to build even higher revenues with lower marketing budgets.

– Fewer staff to execute the same or higher volume of programs and campaigns.

– Requirements to execute marketing solutions across all channels, in particular mobile and the ill-defined “social media marketing” channel.

Much attention is currently focused on content marketing, which is a broad term commonly used to imply building thought leadership and demand-generating content rather than product- or solutions-centric content.

Recent research shows that B2B marketers plan to be spending a significant portion of 2013 focusing on how to better use content to create deeper prospect engagement and offer a more meaningful customer experience. This represents both a challenge for marketers to do more with less, but most critically, an opportunity to more closely align marketing with sales by delivering sales-enablement solutions that reuse and repurpose this content beyond the marketing experience through every customer encounter.

With increasing competition, companies must find ways to differentiate themselves and communicate their unique value. Here are three ways marketers can be seen as innovators who can do more with less:

1. Create flexible, reusable marketing content:

Don’t jump in and start producing product content just because you think you need to fill your channels. B2B marketers should get more from investments by creating product content ONCE, which can be used across multiple platforms without needing to be re-formatted, re-created or re-developed.
That Flash piece you want to develop for your website may seem like a great idea — until you want to utilize it on an iPad and realize the device has no Flash compatibility. Be sure to look into the reusability of content prior to development. A project’s cost can quickly balloon when it comes time to deploy your content to a platform other than the one you developed it for — from your website to mobile devices, social media, trade shows, etc.

Creating content that is easily modifiable is crucial as well. The expensive, impressive video you labor over developing loses its usefulness as soon as one sentence of the information in the video becomes outdated, leaving you to either abandon what you’ve created or pay to create another video entirely. It’s impossible to see such changes coming, but why not prepare for the future by making content that you can simply modify and update as your products change?

People want interactive product content that’s relevant to their real-world experiences and consistent anywhere they go, so having the same content everywhere a prospect encounters your brand is ideal for a memorable customer experience. B2B product marketers should create product content once and use it repeatedly across multiple venues — trade shows, sales meetings, analyst briefings, training sessions, etc. — without needing to re-develop or re-create the content for different types of hardware or operating systems.

2. Create a Mobile App:

With the advances in mobile technology, everyone is staying more connected to the brands they love, and more companies are pushing mobile marketing to capitalize on this increased mobile connectivity. This creates a positive challenge for brands to create even better product experiences that are available 24/7 on mobile devices. As previously discussed, it is best to create content that works not just solely on one device (like the iPad or a particular Android device), but rather, develop mobile content that is device agnostic as users are increasingly adapting to the BYOD (bring your own device) trend.

Creating a mobile product app can help you keep your messages consistent because it allows you to put product content into the hands of all employees with a simple app download. With app updates, every single user can have access to real-time product information updates, which puts the most up-to-date information into the market faster. Due to the fact that apps can be dispersed globally through a simple download, mobile devices provide a great platform to get marketing messaging out to every corner of the globe. It will help you accelerate the sales process and increase global reach — even if you have less money to spend.

3. Create Marketing Materials that are Relevant to Sales:

A recent survey by the CMO Council uncovered that sales departments think presentations created by marketing are less than useful: salespeople are spending approximately 40 percent of their time preparing customer-facing deliverables, and they are leveraging less than 50 percent of the materials created by marketing. Why? They feel they’re too “cookie cutter” or generic — not relevant for specific prospects, not compelling enough or fail to clearly depict how their products differ from competitors’.

Therefore, marketing departments should focus on creating content that is relevant to any audience in your buying cycle. In doing so, your content will not only be repurposed at all marketing touchpoints but also in almost any sales venue. Sales needs the flexibility to show each person its products on a personal level. Avoid the pitfall of “one-size-fits-all” marketing. Create interactive, non-sequential sales and marketing materials that can be uniquely tailored for each customer to tell a compelling story.

By Gavin Finn, President & CEO, Kaon Interactive

Featured in the Agency Post on May 2nd, 2013

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Why B2B marketers are risk averse (and therefore less effective than they could be)

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Gavin Finn

UPDATE: It seems that Lisa Nirell has uncovered a related set of issues regarding the “condition” of marketers, and the need to take a new approach if different results are expected. Interesting read on Fast Company.

Let’s face it. The only major innovation that B2B marketers have adopted since the invention of 3 color printing is the internet. Email marketing, banner ads, blogging….. all are new ways to deliver the same content. A new medium, for sure, but does this represent the potential for marketing innovation? I think not.

Many marketers are risk averse (which means that they think that the “cost” of trying new approaches outweighs the benefits) because:

– they are afraid of losing their jobs; it follows that if they “stick their necks out” and try new things that fail, they may, well…, lose their jobs.

– they are ridiculously busy; with marketing budgets contracting, and marketing departments reducing personnel, those marketers left are barely keeping their heads above water, never mind trying something new!

– they are content with the results they are getting now; “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But research has shown that most people misjudge risk (by enormous ranges), and in this case, the reality is that the failure to constantly innovate represents a much greater risk than simply doing the same things as before. Why?

– most B2B marketing departments are operating with fewer people and less budget than in the past. It is impossible to do the same things anymore – there is simply not enough money, and nowhere near enough people. Something has to change!

– the results that they are achieving are less than optimal (in a recent CMO survey, marketing results were seen to be “inadequate” or “inferior” more than 80% of the time!)  So, it appears to be “broke” – and needs fixing.

– if marketing results are underperforming with respect to the company’s needs, and it is impossible to continue to do things as they have been done before, then attempting to keep things the same is a far riskier strategy than betting one’s job on innovative ideas.

Marketers tend to see investments in new ideas and solutions as a “potential loss” because there is an element of the unknown in anything new – and it is now well established that humans are predisposed to favor strategies that avoid losses rather than acquiring gains. What we all have to recognize is that by maintaining the status quo, the risks have been elevated because the world around us is changing – and we need to change too.

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