Last week we attended this year’s International Builders Show in Orlando. This is the largest building supply trade show in the world aimed at home builders. Occupying the entire Orange County Convention center, the show is massive and seeing it all in two days is difficult.
But in those two days, we were able to cover some serious ground and gather some insights into the state of the industry, in addition to thawing out from the coldest week at home this season.
One of our favorite things to do at a trade show is to walk around with our iPads and compare the physical floor presence of companies to their online presence. It makes for an interesting comparison of where their efforts are focused, and it gives an insight into their internal thinking in terms of marketing strategy.
The Comparison Game
We see that the larger players such as Trex, Hardie, and Kohler have displays that may cost them millions of dollars and digital efforts that clearly match.
However, we also see the lower-tier players who feel the need to match their larger counterparts on the expo floor. They put much time and effort into impressive displays and experiences for the trade show attendees, hoping this will be enough to push them over the finish line in the battle of perception.
This, in our opinion, is a bit shortsighted. The expo floor is a battlefield. It’s hard for the smaller players to compete with larger, more equipped armies with much greater resources. It is possible to compete in a more guerrilla fashion, which is something we did not see much of at this event. But there were some folks who understood that concept and did it well.
One example we did see was brilliant. Without naming the product, we saw one manufacturer who clearly spent a significant budget building out a large display. It most likely took 8 or 9 booth spaces to assemble this large structure. I would definitely call this a niche product, and there were 3 or 4 companies at the show selling the same product.
What they didn’t know was that online, their smaller competitor was outbidding them for almost every keyword related to that particular product.
Why is this smart? Because people remember a name and search for them. But more interestingly, even if people took information that included a web address, they will probably Google the name anyway because it is easier.
So the large company spent a massive amount of resources on a gigantic display booth, only to increase awareness for a smaller player who is playing a more aggressive game online. We’ve seen this happen in many different product areas as of late. The larger players simply don’t feel that online efforts are more important than offline spending such as trade shows, so this results in trickle-down awareness for competitors.
Taking A Closer Look At The Displays
Another interesting takeaway from the trade show is that the principles that apply to digital also apply to physical displays. Manufacturers aren’t doing a good job in the application of these principles.
For example, one important area of focus digitally is determining who your buyers are and what their motivations will be. Online, we call this “persona development.” We want to know the persona of each visitor that comes to your site, and then we want to develop a table to understand what their buying process looks like stage by stage. In this way, we’ll be able to help target users and nurture them through the buying cycle.
Expo booths are awareness mechanisms. This means you have to have messaging that is appropriate to generate awareness for your visitors. Yet all too often, we saw “calls to action” such as posters and signs that were nothing more than branding. Quick, ineffective language that doesn’t appeal to anyone who is looking to solve a problem.
In our travels, the people who were best at actually presenting problem-solving products were the manufacturers that had a niched, specific product. This makes sense logically because they only have to focus on marketing a single product, so their signage can focus on their visitor’s problem and how that product is the solution.
We were astounded by some of the specific problems we saw addressed and how effective some manufacturers were in presenting the solution. In some cases, those booths were overloaded with visitors.
A Unified Marketing Strategy Works
How can you fix this for your organization? With a unified marketing strategy. The visitors you have online are the same that will be at these shows. The language you use digitally can be adapted for physical use. Not doing so means your marketing strategy is not unified. And consistent, unified experiences from physical to digital are something consumers will notice.
The biggest problem we saw, however, was the collection of emails at the expo. Or rather, the way vendors used the information gathered. It is easy via handheld devices to quickly scan and gather information about visitors. However, in asking around, we realized that most exhibitors had no concrete plan for what they were going to do with that information after the show.
Most just planned to add people to a generic mailing list. What they should do is embrace the idea of marketing automation and add all of these expo visitors to a customized workflow that will automatically send a series of follow-up emails with the purpose of nurturing them to the next stage of buying.
Since landing back at our global HQ in New Jersey, we still haven’t received a single piece of correspondence from a single exhibitor despite the fact that we were handing our badges over to be scanned pretty much everywhere we went.
What should they do? Add the email addresses collected (if technology allows) to their marketing automation software on a daily basis, and send a follow-up as soon as possible. Just a quick “thank you for stopping by” email will go a long way. And from there, automatically creating a series of follow-ups over the coming weeks and months to continue the conversation will build relationships.
Brochures and pamphlets get lost—we have a stack of them. But the top of the inbox is always available for attention.
I’ll end this post with a big shout out to all the folks who are in charge of this event. It is a massive undertaking, and they should all be proud of the work they do. If you haven’t been to the show, realize that over 100,000 people attend and there over 1,500 exhibitors. They put on a great show, and we already can’t wait to go back next year!
