The news is dire; the economy stinks, bail outs are being negotiated and pleaded for on the Hill in Washington and maybe we should just close Uncle Sam down for the year until 2010 comes around?

Rubbish!

2009 is gong to be the year of that great “R” word - RECOVERY!

Recovery always follows on from a recession!

You need to steer your business through the recession, that goes without saying but the key to long term success is not just surviving a recession it is positioning yourself so you are able to take advantage of the recovery which will materialize.

This is a fact of business life.

Now is a time of great opportunity for those who have the vision and are prepared to work diligently - trade shows and trade show displays provide an excellent way to forge new customer relationships and when your competition are cutting back on marketing and sales, this is precisely the time to be ramping your efforts up in order to take the market share that is being given up by your competitors.

Just as businesses are generally cutting back, you are in a fantastic position to take advantage of the deals and offers from display and accessory manufacturers as well as event managers.  Business perception and sentiment may be negative but for the savvy operator, now is a time to be capitalizing on the economic situation and getting set for a great 2009.

Start 2009 by taking a good hard look at what trade show events have to offer you whether you are new to exhibiting or a vetaran; you are in a very strong position when it comes to negotiating the very best market terms for your marketing and sales effort so start 2009 off with a trade show bang.

Now it only remains to say goodbye to 2008; enjoy yourselves, don’t drink and drive and have a very prosperous and Happy New 2009!

2008 is winding down as we head for 2009 but there are still some things you can do in the interim between Christmas Day and the New Year Eve hangover, sorry, festivities

The quiet time between these two holidays are an ideal time to take stock of what has happened in 2008 and complete your plans for 2009.  The phones generally do not ring and sales targets for the year had better already have been met and exceeded as it is unlikely you are going to close that million dollar deal in the last week of the year!

By now, you will realize that trade show displays do work - by this I mean; “They make you money!”

Between now and the New Year when you get back into work mode, review your plans for the forthcoming year; tweak your targets and look very carefully at how you are going to achieve them.

In a time of recession, businesses run to what they know best and start cutting back on sales and marketing efforts.  This leaves huge chunks of market share that is not being serviced by your competitors; as some businesses are withdrawing from exhibitions this means there is greater opportunity for you to step in and take the slot, except you are in a position to reduce the costs as event managers scramble to maintain their own revenues and market share.

The key issue to take away with you is that billions of dollars in sales and profits are still there to be made for those who are enterprising, hard working and prepared to go the distance required to win customers over.

Customers won in a recession tend to be loyal and profitable, and one thing that is always true of recessions is that they end - another “R” word comes into play here - it is called RECOVERY!

Think about this for a moment.

Some veterans of the trade show scene like a customer facing kiosk which allows the attendee to engage with the business at their own pace and without breaking the personal space of a sales rep on the booth; kiosks which are interactive are excellent at attracting people and providing the perfect ice-breaker for meaningful business discussions thereafter.

Others like the table top displays; these are amongst the cheapest available but nevertheless they do provide a very quick set-up and with the right people designing and producing them, they are eye catching.  Some say they are not a good display presence if you are sitting behind them; personally I use table top displays but they are set at the rear of my display space and flanked by banner or customer stands.

I currently have an aluminum modular system which does take a little extra time to set up (not much more though) and the great thing about the modular system is the flexibility.  I can change the layout to adapt to the space available at the venue and I have found this to be indispensable when it comes to taking what I refer to as the “discount” spaces at events; I frequently exhibit at tradeshows at the last minute and use this to grab excellent discounts on the normal pricing being asked for; the downside is I get offered all sorts of space sizes and frequently they are not the regular rectangle but some sort of triangular or rhomboid shape - no issue for my modular system though!

Whichever system you go for, and there are others aside from the ones I’ve mentioned already, think through the ides you have and the type of presence both you and your attendees are going to feel comfortable with.

The fact is that you need not reinvent the wheel; all of the mistakes you can think of and many more you have no inkling about have already been made by the tens of thousands of businesses who already are using trade show displays to make billions of dollars of revenue every year.

The first thing you should be doing is attending trade shows and exhibitions but not as an exhibitor, attend them as a simple attendee!

The cost may be free or it may be a small fraction of the cost of renting space and investing in a display.

Firs of all, select a range of exhibitions you are interested in; choose a varying selection as a shortlist and visit them.

You are looking for two primary pieces of information; firstly, look at the venue and the attendance both by trade exhibitors and also by the number of attendees who are there - how many of each; what is the type of exhibitor and pay careful attention to their display presence; spot anything exhibitors are doing that makes then stand out from the crowd; who is attracting people and who are sitting around drinking coffee?

Learn with your eyes and ears and this will give you a whole host of ideas for you to assimiliate in your own effort and also, and perhaps more importantly, what you should not be doing!

The second thing you will be able to acquire is the actual experiences of exhibitors; for those who will spare the time, ask them how they are finding exhibiting at the event, what is working for them and why did they choose this particular event; ask them for their experiences and recomendations for other events that they exhibit at and more importantly, how much business are they generating from their activities.

Bear in mind, people only like to talk about their successes so you will need to treat some of the information with a pinch of salt but you will be getting first hand information from someone who has actually gotten their check book out and committed money to the project.

Bear in mind that I had been exhibiting for a couple of years and knew enough to know what I was doing; my trade show display and marketing collateral were all in place and I only had to land and set up to be in business.

I had to fly to the West coast for a show in LA, head back to base and four days later fly back out to San Diego.

Those four days were dead space; I should have stayed in California but there simply was nothing to do and I couldn’t justify the expense of a four day “vacation” in the sun.

The following year, the time dead zone was six days; a real pain in my constructive and productive neck so I did some research and found secondary tradeshow events in the area open during that time slot.  When I had a shortlist, I called them about a month before I was due to fly out and feeling full of myself I asked if they had any space left and what was the best deal they could offer me.

I was completely open about what I was doing - looking to fill some dead space in the diary and asking around.

The result was I was offered two slots in San Diego for 25% of the listed cost and 30% on the other; both one day events while in LA I managed three events offering 50% and more off space rental.  All the event managers were offering much more aside from simple discounts off the space rental with a host of extra services to try to entice me to take their surplus space.

The moral of the story is simple; if you don’t ask you won’t get!

Use this attitude to your advantage.

Train yourself and your trade show display staff in making simple pitches to attendees; you may have the best product or service but you can still end up losing the sale to a competitor simply because they said it more plainly than you did.

Keep it simple, on topic and to the point!

Don’t be afraid to sell; too often I pass by booths and overhear what I personally call “The Flower Dance”; a member of the booth staff is in discussion with an attendee but instead of talking business they feel reticent in coming forward with their pitch and are asking about kids, the car they drive, vacations, house prices in fact almost anything but the product or service they are there to promote and sell!

Attendees expect to be pitched at so make your pitch for pete’s sake!

Attendees are also full of an ego; like I sad earlier, they come to the show thinking that your attention is going to be on them and them alone so apply a little human psychology and pander to this.

I use free giveaways as a tool to stroke an attendees ego; they feel they are getting something special (and I admit, I do use good high-end promotional gifts) but they are a double edged sword; they are mine to give or not as the case may be; you want my gift Mr or Ms Atendee, then you are going to have to earn my generosity!

I always link my giveaway with a behavior which for me is certainly a meaningful business discussion where I can qualify my prospect and decide whether the lead is worth pursuing or not.  Sometimes I give the gift anyway depending on my mood and whether I am looking to create a lighter atmosphere, but for the most part, you want my gift you give me your time and business needs so I can see if I can fulfill them.

It’s that simple!

If you don’t know your Twitter from your Squidoo, here is a brief guide to what is being used at the moment.

Twitter

Twitter is a messaging system which allows you to post an answer to the general question “What are you doing?” - sounds simple and it is, but how can this be used in conjunction with your convention attendance?

First of all, you can use this to keep your contacts and audience updated with the latest breaking developments regarding the show and your attendance - if you decide you are having a new product line or, what if your booth address gets changed at the last moment?  Twitter will take care of the announcement for you and it will also send text messages to cell phones too.   Excellent tool for on-the-day show announcements and devlopments.

Facebook

Launched as a social networking site for students, now everyone has jumped on the bandwagon.

With Facebook you can share photographs, messages, information and manipulate the presentation as well as join or form groups of interested users; some of these groups are extremely large!

IAEE and others have formed groups for Facebook members to join and contribute and you can establish your own group to include your customers and prospects as well as colleagues.

LinkedIn

A networking tool - you complete a profile which feels like you are applying for a job, and post this up on the site - people then make connections to you based upon past and present business relations.

Event organizers have cottoned on to the event news feature that the latest version has included so all of your connections and contacts can be updated at the same time if something changes.  You can arrange to announce your own events to which will give you control over what is distributed through the medium.

YouTube

YouTube allows users to upload videos, whether they have taken them from somewhere else off the web or their own home movies.

Several trade associations and businesses have created video for YouTube which has been uploaded including information on careers, the general business or association work as well as product information and “How to” type infomercials.

Simple and easy to use and this puts a human face on your web activities to share with colleagues and business contacts.

You will hear buzz words and phrases thrown around such as “Web 2.0″, “Social Media”, “Facebook”, “Twitter” and a host of others but what does all of this new terminology and business/techno slang actually mean for you as a trade show exhibitor or attendee?

The primary feature of social media web sites is to connect; to communicate and to inform the world what you are doing as close to right now as makes no difference.  In terms of application to trade shows and the business world, these social forums provide a mechanism to forge new contacts and enhance communication with your viewing public which generally means your circle of contacts be they friends, family, work colleagues and getting to the point, your customers at your trade show display.

We’ll look at some of the tools in greater detail in a future post so you can tell if you’re LinkedIn on Facebook or not, but for our purposes today, social media is simply a term used to describe a family of websites that allow users to interract in ways a “static” web site does not allow.  The content is generated in large measure by the users themselves rather than a web site designer putting together a series of web pages full of glossy photographs or fancy graphics and it is easily manipulated by the users themselves - you are reading a good example of Web 2.0 media content right now; blogging and blogs are themselves a product of the Web 2.0 social media age.

Trade show managers have been pushing the use of social media a great deal recently, no doubt attempting to capture the younger generation entering the workforce and who tend to be early adopters of new technology.  The phenomenal rate of growth of social media tools and increasing application to the business world cannot be ignored by non-techno savvy business users - your customer and prospect bases are probably already using these tools themselves to learn aout the world around them; if you don’t use social media then you can be sure your competitors will and they are already talking to your customers!

That is the tag line you would expect to read anywhere when it comes to promoting trade shows themselves as a business service but the facts also speak for themselves irrespective of the marketing spin.

• 77% of trade show attendees have “product interest” BEFORE they attend an exhibition
• 96% of first time exhibitors would like to exhibit again
• 78% of first time exhibitors DO exhibit again
• 87% of exhibitors use trade shows and trade show displays as their primary face-to-face marketing and sales activity
• 8% of 2006 trade show exhibitors reported spending more money than they made at trade shows; or in other words, 92% made money out of trade shows instead of losing it
• in excess of $800 billion in new sales was generated at US trade shows in 2007

Trade shows work for business which is why they are so successful; reading the trade show news bulletings that drop through into my email inbox, I never read about a show being closed down or cancelled; if anything the number of trade shows is actually increasing as other businesses in this sector try to carve out a niche for themselves in this lucrative market.

The implications for individual companies looking to promote themselves and grab a share of the customers with orders and check books in ther pockets, is to choose carefully from amongst the trade shows that are offered.  In times of economic constraint, it is best to stick with what you know works rather than try anything fancy and off the wall.  Research trade shows operating within your business sector first before trying exhibiting at unrelated trade shows (the premise being if you stand out you get more interest); keep costs down but do not penny pinch on your presentations (consider sharing a booth of you are looking to cut costs) and maintain a professional presence with timely follow-up after the show has ended.

Well that’s pretty much what we are getting told by the politicians now getting back to business as usual after all the election hoopla and we are pretty much guaranteed that is politicians are now using the “R” word they are now going to save Main Street America from the ravages of economic disaster, right !?!

On the other hand, we can rely on ourselves as always to steer a path through the recession which protects our businesses and gets us through to recovery.  For those who have been through recessions before (which means you were in business back in the 90’s), it’s steady as she goes at the helm; do the same simple things that work, use tried and tested marketing which works to keep your business turning over while avoiding the unknown - now is not a time to start trying new fangled methods and business ideas.

But it is not all doom and gloom!

The dollar is hitting all time highs against the major export markets for American goods and services; a friend of mine is in Europe and changed his humble US greenbacks for the might British pound expecting to get much less and was pleasantly surprised when he was given a $1.54 to the £1; six months ago he would have had to pay $2 to get £1.

Why is this good?

If you are importing  goods it means those countries who’s currency has dropped against ours now pay less to sell them for dollars here in America!

If you are importing goods and services into the US, you really should be banging the drum about your pricing and making sure you are using the advantage handed to you by foreign exchange movements.

Buying that fancy European car just became 25% cheaper for the dealer as a simple example.

Trade show promo work is already seeing a trend towards foreign based goods and services being promoted which may not help America’s unemployment issue but certainly keeps Mainstreet America ticking over