marketingOk, I am working as a marketing representative for a autism school startup. The school is pretty small as it only has 9 students.
Recently, an autism association will open an autism workshop for connecting parents that have autistic children. The autism association sent an email inviting our school attending their workshop.
So, that is a very good chance for us to find more customers or potential customers and generate sales leads.
My question is that what should I effectively do to utilize that workshop for finding more customers and increase the image of our school to many people?
Here is what I think up:
-Give parents our brochures -Some customers need a specific technical info then our specialists will answer them -Approach to potential customers and introduce our school to them -Introduce our school on the stage to all audiences -Give web links, and show videos to them. Maybe we can have an iPad in our table (we gotta pay the association for renting that table). We can show our video on iPad to the customers -Give free gifts (like book or T-Shirt) for customers
What else should I do? do u have any other awesome idea?
The best write-up I’ve ever seen on the topic was a two part post by Steve Blank:
It’s technically advice for trade-show goers, and Steve suggests that the advice is primarily for old-school businesses (I disagree), but I’m pretty sure you’ll find a wealth of good ideas in there.
Quoting part 1 at length:
The Message
Sitting around a conference room table brainstorming messages that might resonate with customers, or worse having a PR agency doing that for you, is a firing offense in a small company. You should be brainstorming messages with current and potential customers. Your messages should have been pre-tested with prospects and existing customers way before you go to a show.
Say it Loud
Attendees are looking at hundreds of booths each screaming messages at them. Why are your messages going to stand out? Show-goers can’t sort through a pile of inarticulate or barely whispered thoughts. Pick just one or two key ideas that you want to get across at the show and train yourself and your staff to “stay on message”. Then that message needs to be translated into a theme for the booth, the staff and the show. Then shout the messages out (virtually) at the top of your lungs. Visually, demo’s, wild colors, etc. If you think you are going to offend your customers or embarrass your engineering organization, get out of the marketing department. IBM doesn’t have to shout to get noticed, but you do. Design your graphics, pre-show promotion, literature and show directory advertising around your focused message and theme. However, scantly clad women, children and animals (in any combination) are still in bad taste.
Promotions attract booth traffic
Promotions and give-away’s drive traffic to your booth. Offer a free bestselling book in your industry (can you have the author there to autograph it?); Hold a contest, (If you’re giving away a big prize make sure your most valuable prospect wins.) Have a loud product demo; give away pieces of candy; hire a masseuse and offer free back rubs. While the promotion needs to fit your company’s image and the demeanor of the attendees, I’ll tell you that I’d be giving away dating-service T-shirts at the bereaved widows’ convention.
Location, location, location
A small booth is no excuse for being stuck in the corner. Don’t tell me “that’s where they put all the small booths.” I know that, so why do I need you? Get yourself into the booth selection meetings and get to know the manager. Call often and early and try to upgrade your location. Shoot for a high-traffic location. Be sure to look at a floor plan before you choose your site. Foot traffic is heaviest in certain areas of a typical trade show floor. Look for locations near entrances, food concessions, rest rooms, seminar rooms, or close to major exhibitors. Try to avoid dead-end aisles, loading docks, obstructing columns, or other low-traffic regions.
Partners Booths
While your booth may be small, some of your potential or existing partners may have much larger ones, in much more visible locations. Figure out how to get your equipment into every other big booth we can. But it has to come with one of your people to talk about the product. If you tell me we can’t find any established exhibitor whose products or services complement ours to let us in, I question why you are going to this show.
Tradeshow Seminars
Almost all tradeshows have conferences and seminar sessions; is your company keynoting any? Leading or speaking at any? No is the wrong answer. If there aren’t any that match your company, create some. You ought to know who the conference or seminar chairman is a year a head of time, and they certainly ought to know you. I can’t imagine your company going to a tradeshow to create awareness and not being a speaker. (That means neither can you.)
Preshow Publicity
Does your company have any new announcements to make at the show? Are you twittering your appearance at the show? Did you create a Facebook page for the show? Are you buying Google adwords and adsense for the show? Did you issue any press releases targeted at the trade publications and local papers that will be covering the show? Has the company talked to key industry analysts/press pre-show to ask them to stop by? Did the company send out direct mail (email or postcards) to potential or pre-registered attendees reminding them to stop by the booth? Do you have press kits for the show, (electronic and paper) and have you posted them on-line and dropped them by the physical and on-line press room?
Key Influencers
Does the company have press/industry analysts scheduled for demos? Does the company have demos or dinners/lunch scheduled for key industry influencers? Is the company hosting/co-sponsoring some event? Why not?
Customer Discovery
Sitting inside of your company you’ve made a whole bunch of assumptions about who your customers are and why they will buy. Now there are thousands of real live customers walking around the show floor with facts. You need to get those facts back inside our building. What are all the questions you’ve ever had about customers? What do they read? What other shows do they go to? How would they reach them? Have they ever heard of you? Do they believe your key messages? Do they believe the problem you are solving is important? Who would buy your product?
Measurement
How do you measure success at a tradeshow where the goal was generating awareness? Ask the potential customers who actually came to your booth and call them after the show. Take all the leads you got at the show (yes you are collecting leads even though you’re at the show to generate awareness) and follow up. Ask them what they thought of your company/product before/after the show. What message did they take away? Did this help them to understand your company/product
The only thing I’d add is: try to come with a client or two. Nothing sells better than a happy client who is explaining to an audience of prospects all the great benefits they’re getting from doing business with you.
What should a marketing representative of a startup do in a workshop or any event relating to their field?
The same thing as all other marketing efforts; I believe the answer boils down to one simple thing: generate marketing qualified leads.
A MQL is someone with genuine interest in the company you’re representing. Basically this means he/she converges into a sale or can get picked up by the sales process. The latter f.ex. means a talk with a sales rep, a direct sale or a specialist.
The fundamental difference between a MQL and a SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is that an MQL is usually created by ‘passive awareness’, while a SQL is usually created by pro-actively reaching out. You can do that with buttons, flyers, events, newsletters, a website, newspapers, bring specialists / customers, buying adwords / linkedin / facebook ads and everything fancy you can think about that ‘tickles’ potential customers. Be creative.
The important thing here is to measure MQL, the effect of your actions on MQL’s and the sales pipeline after the MQL’s. In other words: define the MQL in such a way that you can count them, preferably leading the lead back to a source (that’s the tough part). Once you do that, you can see the impact your actions have on MQL’s and you can predict the amount of (both direct and indirect) sales the marketing efforts are generating.
Making this distinction will give you much more control over your own marketing process than just looking at sales leads. In my experience, MQL’s are different from SQL’s, because they usually have a different convergence rate. Getting a grib on MQL’s will also give you the information you need for business cases irt marketing efforts that costs money.
Next, cut things that don’t work and start to experiment on new things to see if they work.
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