PM360 March 2010

MEDICAL DEVICE MARKETING

Maximizing Your Tradeshow Presence Steve Coldiron

TRADESHOWS PRESENT OUR CLIENTS WITH A UNIQUE OPPORTUNITY—a chance to get their sales force face-to-face with a large percentage of their target audience at one place and one time. We control the message, we control the environment, we control the experience. It’s an opportunity that for most medical device clients comes only once or twice a year. So it’s no wonder that so much of what we do as an agency revolves around tradeshows.

But it’s also one of the most challenging marketing environments imaginable—surrounded by the competition, fighting for time and interest in a crowded and distracted environment, and competing with the lure of outside activities. That’s why it can’t be business as usual when it comes to presenting your brand value at tradeshows. To truly realize a powerful return on your tradeshow investment, you need to be willing to shake things up. Experience has shown us that there are three crucial elements to achieving success on the show floor. Powerful creative, a compelling message, and the guts to do something different—these are the keys to breaking out of your tradeshow rut.

Tradeshow Campaign
You’ve just spent six months developing a great new corporate advertising campaign so you should be all set, right? Well, not necessarily. The primary goal of a tradeshow campaign is to create interest in one thing and one thing only—driving traffic to your booth. That’s it. Since this probably isn’t the key communications objective for your corporate campaign, chances are it alone won’t do the trick. Don’t abandon your campaign but be willing to augment it with something specific to the challenge. We encourage our clients to create tradeshow campaigns that create interest, excitement, or intrigue around the booth itself and what will be happening there. Preferably something that attendees haven’t seen before or can’t see anywhere else.

Obviously, if you have a new product to launch or a major announcement, this presents the perfect vehicle for a compelling campaign, but there are other ways to create interest. For example, for a recent major international tradeshow one of our clients decided to build a campaign around an exclusive and powerful technology feature that had been standard equipment on their products for years but had little recognition or understanding in the marketplace. So we helped them brand the technology with a unique name and logo, and then developed a tradeshow campaign that included print ads, electronic communications, and direct mail pieces all “introducing” the technology and its value and inviting attendees to experience it at the booth.

Booth Basics
The campaign isn’t something that you run in addition to your booth—it’s an extension of the booth itself. The most important thing that our clients can do to ensure success is to make sure that their actual booth property is a powerful representation of their brand and a physical symbol of their tradeshow campaign. This is your brand on display in three dimensions, and it is surrounded by your competing brands. So if it fails to make an impact, then it is certainly an opportunity missed. We are always amazed by how similar most tradeshow booths are and how unappealing they can be. If your booth looks just like your competitors’ booths, what does that say about your brand?

Most important, the booth is the place that your campaign comes alive. There should be a compelling reason for attendees to come into your booth beyond the fact that your products are sitting there. That’s where the campaign comes in. All of the advertising, direct mails, and eblasts have just been leading
up to this point. Stepping into your booth should be the payoff. For our previously mentioned client, we transformed their existing booth property, reusing what we could and also adding exciting new elements like an “interactive tunnel experience” where attendees became immersed in an interactive experience
that provided valuable information of the technology advantage and what it could mean to their practice and patients. Additional interactive kiosks and a game experience were added to the booth. These elements replaced the client’s traditional theater for speaker presentations.

The results can be remarkable. In this case, our client experienced the single best tradeshow sales results in the history of the company. So while they had allocated additional resources to build a compelling and exciting tradeshow offering, their investment offered an amazing return.

The show floor is no place for the timid, so don’t be afraid to let your brand shine. And by the way, your agency can help.

Steve Coldiron is Principal, Creative Director, at Jocoto Advertising. He can be reached at steve@jocoto.com