Maximizing Trade Show ROI: Strategic Insights for Manufacturing MarketersMaximizing Trade Show ROI: Strategic Insights for Manufacturing Marketers

Maximizing Trade Show ROI: Strategic Insights for Manufacturing Marketers Transcript:

Announcer: You are listening to The Kula Ring, a podcast made for manufacturing marketers. Here are Carman Pirie and Jeff White. 

Jeff White: Welcome to the Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Kula Partners. My name is Jeff White. And joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how are you doing, sir? 

Carman Pirie: I am delighted to be here, Jeff. And how are you today? 

Jeff White: I’m doing great, mate. Good to see you. 

Carman Pirie: Likewise. Look, today’s conversation in all seriousness should not be muted. I’m really excited about it. I think look, it’s easy to kick a hole in a marketing plan that is heavily weighted towards trade events.

And at the same time, it is the situation that many manufacturers find themselves in. And that doesn’t necessarily mean that they shouldn’t find themselves there. IE there is a very good ROI for trade shows in a variety of categories and a lot of various areas. And this is something I think manufacturing marketers really struggle with to get the balance of trade shows, and to how to, and also to invest properly in the ones that you do. 

Jeff White: Yeah, capitalizing on the opportunity too is just so often not really planned for. 

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of nuance and areas to explore around this so I’m excited for today’s guest and to jump into it further. 

Jeff White: Yeah me as well. So joining us today is Jim Beretta. Jim is the founder of Customer Attraction. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Jim.

Jim Beretta: Thank you very much to both Jeff and Carman and also wanted to mention that I was at your facility just recently in beautiful Halifax, Nova Scotia. So that was a lot of fun. 

Jeff White: Yeah, it was great to have you here for an espresso and a chat, kind of catch up, nice to bring the center of the country and the edges together every once in a while 

Jim Beretta: Yeah, and you’ve got beautiful views. So no that was a lot of fun And again for having a chat and I think this is a really appropriate discussion to have about when you’re building a plan for marketing, absolutely, Carman, you making sure that trade events have the exact right plan part of that plan is really critical. 

Carman Pirie: I must say Jeff’s introduction to Jim, saying that you’re the founder of customer attraction. It’s like you invented the entire discipline. This is a hell of a position to have quite candidly. 

Jim Beretta: So I should be more precise, that I am the founder of Customer Attraction Inc. So we are a marketing. I’m a marketing consultant in London, Ontario, and we do a lot of B2B marketing. We specialize in robotics and automation. So we do a lot of work and have. My own podcast is called the Robot Industry Podcast. I hope I can plug it here a bit. But today’s conversation is going to be about trade event marketing. We had a conversation, Jeff and I, about one of my early experiences being a B2B marketer for a client that we both kind of share sometimes the president was in the hallway. I was passing him by and he mentioned to me, this is a true story. He mentioned to me, he said, I see you’re going to another trade show and wasting my money. Now he was the president, but he had also been the chief financial officer. And I just, I was gobsmacked is maybe a good word to say.

I went home that day and I was like, Oh my gosh, is this what he thinks about what I’m doing? Cause I was the director of marketing at that time. Is that what he’s thinking I’m doing with all this marketing money? So I sweated, I went home for a couple of days. I’m like, oh my gosh, I need to turn myself around. I need to become very digital with all of our marketing. I need to start reporting all of our marketing and what that marketing showed him the ROI. Behind those marketing dollars that were being spent. And of course, the first thing to start with, because it’s such a big spend for manufacturers, is trade show marketing.

So I went home and measured everything. It took a while, but we had our digital marketing playbook and report, and we’re able to go back and say, Hey, listen, by the way, we went to this trade show, we spent 40,000, we got 1,000,000. Opportunity. And we actually landed that million-dollar opportunity. So it started my whole life of when I’m doing work with clients is making sure that yes, we’re planning the right trade show and here’s what we’re planning to get out of it.

So having a good plan and great expectations for trade event marketing is critically important. 

Jeff White: I love it when the post-trade show rationalization actually nets out and you win, though, it’s a much better alternative than coming back and saying, yeah, we didn’t necessarily do the right things in the previous ones, but we’re going to change the game in the future.

Jim Beretta: Jeff, one of the things we did, our factory, we had an open house and we had it with the packaging manufacturers machinery Institute, the PMMI, and we had 175 people through our factory and so things like that, you can record on, right? You can say, Hey, here’s what we did. Here’s why we did it.

And would we do it again? Yes or no. So there are a lot of other things that you can do when you’re taking that digital approach to marketing for sure. 

Carman Pirie: I want to, I appreciate that as building at a level of digital attribution to trade events and understand how you would do that and it makes sense to me and I’m not trying to talk past it or suggest we don’t want to cover it, but I do want to not talk past President’s comment in the hallway, because that kind of, that’s illuminating on a couple of courses, yes, it puts your, it lets it’s a bit of a shot across the bow. We need to start measuring this and have a good answer for that, introducing some of these attribution levels.

But why do you feel like why is the ROI of trade events? Do you, why do you think it’s such a mystery to begin with? And I would say that almost on both sides of the equation, it’s just as easy to overestimate qualitatively the impact of a trade event appearance, just as easy as it is to underestimate, underestimated what?

Why is that? What is the nuance about trade events that cause us to think this way? 

Jim Beretta: I think it’s, and that’s a great question. I think it’s a lot about emotions, right? I think people go, wow, that was a terrible trade show that we went to. And I’m like, wait a second. No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t terrible at all.

As a matter of fact, here’s all the things we did. Remember we’re working for engineers in a lot of cases, right? And so they want the proof. So they want the binder, but they also want to say. What did everybody do at the trade show? How many leads came through the booth, which leads led to an actual quote document, what happened to the quote?

So like they, if you give them this Carman, it’s so powerful. You can say absolutely that a trade show we did last year, if we, it’s paid for the next 10 years of trade shows. So I think going back and you’re, if you’re CFO goes. Wow, those guys in marketing, they really know what they’re doing. They’re spending our money wisely, or maybe they did something and they blew a whole bunch of money. But if you’re very digital in your reporting, you can say, so what now, what do, what with, every spend. And so you won’t, you’ll walk away from maybe that trade show that is in, in some weird location where you don’t have any sales reps like that kind of those are the things I think that’s so important. But so emotions get the better because sometimes you’re paying for drinks and they’re like 500 bar bill. Yes. But remember, that’s a trade show. We got a million-dollar trade opportunity from. So I think emotions have a big play in it. But I also think that there are things like maybe we didn’t do a trade show report.

Or maybe we, maybe it’s just a little bit of, you have no information. So you have, so you’re obviously going to say that was a terrible trade show we went to. 

Jeff White: And I have to think too, if you said to the CFO we spent 500 and on advertising on PPC and got a lead. Yes, but they probably didn’t get as integrated into your team and have the connectivity with the brand that they might have had, at the pub after the show or something like that, or in your booth at some kind of event or something like that.

There’s a higher order of connectivity direct to the customer when you’re doing it at a trade show that maybe has the potential to increase the ROI of the dollars spent compared to some other vehicles. Do you think that might be true? 

Jim Beretta: Absolutely. And there’s so much, like you said, customer listening, right? There’s intimacy at trade shows that you don’t often get in a Zoom call or on, a corporate call. People will tell you things at a trade event that they would never tell you under normal circumstances. So you get to learn a lot about what’s happening. And so what I’ve done is I’ve crafted a trade show report and it has in it. Here’s the ROI, but some of the ROI is, oh, we met a blogger. He’s going to do a blog about it. Oh, we met a magazine article editor, and he’s going to do an article about that. But, these are things that only happen because we went to a trade show. So, in my trade show report, You can take a look at some of the, I call them non-transactional items because maybe they didn’t even come into your booth and your president met with the president of another company. That should have a dollar amount attached to it. So your ROI may be a little bit non-traditional, but you can now say, Wow, this was a great trade show from all the other things that except for beyond sales. 

Carman Pirie: I think that’s very important because, of course, so many manufacturers are working in a space where, that trade show prospect that you met maybe 18, 24 months away from becoming a customer. So if you’re trying to get closed one revenue attribution in the first month after a trade show to guide your future trade event appearances, that’s a real fool’s errand. 

Jim Beretta: Yeah. You have to have a long-term, right? Because this is a complex sale. This can take a year or two to close. So the marketer has to be a little bit more savvy, and maybe put some hooks into your CRM system to say, Hey, who all did we meet at the IMTS show 2022. And so then you can go back and say, Oh, by the way, these, this opportunity came from there, but all these service opportunities came from there as well.

So you have to it’ll be. A little bit on your toes.

Carman Pirie: really measuring and doing your attribution appropriately and being enough forward-looking is what you’re suggesting. 

Jim Beretta: It’s the attribution word because attribution is hard, right? I went to a coffee shop, I met this guy and so it is really tricky and I think that’s that’s critical, especially with everybody going digital, they want the proof and they want to be able to look back at a trade show three years ago and say, should we do this again?

Jeff White: You touched on a point that I think is really interesting. This idea, this notion that you have to be able to think on your feet when you’re at a trade show, you know You’ve got to be able to hear the signals that are coming back and they’re not like you said some are non-transactional But are going to have ramifications down the road as a result of that.

What do you think? The optimum mix of booth personalities would be like in terms of marketing sales engineers we don’t do booth babes anymore, thankfully, like who’s the best? Person or group of people to send into a booth. 

Jim Beretta: I call it the A team. So you always should bring your A team to the trade show.

And the funny part about that is maybe that’s the person who’s on reception, or maybe it’s a co-op student, or it could be we actually, I used to have tool makers that we would bring in and service people from the because we needed them to take care of the machines. So I think it’s having the right mix of people.

And one of the things we started doing was getting our salespeople to create. A pre-show plan, where are you going to call, who are you going to have for breakfast? What are you what are your plans? Roll that into your trade show plan. And then it makes it really easy. You just pick the people with the best trade show plan to bring to the trade show.

Carman Pirie: You mentioned the sales at that moment then, and in doing so, it was just a couple of seconds after mentioning a broader range of people beyond sales that may warrant inclusion. And just I guess this is going to be a very long-winded question just to try to get you inside of my head. It’s a scary place to be.

But I’m thinking, okay part of me wants to just ask you who should own it then who should own the trade event. Presence, because it seems to me that if it’s owned by sales, it may be maybe a bit too focused on immediate pipeline opportunities that are maybe already in flight with relationships that already have been created.

And then it’s pretty easy for the salespeople to justify why they just spent. Another three days developing that same relationship versus doing new ones. So in some ways, part of me is wondering, okay, is it around who should own it? And then the other side of saying it’s part of it is being contributed to by this long sales cycle notion where because we have a long sales cycle, that means there are many touches.

The opportunities for revenue attribution are many. And I think conceivably it’s easy to either undervalue or overvalue that one touch of the trade event. So I said I had a question at the end of all of that, and I’m not sure I do. Do you think manufacturers more frequently Undervalue or overvalue their trade show investments?

Do they overestimate their impact or underestimate their impact? 

Jim Beretta: They probably, first to answer the first question. I do think that marketing should own it. I think whose budget is it coming out of? And that’s another thing that I think is one of the challenges with trade shows.

You have to start with a trade show budget or a sales budget, but if you budget it. It’ll happen if you never budget it, it doesn’t usually happen because it’s a long sales cycle. I think marketing has that long-game approach. Now there are a lot of people who don’t love trade shows because of all the complications because of the, maybe it’s poor marketers or maybe it’s a poor reporting and nobody, all that was my lead. I knew him long before we met him at the trade show, right? So it’s. A little bit of poor attribution. So I do think that trade shows are probably maybe over-marketed internally. And if they’re not doing all these other things, I call it REM, I call it, or sorry, PEM plan, execute measure when it comes to the trade shows, right? Do good, a good plan, execute really well. And then measure it. And then if you do that, then you won’t have a big problem with trade events because you’ll have this report and you go always go back to the report we did last year, the year before, or the year before that, and say, this series of shows is really working out well for us. We should absolutely do it again because we met these people, we created this brand touch point, we found these new salespeople, maybe there are other reasons that we went to the trade shows that, that aren’t really, maybe we want to sell our business and we want to have some of these intimate conversations. And I think the right place to do that is a trade event. Now I have to disclose that I do have two clients who do trade shows, but I myself have sponsored over a hundred trade shows when in my work in industrial automation. 

Jeff White: So you’re developing the plan. What goes into that plan? Because, obviously there’s a budget in order to pay for the whole thing.

And you’re thinking about the prospects or leads or customers who are going to be in the booth. What else are you thinking about? What have you seen in terms of the manufacturers that you’ve worked with? Where they’ve really succeeded in terms of executing an excellent trade show plan. Not just one that is thought out and you get some great results at the other end, but what happened in the middle there to really drive the business forward. 

Jim Beretta: There’s so much to go into a trade show plan. It really depends on what your goals are, I have seen I think when we mentioned this in the warmup call, one of my friends, just joined a new company. He called everyone he knew and invited them to come visit the booth at specific times. So he preloaded the gun, so to speak, and he just, Got a steady stream of all the contacts to see his new products I’ve seen really good examples of people buying swag and using it to bring people into their booth or to purpose imagery or something like that on social media I am a big believer in speaking at every trade event that you can do. So you got to play a little bit of a long game and contact show management and make sure to put a panel together or make sure that you’re up to date In front of people speaking lots and lots of opportunities as well in sponsorship.

And sometimes companies go, wow we’re going to this show and we can’t afford any sponsorship dollars. But I think that is something to really look at your trade show budget and look at your goals and say, we should really sponsor this part of the show because it’s actually pretty cheap when you look at what the trade show overall cost is.

The other thing that I’m interested in is maybe doing like a wine and cheese in your booth after the show. It extends your trade show experience for two hours and you get to bring the exact right people into your booth for an extra little shot at a show, for example. 

Carman Pirie: Almost everybody I’ve met has suggested that they’ve done trade shows really well.

It’s that extra little bit, like you said, that wine and cheese at the end of the show or whatever to just extend the touch point, if you will, it’s surprising how frequently I hear that. I must say, I want to address one thing that you mentioned earlier, just in terms of how you mentioned, okay, we have the trade show reports and you’re making a decision to go again because there’s been good ROI in past years. And of course, this is the nature of trade events. They do build in a bit of year-over-year momentum. Once you’ve gone to one, you tend to go again. You tend to go again for, and I found many manufacturers who find themselves kind that they’ve just gotten into that pattern, and maybe they’ve stopped thinking critically about that presence.

I’d be curious if you have any specific advice for them, or if you’ve encountered that in the past, where people are reporting out and they’re seeing ROI. So then they almost take their eye off the ball of what’s new or what’s next. 

Jim Beretta: I think there is a certain portion of the audience there who’s like yeah, we just go to the same trade show every year.

And that’s it. They just go, there’s no excitement. There’s no planning. There’s no, Hey, listen, we should do something interesting. It’s our 50th anniversary we should get a big cake or whatever. So I do think that there is pulling in some outside voices to say, Hey, listen, if we were going to do this and actually do it with excitement what could we do differently than we’ve been doing for the past whole bunch of years?

So I do agree with you. I think there’s a whole lot of people going just because they’ve always gone. 

Carman Pirie: I think, I figure there should be some sort of rule, like if you’re sitting around as a marketing team and it’s like year two or three and you’re hitting the rinse and repeat button, you should, there needs to be a timeout call at some point.

I don’t know if it’s year two or if it’s year three, when is the right appropriate time? I wonder too, like the other bit of trade show momentum that I notice are people assuming that there’s a connection between the size of their brand. Or if you will their position in the market and how big their trade presence ought to be.

Jim Beretta: That is a really interesting issue. And I have seen this before you go to a medical design show and the other bunch of years back before the pandemic, I took a picture of the Johnson and Johnson booth. It was a 10×10 size and you’re like, wow, that’s really weird. How could this multibillion-dollar company be taking like the smallest trade show booth and it’s great that they’re there, but I do believe that you’re right in that if you take too small a presence, you’re like should I even be there? And I think you should be there, but I do agree with you that it is a bit of a reflection of your interest in the area. And I’m pretty sure what’s probably happened is maybe a small division. They Had decided to take a booth and that’s all they had left of their budget money for the year. Now, the other way to do this too, is if you’re maybe a new brand and you want to make a big splash, maybe they’re buying a 20×40 booth and you’re like, wow, who are these guys?

So it works the other way too, right? 

Carman Pirie: Yes that, that’s your point is well taken. I was not going to specifically name this client or the industry because if I do, it’s just so niche that everybody wouldn’t know who I’m speaking of. But I guess one client I could think of in particular, they’re number one in their industry. And the largest trade show in their industry, they, of course, ensure that they have a major presence every year. And they’ve looked me squarely in the eye and said, we’re pretty sure it’s a waste of our money. There’s nothing, we don’t see any deals there that we don’t already have visibility into.

But they really do feel that pressure at the end of the day, that. We’re number one in the category. Therefore we ought to support this show. I just to be a fascinating bit of paralysis. 

Jim Beretta: It’s crazy because there are so many reasons to be at shows and I agree with them. Hey, listen, we’ve already hit our target.

We don’t have to be at this show, human resources, there’s hiring new people. There are so many reasons to be at trade events rather than just sales. And I bet you they’re collecting those names in their scanning software or whatever, putting them hopefully in their CRM. So I have heard that myself too. We don’t need to be at this show, but maybe they do as a brand touch point, maybe building their brand. Maybe that’s one of the only things they do all year long. And it makes sense to continue. So I kinda, I’ve never liked that people will think that we’re out of business if we’re not at this trade show.

I’ve never liked that. And I’ve never prescribed it. There are just so many other reasons to voice customer and, seeing which way the industry is going I think it’s important for all these big brands that if they’re thinking that they probably should be there. 

Carman Pirie: Jim, thank you for pushing back on that a little bit. I appreciate that. 

Jeff White: I think there’s an interesting example here too. And I’ll have to put a loonie in the cookie jar just to mention Apple. But, years ago when Jobs was back at the helm, he pulled Apple out of Macworld, which was traditionally the one show where Apple released all of its products and everything.

It was beholden to the Macworld brand to launch new Apple products. They decided that they just didn’t want to be on that cycle anymore and decided to hold their own events to launch things and own the presence even more by being the only one on the ticket. So there’s an interesting kind of opportunity there for large brands specifically, I think because very few others would have the resources to pull that off. If you’re not going to be there, what are you doing instead? Because your brand perception could potentially suffer by you simply not attending, what sort of splash are you putting out? How are you addressing your market and kind of owning that if you have decided you’re not going to show up at the major show of the year? 

Carman Pirie: How are you asserting that leadership position in another way? Yeah. 

Jeff White: Yeah. But I’ll pay the Apple tax for that one. Cause it’s an interesting reference. I think.

Carman Pirie: I appreciate what Jim said is that it’s not maybe that just shows that we’re looking at the success or failure of a trade show in too narrow a way. Now there’s another voice of the customer, HR, et cetera. Lots of other reasons why you may want to be there. I thought that was a very valid point. Nice pushback to me being contrary and thinking that the client was a little paralyzed.

Jim Beretta: The, sometimes they go to manufacturers, they maybe had a hard year and they’re like we got to save some expenses, where are we going to save, and of course, it’s usually the biggest spend, are we can just put off this trade show for another year and then they put it off another year and they stopped doing trade shows and they start wondering why maybe things are changing a little bit and they stop their competitor comes in and does, and sees this and they start spending more. And so it is sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are a lot of CEOs and CFOs that have not had that conversation where they look at a trade show report and go, wow, sometimes it happens two years later or three years later, but it, hopefully, happens. We were doing like at the big engineering company I was with, we were doing 25 trade shows a year.

So there’s no way you could keep on top of all of them, except through except through this self-reporting. 

Jeff White: Do two a month that’s a commitment.

Carman Pirie:  Yeah, you’re keeping busy for sure.

Jim Beretta: Especially if you’re in different industries one might be solar one might be motor one might be robotics and automation.

Carman Pirie: Jim we are as a pull this show to a close I’ve really enjoyed this chat and I think that we’ve given our listeners something to think about as they Imagine their trade show presence a good timing as well as we’re fast approaching 2025 and a lot of people are planning what their next year may look like and in more detail. Any parting words of wisdom, something really interesting that you’ve seen lately in the trade event space or something that maybe people want to keep their eye on as they go forward here?

Jim Beretta: One of the things I really like about trade shows is, as much as you can plan for it, as much as you can target it and you, Hey, this is exactly the right trade show where you shoot, there’s a lot of randomness at trade shows. That’s one of the things that, you turn around and somebody walks around the corner from the solar industry and Oh my God, that’s exactly the, my prospect I wanted to meet. So I do think that there is is there a certain amount of randomness and I like it. 

For trade events, I always think about having conversations early, planning them, and maybe planning with partners. It can go a long way, especially on the speaking side. So I always tell people to make sure that they put it out there early, have lots of conversations with their trade show partners about what you might need and what they could do and get some creative ideas going.

Carman Pirie: Thank you for this, Jim. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show. 

Jim Beretta: Yeah. Nice to chat with you by you both and hope to get you on my show sometime in the near future as well. We can chat about something a little different. 

Carman Pirie: I look forward to that. 

Jeff White: Fantastic. Thanks a lot, Jim. 

Jim Beretta: Thank you. 

Announcer: Thanks for listening to the Kula Ring with Carman Pirie and Jeff White. Don’t miss a single manufacturing marketing insight. Subscribe now at kulapartners.com/thekularing. That’s K U L A partners dot com slash The Kula Ring.