FREE ADVICE
AND SOME FREE–ASSOCIATION
By Paul Bridson TRADE SHOW marketing will normally justify its expense by generating qualified leads that turn into new sales. But as with anything, nobody wants to pay more than they have to. Here are some strategies can save money every time you exhibit. Rent. In addition to providing design flexibility, renting lowers upfront costs versus owning your exhibit. You don’t need to pay for storage, maintenance, pull and prep or refurbishment when you rent. Many folks don't realize that your local design shop usually has great rental resources, so you can forget the blah rentals available through the show decorator! Use your design house to supervise exhibit set up. Experienced supervisors lower labor costs by reducing setup time and eliminating onsite mistakes. An experienced supervisor knows how to work efficiently with show management and labor to get you set up and dismantled in record time and without the usual headaches. Learn to manage labor. Labor costs can quickly swirl out of control. Allow ample time for exhibit properties to be delivered from dock to booth, and avoid the heartbreak of seeing 4 well-paid laborers cooling their heels waiting for the crates to arrive. Take full advantage of early bird pricing. Show contractors offer deadline dates for discounted pricing on electrical, rigging, drayage and other booth services. Hitting these targets add up to savings on your budget. Use lightweight materials in your booth design. Your designer should be able to provide you with weight estimates for properties you are considering. The shipping cost of a proposed booth design should be a prime consideration it your decision-making process. Ask about weight, crating and material handling before signing off on a design. View your exhibit fully staged before the show. Your exhibit house should be prepared to set up your new property, complete with graphics and lighting BEFORE you ship. Adjusting graphics or hardware on the show floor is exponentially more costly than do so beforehand! Make sure you run the numbers on electrical needs. Shorting your order and needing to correct it at the show can run your budget into the danger zone. This is simple math, and your exhibit house should be able to help you determine your amperage needs with great precision. Avoid the small shipments trap. Planning ahead will allow you to bundle everything needed into one (or maybe two) shipments. remember that each shipment incurs substantial drayage charges. A box of velcro might easily end up costing you over $100, due to minimum fees. Use shippers you trust and "get" the trade show business. Not every shipper understands the delicate dance that is the trade show marshalling yard. If your shipper is unfamiliar with procedure, you may well end up missing crucial deadlines, and incur significant additional expense. A carrier that knows the trade show business is a friend indeed. Double check your billings at show end. It is not unusual to find mistakes on the general service contractor billings which must be settled prior to the end of the show. Carefully review every item on the bill and ask for backup on any questionable items. Once the show is over it is nearly impossible to dispute these charges.
0 Comments
By Kelly Sargent FEEL LIKE making a new life in a new home in a new town? There are places that will help pay your way. Seriously. And one is in Iowa. From House House Beautiful: These 9 Places in America Will Pay You to Move There
By Lyndsey Matthews November 2, 2017 As more Americans move to cities, rural American towns — and even entire states — are looking for new ways to incentivize people to move to the countryside. While 54% of Americans lived in rural places in 1910, that number fell to 19 percent by 2010, Zillow reported. To revive their communities, these places are hoping that everything from cash grants to paying off student loans and giving away free land will help draw a younger generation to them. But it’s not just small towns that hope to draw more people to them with these programs. Some cities like Baltimore and even entire states like Alaska will pay you to be their newest resident. Click here to read the entire article By Paul Bridson TWENTY YEARS ago we were designing and implementing direct mail campaigns so often we were dreaming about it in our sleep. With the advent of electronic advertising, direct mail fell by the wayside. Now nearly every business has some sort of e-marketing program in place — either e-mail, banner advertising, Google Adwords, Facebook or others. As a result many companies have forgotten completely about direct mail. So the question is — is it worth another look? Think about your mailbox these days. It's nowhere nearly as cluttered as it was ten years ago. Now think about what you email inbox looks like. Yikes! The flight from direct mail is your best excuse to use it now. A well-designed campaign will receive more attention than it has for decades because it has so little to compete against. The positives of direct mail are still valid:
So how do you do it right? Great databases make great campaigns Make sure that your database is clean, sorted and with good recency (you've communicated with them within the last year). If you've been sorting your clients and prospects by interest, consider how printing custom, targeted messages to individual market segments might increase your success. If you're buying a list, use a professional who lives near enough that you could potentially dope-slap them if they give you a bad list. If you really want to handle it on your own, try to stick with the biggies, like Experian or Dun and Bradstreet. Consider your targets carefully. If your target is B-to-B you may want to purchase your list sorted for things like years in business, geography or SIC code to qualify the list as much as possible. Clean that list! Use a good mail shop and have them a) remove any duplicates. and b) send it through the National Change of Address (NCOA) registry. That way anyone who has moved recently will still get your mailing. Have realistic expectations Well-designed mailings with a strong offer get results, but don't expect more than between 3 and 15 percent response from existing clients or between 0.5 and 1 percent from prospects. Also, even a cleaned purchased list will likely only achieve 95% deliverability. Ask your mail shop for a postal reciept to verify how many pieces actually went out. Use an experienced designer Graphic designers with years of experience will be able to create a visually compelling piece with the proper word and graphic density, legibility and a built-in response vehicle. This is not the sort of job to try out an amateur. Present a strong offer Here's where so many companies go wrong. Making your offer truly compelling is crucial to the success of your campaign. Make sure that your offer is generous enough to generate interest and worded in a way that is instantly understandable. For example offers have gotten a 40 percent lower response rate when they were worded “15 Percent Off” compared to an offer that said “$15 Off.” Both offers could cost the business the same amount when structured right, but one elicits a significantly higher response rate than the other. Here's a strong offer checklist:
Measure your results There are many ways to track the results of your campaign, including offer redemption codes, custom phone numbers, custom web landing pages and so on. Use them! Advertising without tracking is unnecessary and risky. Companies that track learn how to get results with the least expense. Naturally, Brainstorm Marketing would love it if you considered us to help you with either direct mail or any other marketing vehicle. Contact us at: |
800-760-7706Paul Bridson and Kelly SargentWe've been helping companies achieve lofty goals for over twenty years now. Here's the benefit of our experience! Archives
July 2018
Categories
All
|