Every Minute Matters: Discerning Attendee TypesWritten by Susan Freidmann
Set one foot on trade show floor and instantly you’re surrounded by people. Tall ones, short ones, old ones, young ones. C-level executives are rubbing shoulders with corporate nobodies. Some rush from booth to booth in search of giveaways while others draw your sales staff into long, pointless conversations. The good news is that between 80-90 percent of attendees are often there to purchase new goods and services. The bad news is that other 10-20 percent can eat up lots of valuable floor time. How in world do you identify who are valuable prospects and who are ‘just looking’ in this throng of people? I’ve identified twelve distinct types of trade show attendees. Almost every person at show will fall into one of these categories. Teach your staff to recognize these types. That way they can politely yet quickly handle non-starters and spend their valuable floor time concentrating on promising prospects. Keep them moving if… They come for demo – any demo, every demo. Some people just love to watch a show, whether it’s for newest floor cleaning squeegee mop or a hydraulic drill press that can bore through four feet of concrete. They seem to travel in flocks, congregating around one demonstration after another, with no intention of purchasing products being shown. Asking a few open-ended questions will help your staff know who’s at show to do some shopping and who’s simply looking to be entertained. They say “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme” Any type of giveaway attracts these types. Keychains, pens, can cozies, mouse pads, t-shirts – it doesn’t matter. If it’s free, they want it. They may even want more than one, to give to their family, friends, and colleagues. You can often identify this type by their bulging tote bags and pockets full of unsharpened pencils. Keen questioning will ascertain if this visitor has any potential. They’re a Gambling Man. Winning contests is a passion for some people – they have an almost biological compulsion to drop a business card into a fishbowl for any kind of drawing. They don’t even care what prize is, as long as they might win. Contests that require more than a business card to enter will help deter these types from finding their way onto your follow-up lists. They ask too many questions. Like it or not, trade shows are a prime opportunity for competition to indulge in a little industrial espionage. Snooping can and does occur. These would-be spies often give themselves away by knowing far too much about your industry or asking specific, precise questions. Make sure that you do more questioning than talking to reduce chances of giving away valuable information. They’re snapping up every brochure in sight. Everybody collects something, and believe it or not, some people just love to collect sales literature. They’ll take any piece of paper, no matter what it is. Check to see if they’re researching a particular market for a supervisor – if so, they may be an influencer worth pursuing. They don’t want to talk to you. Some attendees come to a show for a single purpose, and that’s all they want to see, hear, and talk about. These folks simply will not be interested in what your organization is offering. Luckily, they’re not shy about letting you know this. They’ll communicate via body language, by purposely avoiding eye contact with your booth staff, or chatting with a colleague when passing by your exhibit. Waylaying these types will only upset them.
| | 3 Proven Free Marketing Methods Guaranteed To Improve Your Website TrafficWritten by Adam Thompson
3 Proven Free Marketing Methods Guaranteed To Improve Your Website TrafficWhy would you pay for advertising if you could just get it for free? Well, truth be told, most free advertising methods are mostly alot of hype. You often get what you pay for: nothing! Even good free methods are often misunderstood & not used to their maximum benefit. The purpose of this article is to show you a few proven methods of getting quality traffic to your site for free. I also want to show you how to maimize these methods. Method #1: Link Exchanges Link exchanges, or swapping links with other sites, has two advantages. First is traffic that those links will drive to you. Secondly, & even bigger is improvement in your search engine rankings that inbound links give you. Here, though, I just want to deal with first, because there us not enough space here to cover second. Things you can do to improve traffic from link exchanges 1: Only swap links with high-quality sites 2: Only swap links with relevant sites 3: Swap home page links with a few really good, relevant sites 4: Make your link titles enticing If you're looking for sites to swap links with, here are some tools that help you locate potential link partners: http://www.linkalizer.com http://value-exchange.sitesell.com http://www.linkmarket.net Method #2: Exit Traffic Exchange
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