Marketing is essential for raising the profile of your business and growing to reach your full potential. The only question is how do you most effectively market your business to your customers. In answering this question there is often a very interesting disconnect between what people perceive as being most important when choosing marketing strategies and what they actually invest in. In particular, many companies rate face-to-face interaction as one of the most indispensable facets of successful marketing (especially in business-to-business environment). However, these same individuals often invest in more impersonal forms of marketing at higher rates. Why is this?
Answering this question could go a long way to explaining exactly why it is that people seem to value the face-to-face marketing and interaction with other businesses that happens at a trade show, but then don’t often invest in it as much as they maybe should. That’s a bit of a conundrum for many. Perhaps, the issue is one of the difficulty of objectively verifying the return that a successful trade show presence can provide. Maybe it is partly because of the diversity of marketing opportunities and other business development opportunities that are available at many trade shows.
Either way, there are a number of ways that businesses can take advantage of the effectiveness of face-to-face marketing, including utilizing a portable booth or exhibit to bring their exhibition out of the trade show floor and to the general public. Of course, trade shows are still essential for all of the other opportunities that they offer and for the sheer density of companies present who are potential customers or partners for your company. But, utilizing a portable booth and getting your message out into the public (directly) is still an interesting and under-utilized tactic that can really provide marketing benefits if done effectively.
Beyond the portable booth, or the trade show exhibit. There are a whole-range of marketing tactics that involve face-to-face communication that seem to be increasingly neglected in favor of television and web advertising, social media marketing, direct mail and other tactics. It’s true that these options are indispensable for many companies, but the trade show and other real-world marketing tactics should also be an important part of a company’s marketing strategy.