This is a fairly typical scenario for tradeshow marketing planners: You have made the decision to have a tradeshow exhibit in your industry’s leading tradeshow. You have planned properly by selecting the appropriate tradeshow, nailed down the key objectives and goals of your company’s tradeshow marketing team, and hired professionals to build a dramatic, eye-popping tradeshow display. Now all you need to do is wait for visitors to find your tradeshow booth. You believe in the motto “ If you build it, they will come,” right?

Well, not exactly. With tens of thousands of square feet of tradeshow floor and hundreds of competing tradeshow exhibits, prospects finding their way to your company’s tradeshow booth can be an overwhelming challenge.

Fortunately, there are proven ways to get crowds to your tradeshow booth.

According to Elaine Cohen, Founder/President of Live Marketing in Chicago, you need to be imaginative and pro-active to stimulate tradeshow exhibit traffic. You will need to design a fully integrated crowd-gathering campaign for success in getting visitors to your tradeshow exhibit. Once there, you need to educate them, connect them with a sales representative, and get them to take a desired action.

Cohen sites an example of a crowd-gathering tradeshow campaign that she designed to produce highly successful results for Purina Pro Plan® at the National Dog Show in Philadelphia in 2005. The campaign was titled “The Difference is Real --Real Meat, Real Commitment, Real Experts.” The tradeshow live presentation was so successful that it was repeated at the Philadelphia’s National Dog Show in 2006, and also at the 2006 Chicago Dog Show and the Detroit Kennel Club Show.

Cohen not only got people to Purina Pro Plan®’s booth, but had them actively involved once they were at the tradeshow booth: Here’s what drew the visitors:

• The stage was set with banners at the entry to the tradeshow hall announcing Purina was the presenting sponsor of the show. Signage was displayed inside and outside the event venue. In addition, the tradeshow exhibit had the prime location at the hall entrance.

• High-energy music, visuals of great looking dogs and colorful signage drew tradeshow visitors’ attention to the Purina Pro Plan tradeshow exhibit and theatre.

• A crowd-gatherer greeted visitors and directed them to the tradeshow exhibit by inviting them to learn how to get the most out of the show. People movers such as a presenter and a booth ambassador enticed people into the tradeshow booth and moved them from activity to activity. Visitors got insights into how their dogs can lead happy, healthy lives. Purina brought ten staff members to work the exhibit—brand specialists, experts and field sales people.

• A live theatre presentation featured a presenter who gave away complimentary Purina Pro Plan hats, and entries into a drawing to win a year’s supply of Pro Plan food for their dog. Pro Plan Frisbees and dog food bag clips were awarded to those who answered questions. The audience eagerly participated.

• Many tradeshow visitors who wore their hats around the show floor were rewarded by being spotted by roving exhibit staffers. Those who were spotted received coupons.

The results were significant:

• 1,222 consumers experienced the live presentation over the 2-day show.

• 60-80 people participated per presentation, with many standing and sitting around the theatre area (the theatre had 30 seats). This exceeded the initial goal of 400 by over 300%. • 1,672 people completed all three activities.
• 2,000 Pro Plan hats were distributed.
• 100 Pro Plan hat wearers received $5.00 off coupons from Pro Plan spotters
• 1,000 Frisbees were given out.
• 3,500 coupons were distributed.

In order to have a successful tradeshow exhibit experience, therefore, you must have a plan in place to bring people to your tradeshow booth and also give them a good reason to spend time at your tradeshow booth—no matter whether your presentation is at the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago, the Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland, the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the Hannover Exhibition Center in Germany or the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

Remember, the next time you exhibit at a tradeshow, by having pied pipers attract a crowd to your audience-focused, live tradeshow presentation, your tradeshow exhibit will become a crowd-pleaser.

The greatest asset to your business is your Customer, specifically, your Customer Lifetime Value.

In my many years in Sales and Marketing, I've met many CEOs and business owners who don't have much clue as to what Customer Lifetime Value is, much less its importance and the impact it has on their bottomline. To most of them, what matters most is to increase revenue by continuously acquiring new one-shot customers.

This is one of the fatal mistakes that many business owners make; it's a sad scenario, but it's also the reality. Let me tell you something: it'll cost you 5 times more to attract a new customer than it is to bring one of your past customers back to you.

I don't know you personally, but if you're a smart business owner, you'll understand that every cent you invest in advertising is going towards acquiring new customers. You'll also realise that once you've acquired the customers, you just can't afford to let them go.

So what's Customer Lifetime Value?

Customer Lifetime Value is defined as the total value, in monetary terms, of your average customers spanning the entire period that these customers are likely to do business with you. It's the potential contribution of your customers to your business over a period of time.

Here's how to calculate your Customer Lifetime Value:

1). Let's say you've 2,000 steady customers and these customers remain with you for an average of two years; for the past two years, your net profit was $700,000.

The Customer Lifetime Value can be calculated as: $700,000/2,000 = $350.

What this means is that over an average customer lifespan of two years, each new customer you could acquire and keep is worth $350 to you in profits.

2). If you do not have the actual figures, you'll have to estimate. As the Customer Lifetime Value will have a significant impact on your bottomline, my advice is that you be prudent and conservative in your estimation.

Why is it so important to you and your business?

Lifetime Customer Value is important to you and your business for the following reasons:

1). Knowing the Lifetime Value of your customers is crucial to you and your business as it serves as a benchmark without which you'll be groping in the dark.

When you know the Lifetime Value of your customers, you can determine how much time, effort and money you can afford to invest to acquire that customer in the first instance.

In other words, you can invest more today to reap a much larger profits later down the road as long as your cashflow is healthy and can support it.

Every marketing campaign that you undertake costs you money as well as reaping you benefits such as increased sales, enhanced corporate image, etc. But how can you be sure that the benefits would outweigh the costs or investments? This is where knowing the Customer Lifetime Value is so powerful - it helps you to determine this even before you launch your marketing campaign.

2). When you realize that customers are actually an ongoing stream of revenue as opposed to a one-shot sale, you can re-focus your marketing efforts.

Instead of contantly struggling to acquire more and more new customers, you can now begin to focus on keeping your existing customers longer and selling to them repeatedly, in other words, repeat sales.

You may spend more like making stronger and more attractive offers than your competition in acquiring new customers now who will be your money spinners tomorrow.

This makes sense because you now know that on average you'll more than make it back over the years that the customers are with you and therefore you could afford to break even or even lose money now in acquiring the new customers.

Start shifting your focus to Customer Lifetime Value and maximise your profits today!

Start to have a proper understanding of Customer Lifetime Value because it's key to the success of your business. It'll allow you to acquire more customers than your competition through better and more attractive offers; it'll dramatically increase your bottomline through more repeat sales and shoot your profits through the roof.

Retailing has seen a sudden boom in the market in the recent past. Several companies offer their retailing expertise to various entrepreneurs in this field. They have a dedicated warehousing and distribution service for test products and demonstration. This is in association with compilation and analysis of data. This makes certain that the various elements of a test program are controlled effectively to present precise, independent and off the record results.

These companies are typically specialized in research in the retail sector. They offer several options in carrying out in-store testing and research facilities to know about the point of purchase. They offer to predict in-store services that are made to suit the clients? requirements. They are built through wide experience and proximity to several big names in the industry.

Auditing, product delivery and accounting are various parameters that are worked out in detail for the test programs. Hiring the services of these marketing experts has been found to work in varied fields such as FMCG, multiple grocery, and retailing.

These services tell the client about the viability of the business venture in a fast and confidential manner by analysis of the project brief. They recognize the latest advances in in-store marketing in both theory and practice. At times, they are even responsible for originating such a change.

Several new test markets are utilized by these companies to predict sales forecasts quite reliably. They also organize meetings between the suppliers and retailers that allow better communication and make grounds to develop better strategies.

Category Management Studies is one of the profiles of these companies that ensure study of the complete product sector in totality. It takes into consideration various factors such as needs of the consumer, trends in the market and profit mix for their analysis.

Retail marketing service companies offer a comprehensive picture of the retail environment to capitalize on the likely areas for procurement. Hence, they are a good investment for companies that are venturing into the field for the first time.

Sometimes, the reason why a product or service fails is not because it is not relevant to its consumers, but because your market may not be aware you exist. If this is the case, you might as well close shop and do something else, or allow your business to be enhanced by marketing search engine tools.

With the current lifestyle and habits of consumers, it is almost always fatal to not be able to be available to your market through the Internet. Almost anyone and everyone uses the Internet one way or another and more and more people go to the web to look for specific products and services.

When a potential customer logs on the web and searches the Internet for a product or service that you may be offering and finds your competitor instead of you, that's a lost business opportunity that you can never get back.

You need to have a website that serves as a showcase of your products or services. It would be ideal to have your site allow your visitors to be able to purchase your product or service through your site. At the very least, you need to have your business contact details available for your visitors to see so that they can contact you for further queries or to purchase your product or service.

Having a website is just the first step however.

Nowadays, it is not enough to simply have a website and be online. Despite a wonderful website with an interface and design that makes it easy for your visitors to browse and purchase your services, the first step to making a sale in the Internet is to first get your message across to your consumers. With millions of other online sites that may be offering similar products or services as you, your site needs that added boost that will ensure that it can rise above the rest.

When a potential consumer logs on and searches for a particular product or service, the search engine will come back with several results to their query. In most cases, there will be thousands or hundreds of results that will be displayed according to its relevance to the query. Make sure that your site gets itself at the beginning of this list because otherwise, your potential customer will seldom go through all the results. You consumer needs to be guided to your site right away, otherwise your business is gone.

To be able to rise above all the other sites that offer similar products and services, you must utilize marketing search engine optimization. This will then allow your site to display as one of the most popular sites for particular search strings or words. This means, your website will appear as one of the first results among other results given back by a search engine given a particular query.

Sometimes, you don't have to be selling a particular service or product to make money online. Utilizing marketing search engine optimization allows your site to become a popular site visited and then you can sell space in your site to special interest groups that can ride on your website's popularity to sell their products or get their messages across. This makes it a win win situation for all so that using marketing search engine optimization a good thing to take advantage of.