By Nancy Drapeau, PRC
Research Director, CEIR
In a report released recently by CEIR, Exhibitor Ancillary On-site Marketing Practices, marketing activities exhibitors engage while on-premise at an exhibition are evaluated. It identifies the most popular activities and takes another important step, asking exhibitors to identify how effective each activity is in helping them achieve their overall goals for exhibiting.
Bottom-line assessment is that a popular marketing activity is not necessarily the most effective. Exhibitors and organizers alike should read this report and think about what implications it has for their programs.
- Exhibitors, spend your marketing dollars wisely relative to your objectives for exhibiting.
- Organizers, reflect on the onsite marketing program offerings you make available to your exhibitors. How can you help exhibitors achieve their goals and maximize your ancillary revenues?
Activities evaluated in this study include:
- Exhibition program advertising
- Speak at educational seminar/workshop
- Sponsor exhibition giveaways
- Sponsorship of exhibition special event/session
- On-premise advertising outside of booth
- Private event, outside exhibition hours
Engaging in pre-exhibition marketing is very important to generating traffic to an exhibitor’s booth. Once an exhibition is open for business, activities at the exhibition are key to maximizing awareness of an exhibitor’s participation at the event and drawing target attendees to the booth.
Most exhibitors understand the importance of this activity to maximize the impact of exhibiting, with the most popular activity being advertising in the exhibition program (82 percent).
In terms of the effectiveness of each onsite marketing activity in helping an organization meet its important objectives for exhibiting; those activities which give an organization singular attention achieve higher effectiveness scores, with speaking at educational seminars/workshops (86 percent) top ranked for effectiveness.
Use of different marketing activities and level of effectiveness vary by industry sector. Differences are also evidenced by the frequency of using exhibitions and size of an organization. To obtain the full report, go to: http://www.ceir.org/store_products.view.php?id=2554.
