Do You Miss Trade Shows?
September 2009
A decade or so ago, when I was a magazine editor, I went to a lot of trade shows, appreciated the fact that they were my best opportunity to meet face-to-face with the vendors and find out about their products, successes, plans, and accomplishments. I was also invited to a number of user conferences and channel partner meetings where I not only got updates from the marketing team but had a chance to interact with customers and implementation partners.
Trade shows are a pretty rare occurrence these days, and many companies have either cancelled their annual user conferences outright or switched to smaller, regional events. While there are certainly fewer magazines (and fewer editors) these days, there are still quite a few ‘influencers’ out there who are finding it difficult to stay abreast of all the product developments and customer successes. This group of ‘influencers’ includes independent consultants, active website writers and bloggers, and regional consulting organizations (not affiliated with specific vendor products), among others. While many vendors are still doing ‘press tours’ to update analysts and the media, they are still not reaching the other influencers mentioned above.
Last year, I had a discussion with a client on this topic. My advice was to invite the influencers to their user conference (which they did, last year, but unfortunately are not holding one this year). I also suggested that they host a reception of sorts for these influencers when they are on their press tours (Boston, New York, Chicago, LA, etc.). Another idea was to launch an electronic newsletter to tout successes and make the influencers aware of product releases and developments.
Of course, the first challenge is to assemble and maintain a good list of influencers that you would like to keep informed. Contact Production Solutions to discuss how we can help you build and maintain your list of influencers you would like to keep up-to-date, write customer success stories to include in your newsletters, write feature articles or white papers about your new products or releases, and even create and publish your newsletters for you.