Making Trade Shows Better with Technology: My Dreams

I’m frustrated with exhibitions. I pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to rent space at big trade shows, I spend lots of hours on my feet with a big smile on my face talking to prospects that often turn out to be useless.

So at the moment I am at an oil and hgas exhibition in Malaysia. I’ve exhibited here 4 times before. 20 thousand people come through the doors in three days and usually 450 spend enough time at our stand to leave us a business card. 70% of those are sufficient quality to be worth following up.

Yesterday we had a bad start to the exhibition. Visitor numbers to our stand were down by 23% compared to 2 years ago (same hall, same location) which was not unexpected in light of the oil price drop and the headcount and capex spending cuts that we’v seen in the sector.

What was far worse was the 30% decrease in enquiry quality. We use a number of business card metrics to capture this but broadly it boils down to — medium ranked people at medium sized companies are our best prospects.

This got me thinking that there must be a better way of running exhibitions to create more value for exhibitors, visitors and the organiser.

In 10 years I have seen few signs of technological change. Expo websites have become flashier — but they deliver no SEO or marketing benefits to me as an exhibitor. There are business card scanners — but they come at a high price and you lose much of the interestng demographic data that is contained on a business card.

For the rest there is nothing that helps me to increase my ROI. I know that among the 97.5% of visitors to the show who don’t stop at my stand there is a lot of value. Accessing that value is something that I am prepared to pay for.

This is what I want.

Every visitor badge has a tracking device. Every stand has a sensing device. Share or sell the footfall data within the expo.

Some tests that’d run on the data.

For people who've visited my stand which other stands have they visited? This helps me to clear out random garbage. People who stop at every stand are normally souvenir hunters or other trash.

For the valuable contacts where else have they visited? More interestingly how many other visitors have profiles similar to the ones that visited me. If I sell valves for example — what is the set of people who visit the expo and stop at more than 5 stands selling valves with a dwell time of more than 2 minutes on average.

These are simple tests but once you can do this you suddenly start being able to match buyers and sellers far more effectively.

I think privacy is important but in this case privacy is less relevant as what is being tracked is not the individuals as opposed to a corporate position. I don’t care about Joe Blogg’s movements in an expo — and shouldn’t be able to see where he went. I do care about the movements of Senior Procurement Executives from EPC companies. (and I’m sure an opt out should be allowed)

And make no mistake I see no reason why visitors to the expo should not have the ability to access the data set in different ways.

If you pay for a stand — you get richer deeper information on your potential buyers. If you are a visitor the data should enable you to find better suppliers. Far better than going up one row and down the next making a 3 second assessement of each stand — “Is it worth me stopping and talking”.

For the organiser — there’s a lot of inertia and issues to overcome for sure. At the end it comes down to a simple question they can ask “Denis, you paid $10,000 for a stand and had 300 highly qualified prospects come and visit you. We have another 150 that exhibit the same behaviour. How much are they worth to you?”

I haven’t spoken to them so they aren’t as valuable — certainly not $33. But they may be worth $5 or $10. Its still a low acquisition cost compared to any other means.

And that to me looks like a win win for everyone.

EDIT: And if you have a system like this why not tie it up with a recommendation system delivered by SMS or whatsapp “Hi Denis, if you head up to Hall 8 you may find company X and Company Y interesting”