Trade shows can be wonderful places for a small business like yours to find new clients and partners. Unfortunately, exhibiting at a trade show can often be expensive. It’s easy to spend $3,000 to $10,000 on the floor space alone—and that’s before you rent a booth, buy signs and banners, or purchase promotional items to give away.

While you can’t do much about the fixed costs of being an exhibitor at a trade show, you can save money on your display while still attracting more visitors (and potential leads) to your booth.

Create Reusable Signage
Avoid putting the year or any other time or seasonal indicator that might keep you from being able to use your signs year after year. Creating signs with just your business name and logo saves you money, and you can reuse them for any event at any time of year.

Hire a professional designer to make your banners stand out. Make sure the sign can be read from a distance, and the colors are vibrant (without being garish). The sign’s job is to lure people to your booth.

Go Beyond Traditional Promotional Products
Trade show attendees will have bags of pens and candy from other exhibitors. Stand out by choosing promotional products with a bit more pizzazz. For example, smartphone cases are popular and useful, as are flash drives. Aim to get your logo on promotional items people will actually use and talk about.

Consider investing a bit more in a handful of promotional products at a higher price point, and reserve those for strong leads.

Host a Hip Giveaway
Who wouldn’t want to win an iPad? Tablets, tech tools, and other gadgets are always a draw at trade show booths, so choose a prize people will seek you out to win. Such a prize could be a basket of your products, or a hot ticket item valued at $500 or less.

Plan to heavily promote any giveaway you host before and during the event, both in marketing collateral and on social sites. Make sure to get each entrant’s contact info for your database.

Set Up a Twitter Feed
If the events you attend are tech-focused, consider setting up a TV monitor or laptop to track the hashtag associated with the event. People like to stay in the loop with what others are sharing, and you can draw in more traffic by placing the screen prominently in your booth, and making it visible to those passing by.

Show Videos of Your Products
Another way to use video at a trade show is to run a loop of videos demonstrating your products, especially if they’re too large to bring to the show. Create a series of short (2- to 3-minute) videos with eye-catching imagery and professional filming to attract conference-goers to your area.

Rethink Your Marketing Materials
Assess what you’ve had printed for past shows, and review the content people have actually been excited to read or use. You might leave behind the product spec sheets in favor of a high-level product guide, or try something fun like an infographic poster visitors can take with them.

Make sure your marketing materials look professional, are free of grammatical errors, and have appealing images to entice people to pick them up. And invest in quality where it’s needed. Your tri-fold brochure doesn’t need to be on expensive, heavy stock paper. If you’re printing large numbers of an item, you can still get affordable, high-quality printing. On the other hand, if you have a special media kit you plan to hand out to a few members of the press, spring for a high-grade paper. It’s worth the price to make an excellent impression.
Keeping your trade show costs down can help you realize a better ROI from the event. Focus on delivering more “POW!” for less money, and engaging with people at the show. Learn from past events and tweak your strategy for future successes.

Susan Payton is the President of Egg Marketing & Communications, an Internet marketing firm specializing in marketing communications, copywriting and blog posts. She’s also the founder of How to Create a Press Release, a free resource for business owners. She’s written three books: DIY Press Releases: Your Guide to Becoming Your Own PR Consultant, 101 Entrepreneur Tips and Internet Marketing Strategies for Entrepreneurs, and contributes to several sites, including ChamberofCommerce.com, The Marketing Eggspert Blog, CorpNet, Small Business Trends, and BizLaunch. Follow her on Twitter @eggmarketing.

By Jerry Rackley

If you visit the Demand Metric website today, you’ll notice a change. We’ve been working quietly, behind-the-scenes for months building some serious new online infrastructure: a marketing community. The term “community” gets tossed around a lot when a person or organization wants to conjure up some warm feelings about how people are connected. We get that, and you’re probably asking yourself right now, “Why do I care?” It’s a fair question, and we think we have a good answer for you, so please, read on!

Wikipedia defines an online or virtual community as “a social network of individuals who interact through specific social media, potentially crossing geographical and political boundaries in order to pursue mutual interests or goals.” Check. This new marketing community is all about that. Allow us to be more specific: our vision for this new marketing community is to advance the state and practice of marketing in mid-sized enterprises by encouraging community members to share their collective expertise. Let’s unwrap this vision a bit further.

• Advance the state and practice of marketing: this vision has been the driving force behind Demand Metric since its inception, and the rate at which it occurs has increased steadily as our membership has grown. What this new marketing community will do is change the rate at which it happens. Before this community was launched, a single member would download one or two Demand Metric resources to help them. Or, another member might schedule a call with one of our analysts. Both of these scenarios have good outcomes, but they are one-to-one exchanges. The new Demand Metric marketing community will take the content of these one-to-one email and telephone exchanges and put them online, where they can help many, not just one.
• Mid-sized enterprises: as of this writing, Demand Metric already has over 32,000 members, all of which, by virtue of their connection with us, will gain access to this new marketing community. Our members range in size from startups to members of the Fortune 500. We’ve learned in the seven years since Demand Metric was founded, that mid-sized enterprises need our resources the most. They don’t have the $30,000 – $50,000 per year it takes to be a client of a traditional research and advisory firm. All Demand Metric members are getting value, but mid-sized enterprises are the most active users of our resources and most grateful for what we provide. The new marketing community will serve all members well, but we expect mid-sized enterprises to participate the most.
• Share their collective expertise: if you haven’t had the opportunity to get advisory from one of our analysts, we have some elite marketing talent to offer our members. At the same time, we have a lot of marketing experts represented in our membership. This new marketing community brings all of that together in one place, with mechanisms to encourage and reward the sharing of problems, solutions, ideas and best practices. Perhaps we should call this marketing community “Thought Leadership Central” because it provides a place of expression for the genius of our members.

Here are some other things you should know about the new Demand Metric marketing community:
• We put the FUN in marketing FUNction! We built this marketing community around a new strategy called gamification. It employs elements of game design to make interaction in the community more fun while providing a system to recognize and reward those who participate.
• Presented commercial free and without interruption. We’ll maintain a well-moderated forum in this marketing community that is free from advertisements or vendor pitches.
• Elite and focused. Not because we made it this way, but because you did. Our members, all of whom automatically become members of this new community, are already quite focused and elite in terms of position: 75% of our members are in B2B organizations, and 67% have job titles of Director or above.
• Roles and topics-based. The community will facilitate discussions and networking around specific marketing roles and topics.

Beyond the obvious benefit of having a place to show thought leadership and access it, there are a number of other advantages to active participation in this marketing community:
• Get one, free download of a Demand Metric tool or template each month.
• Access the Performance Marketing Report, a monthly e-guide to new tools, templates, events, analyst insights and other announcements.
• Read any of our How-to Guides and participate in our benchmark studies, like the one we recently completed on marketing analytics.

There isn’t another marketing community like this one in existence, and we think it can be a game-changer for the marketing professionals that take advantage of it. We invite you to get involved in the community to share your expertise and learn from your peers. When you do, everyone wins.

By: Jerry Rackley

At the risk of being polarizing, I’d like to start a debate about Creationism versus Evolution.  Before anyone starts loading up their theological or philosophical guns, let me put this debate in context:  my interest is in branding, not the origins of mankind.

I’m a firm believer in brand creationism.  By that, I mean that the building of strong brands doesn’t occur through some evolutionary process.  Strong brands are the products of intelligent design, planning, care and nurturing.  Consider this list from Fortune of the world’s most admired companies:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Amazon.com
4. Coca-Cola
5. Starbucks
6. IBM
7. Southwest
8. Berkshire Hathaway
9. Walt Disney
10. FedEx

These are all strong brands we admire. Those of us who help manage a brand aspire to have the awareness, reach and reputation that these brands enjoy.  And none of them just accidentally crawled out of the primordial branding slime onto this list.  They all got there the same way:  by consistently delivering on their brand promise.

Companies that don’t benefit from a strong brand must ask themselves how to achieve brand greatness, and the benefits that come with it:

• The ability to set premium pricing
• Greater customer loyalty
• A bigger share of the customer’s wallet
• Lower new customer acquisition costs

In a recent post to his blog, “You Don’t Have a Brand”, Marc Simony, holistic brand thinker, made this observation: companies are not brand owners; they are brand stewards.  Marc has it right – the customer is the final arbiter of the worth and value of a brand.  They own the brand, we just take care of it for them.

What can you do to strengthen your brand?  Here are some steps to get started:

1. Assess the current state of your brand.  Use the Demand Metric Brand Assessment Tool to see how your brand fares in four ratings categories:  Strategy, Alignment, Communication and Execution.
2. Get the customers’ perspective on your brand.  Use the Demand Metric Brand Perception Survey to learn how those who own your brand perceive it.
3. Understand how brand loyalty develops. Read the Demand Metric How-to Guide, “The Brand Loyalty Advantage”.
4. Take what you’ve learned and put a plan in place to grow a stronger brand.  The Demand Metric Brand Strategy Scorecard will let you document your plan and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your brand.

A strong brand is perhaps the most sustainable competitive advantage.  Your brand merits time, attention and investment in growing it.

By Jerry Rackley

Social Media is a mainstream, marketing communications channel for most companies.  Social media once meant Facebook, but now companies are trying to manage a presence on a blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, SlideShare, Youtube – the list goes on and on.

There are some excellent tools available to help automate the posting of content to social media sites, as well as some great monitoring tools.  The technology to manage social media is evolving about as quickly as the media itself. Sometimes, though, social media managers get so caught up in the details, it becomes hard to remember what the social media forest looks like, because there are so many trees in the way.

It’s important to keep the big picture for social media right in front of you for these reasons:

• The social media landscape continues to evolve and become more complex.  With hundreds, if not thousands of active social media networks, it is increasingly difficult to remember what your section of the social media turf looks like.
• Social media is a wonderful communications servant, but without keeping it in the proper perspective, it’s easy to become its slave.  Without clear objectives for its use and the proper tools to manage social media, it can own you.

An excellent tool for capturing your social media “big picture” is the Demand Metric Social Media Channel Map.

This tool has two components, which will help your company ensure that its social media efforts match its objectives.  The first is a diagram that depicts all social media networks in use, categorized by the types listed here:

• Social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+
• Social bookmarks: StumbleUpon or Google Reader
• Presentation sharing: SlideShare or Scribd
• Blogging platforms: WordPress or eBlogger
• Video/Photo sharing: Instagram, Flickr, YouTube or Pinterest
• Micro Blogs:  Twitter or tumblr

The second component of the Social Media Channel Map is a table that gives you one place to record your goals for each social media channel, as well as who is responsible for each channel and a list of Key Performance Metrics (KPIs).

The Social Media Channel Map is a simple yet powerful tool that will help you keep a firm grip on your organization’s social media rudder.

By Jerry Rackley

A phrase – or more accurately a job title – we’re hearing more about is “growth hacker”.  Yes, it’s pretty buzzy, and how quickly we fall in and out of love with the buzzwords du jour. Growth hacker is descriptive, and if you’re not yet plugged in to what growth hacking is, it’s marketing.  But not just garden variety corporate marketing:  it is the kind of marketing that hungry, agile, resource-constrained startups do.

By definition: “Growth hackers utilize analytical thinking, product engineering and creativity to significantly increase their company’s core metric(s).”

At the same time, it’s not marketing, at least not in the usual sense.  Growth hackers pride themselves on non-traditional, atypical approaches to getting attention.  They laugh at the notion of creative risk.  They also tend to fully exploit technology more than their corporate marketing peers.

It just so happens that I’ve been a growth hacker for years.  I just didn’t know that’s what it was called.  Gagan Biyani does a wonderful job unwrapping this topic further in his article on The Next Web, “Explained: The actual difference between growth hacking and marketing”.  In this article, he provides a laundry list of tactics that most growth hackers use.  We’ve taken that list, and added links to some Demand Metric tools to create the Growth Hacker Tool Kit:

Viral Acquisition. The use of built-in sharing features in your product to promote viral adoption.  Helpful resources:

• The Product Features Prioritization Tool can help you put the optimal sharing features in your product first.
• Social media will likely facilitate much of this sharing, but which channels make sense?  Use the Social Media Channel Selection Tool to find out.

Paid Acquisition.  There are lots of options to source leads:  Google AdWords, Facebook, etc.  Use the Online Advertising ROI Calculator to evaluate the options and select the best performer.

Call Centers/Sales Teams.  Most startups don’t have a call center, at least not their own, but many outsource this function or otherwise leverage low-cost labor to support outreach.  However it’s done, having a Sales Playbook is critical to the success of any such effort.

Content Marketing.  Pulling visitors into the sales funnel via content: blog posts, infographics, webinars, white papers, video or virtually any form of content.  The Demand Metric Content Marketing Plan Methodology can help you plan and execute your content marketing strategy.  There is also a content marketing infographic, which should have strong appeal to a growth hacker.

E-mail Marketing.  If you’re going to do e-mail marketing, you might as well do it right, as described in the Email Marketing Best Practices webinar recording.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  Growth hackers gravitate toward SEO, and why not!  Determine your level of SEO maturity using the Demand Metric SEO Maturity Assessment.

A/B Testing and Analytics.  Also known as a landing page split test, read the Demand Metric blog post, “How to Conduct a Landing Page Split Test” to understand how to run this play.

There are plenty more tools – over 500 – in the Demand Metric library that growth hackers will find helpful, but consider the list above your “starter kit”.

Chief analyst Jerry Rackley was interviewed by Kevin Price, host of the “Price of Business” radio show that airs on KTEK AM 1110 in Houston, Texas. He and Kevin chatted about how to effectively market using tradeshows.

Tradeshow marketing is an important B2B marketing strategy.  Some companies rely on event or tradeshow marketing to produce a majority of their leads.  For other companies, tradeshows are just one of many marketing channels.  Regardless of where a company is on this spectrum, it is important to do tradeshow marketing well, because the impressions made at tradeshow events are lasting.  The potential for gain is high, but so is the potential for embarrassment if a company fails to plan it presence.

Kevin and Jerry discussed some tradeshow marketing tips, such as show selection, the “5-Second Rule” and promotional items that can help firms excel at tradeshow marketing.

Hear the May 29, 2013 interview on tradeshow marketing here:

To see the full set of Demand Metric resources for tradeshow marketing, such as the Tradeshow Program ROI Calculator, visit the Demand Metric website.

Having an accounting scoring template is beneficial whenever a company is on the watch for new accounting software. This template includes all of the necessary factors that need to be considered when you are shopping for this.

If you know what you are looking for, it will be much easier for you to get the most effective solutions, no matter what you have in mind. Make sure that you take the time to look at templates so that you know what you should be looking for.

A template will typically include a checklist of features or elements that should be included in a software solution. It will showcase all of the things that you need to consider before buying so that you can get a clear picture of your options to ensure that you select the best solution for your company. Accounting scoring templates are not all the same, but they will typically include the following:

-Quality and credibility of the software itself, including who makes it and what value it adds to your business.

-Features and included functions of the software, as well as how you can use it for your business needs, no matter what those are.

-Investment versus value to determine how you can maximize your investment.

-Features you do not need and how to avoid investing in these.

-What your backend needs and expects from software products compared to what’s available.

-Must-haves versus needs or wants, as well as optional features. s.

There is a lot that goes into an accounting scoring template, and these are just a few of the items you will find. The goal of this template is to help you select effective accounting software solutions for your business, no matter what your needs might be. Make sure that you keep these in mind so that you can get everything that you deserve out of your investment. Customize a template like this for your business and you’ll instantly be able to score your own options and get the best software faster and with less effort.

There are many factors involved in a project management policy throughout a company. One of the best ways to optimize your policy to to look at sample best practices.

When you look at these project management policy samples, you are going to see everything that your own policies need to include along with explanations of what should be covered. You can then use this information to develop your project management policies.

Some of the elements of a project management policy sample includes are:

-The scope of the document, or what it is used for. Usually, this policy is designed to govern projects within an organization or within a specific department.

-The policy itself, which includes all guidelines for things that are included. This can include requirements for projects that have to adhere to the policy, management assignments, reporting, evaluation of requests, and other elements.

-Project sponsors and reporting to them in various steps, as well as how they are involved in the projects and what their role is along the way.

-Determination of actionable steps and methods involved in project management, including steps toward completion and evaluation once a project has been finished.

-Procedural guide, which include actionable steps from the project request through the project evaluation after completion. This will include approval, manager appointments, development of project charters, structures and schedules, and more.

-Sign off on department or involved individuals. This signing indicates that everyone agrees to the policy and that they will follow its rules to their best abilities when they are entering projects during their time with the company.

A project management policy example is either going to provide you with the tools you need to develop your own policies or it is going to give you an entire template where you can simply plug in your company’s information to put the policy into effect. There are a lot of ways that you can go about incorporating proper policies into your organization but its helpful to take advantage of pre-existing templates. Use these samples and templates for your own policy creation and create better policies with less work, no matter what type of company or organization you have. Project management is important in every business and using these tools makes it much easier to deal with.

The purpose of a project management policy is to ensure that projects have guidelines so they are completed in a timely, efficient manner. Having an effective policy in place saves a company the challenge of handling each project on an individual basis and guarantees cohesiveness and consistency throughout the business’s operations.

If you don’t have a policy in place or you’re in the market for a new one, there are a number of online tools that can help.

When you approach a project management policy, keep in mind that different categories of tasks will require separate policies. Every policy is going to be a little different depending both on the needs of your company and the project itself, but typically your general project management policy will outline the scope of the project and will assign guidelines for managing the projects taking place throughout an organization. This guide can be defined by the marketing department, sales department, or any other area of the company.

With this, it is important that you define which projects need to follow your policy, and whether you need more than one policy in place for different departments or areas of your business. The elements of your project management policy will include items such as:

-Assignment of project management

-Evaluation of project requests and resource allocation

-Reporting to project sponsors

-Project evaluation

-Steps for project creation/implementation

In addition to this, you will want to include any relevant information, steps, or guidelines that your company or employees need to adhere to in the project management and completion process. Because every company is different, you might have criteria that aren’t listed in templates that you find in your research.

Developing an effective project management policy ensures that your company’s projects are handled accordingly at all times. It keeps people on the same page and provides an organization with set of standards to maintain consistency. These types of policies and guidelines are important to a business that wants to succeed. Having standards of protocol and regulations ensures that operations run effectively.

Successful branding in the 21^st century is about developing consistency in how your customers interact with your company. From how employees answer the phone to how quickly you reply to a social media complaint, your company has to rely on streamlined and effective channels of internal communication in order to stay on top of how your brand is perceived in the marketplace.

No matter how successful your brand, when these channels break down, you learn the hard way why they are so important. McDonald’s recently ran a Twitter hashtag promotion using #UnwrapWhatsFresh. Twitter was instantly flooded with offensive, often suggestive tweets from consumers about what they’d like to “unwrap”—not exactly the messages McDonald’s had in mind for their brand image.

McDonald’s disastrous hashtag shows just how important it is to take control of your organization’s image and presentation to customers. Due diligence during the creation of any new content is important, but showing your customers you value their time and feedback is just as critical. Developing your brand is about looking for ways to manage and improve your customers’ experience at all points of contact, whether they’re a first-time visitor to your web site or a loyal customer looking for product support. Making customer satisfaction your primary goal is the best way to reinforce brand loyalty.

Benefits of Integrating CRM Systems

But developing a stable of loyal, satisfied customers doesn’t happen on its own. A robust customer relationship management (CRM) system has become a necessity for growing an established company around the world. The business intelligence a CRM system provides significantly increases your capacity to foster brand loyalty by allowing you to develop targeted marketing and feedback. And with centralized data, customer support has the knowledge and authority necessary to address customer concerns on the fly while staying on-brand and making every interaction a positive one.

The Economist’s Tim Hindle argues that a company using a CRM system is able to give the customer what he/she really wants rather than what the company thinks the customer wants. Hindle also underscores the relative value of retention over acquisition, suggesting companies looking to lower client acquisition costs should first focus on retaining the customers they already have.

A CRM system such as Insightly allows your company to collect, store and share every customer interaction or promise you make right through your inbox. Applying this information to your customer service systems gives you multiple touch points across the sales and customer lifecycle, helps you understand your customers’ individual needs more clearly, and—most importantly—apply your new knowledge to give your customers the best service experience possible. A customer who has positive interaction at point-of-sale and with your customer service department is far more likely to be loyal to your brand.

Improving your processes and implementing an effective CRM solution will help your company meet evolving customer needs and avoid the potentially costly consequences of miscommunication and unmet expectations. Meredith Estep from Examiner.com writes: “Your customers should know what to expect from your company right from the beginning.” The more prepared your organization is to handle point-of-sale interaction (and subsequent interactions via customer service), the better your customers’ experience will be. The better the experience, the more likely those customers will return in the future and regard your brand as the one they trust.

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.