My field marketing hiring philosophy:
Hire remotely but hire in a city or region where you think you’ll have the most in-person events or interactions.
This typically means you’ll save a lot on travel costs, and this person may be able to leverage their local network of connections immediately.
How about you? Agree/disagree?
Hot take 🔥 – If a tradeshow gives you the contact info of all attendees, do NOT email all of them after the event.
Unless they talked to you at your booth and gave you their contact info, they probably don’t want to get an email from you.
So… don’t send that huge blast to 5K people 🤐
Only reach out to those that actually wanted to talk with you.
Agree/disagree?
I met a CMO last night that said sponsoring tradeshows is her best-performing channel 🤯
2 takeaways for me:
1. Distribution-focused, educational paid social would probably work great for them and become a better performing channel than events.
–> Why? People obviously are interested when they see their booth & chat. When reaching a bigger audience on paid social, it’s like scaling that booth interest to their whole target audience. And getting in front of these people 7-10 times per month rather than for one two-day event.
2. Every company is different, so you have to take advice with a grain of salt. Tradeshows are a money-sink for many companies but not all as proven by this example.
I was recently at our biggest tradeshow of the year. We have a 20×20 booth & had a lot of our Sales, Marketing, & ELT here. Outside of normal activities, one of the biggest things we were focused on while at this show was using it for content creation.
📹 We had 4 camera + mic setups ready (3 are just iPhones + mic)
🎙️ Had a podcast area at our booth, shoutout Erica Palmer
📷 A plan to capture customer stories, shoutout Kayla Hasler
💸 Got market research in video interviews
📺 And created much video and social content from all of it
We also:
🥳 Planned a VIP party with some top prospects & customers, shoutout Alex Reese and Lyndsey Lumpkin (plus they led the event strategy & execution in general!)
📣 Had one of our subject matter experts invited to speak for free, shoutout Maura Dent Cash
🤓 Had a meeting room for Sales
📝 Plan to attend sessions & summarize learnings online after
👇
What other kinds of content do you like to capture?
How else do you make the tradeshow more than just a tradeshow?