How to Hire a Celebrity for a Trade Show Appearance

 

Wouldn't it be great if we could get (______) to come to your booth? NOW WE CAN!

How to Hire a Celebrity to Do an Appearance at Your Booth at a Trade Show

Trade shows are great for generating new business, and there are a lot of ways to make your booth stand out, attract people, and most importantly acquire and cultivate new business leads.

  • How to Hire a Celebrity to Do an Appearance at Your Booth at a Trade Show

    Trade shows are great for generating new business, and there are a lot of ways to make your booth stand out, attract people, and most importantly acquire and cultivate new business leads.

    If you have ever been to a trade show and been walking around, booth after booth, company after company it all starts looking the same.

    What is sure to stop you in your tracks? A celebrity doing an event right there. This always attracts a crowd, which floods your booth with people and gets you an exponential increase in sales leads if you do it right. Here is the ultimate trade show strategy in a box.

    This is the ultimate trade show strategy that will let you stand out in a whole new way from all of your competitors. We are going to include some other important non-celebrity related tips as well, so that you have the total package. Even if you can only apply 30% of these ideas, your success will be greatly increased. Apply all of them and, well, you will just take over your industry, is all.

    Watch [this video] or visit [this page] for more details on how the typical celebrity’s organization works, we won’t go into that here.

    WARNING: having a celebrity won’t help you if you don’t have the other things we mention here that channel all the new people into your sales funnel, so we have no choice but to give you to total package for trade show success here. Even if you don’t get a celebrity, following all these other tips will dramatically change the ROI that your company has been experiencing from trade shows so far.

    First let’s look at an unsuccessful booth. This is what you usually find:

    • – Little or no prep before the show
    • – poor unexciting display, the booth does not “pop”
    • – not enough people manning the booth to answer people’s questions
    • – bored, tired employees. Often overworked and understaffed.
    • – pushy sales types on the front lines
    • – no promotional literature
    • – not collecting leads
    • – not following up on leads
    • – no private area to actually close new business right there at the show
    • – executives of the company not there
    • – best salespeople and closers not at the booth or the show
    • – no refreshments
    • – no swag
    • – nobody from the company gets to speak
    • – company doesn’t get to participate in the event, or speak in the event
    • – company doesn’t create an event of their own
    • – no booth babes
    • – no motion
    • – no entertainment
    • – no video
    • – not having several little areas for presentations
    • – no one to answer people’s questions
    • – booth doesn’t stand out
    • – company doesn’t stand out in any way
    • – little or no followup with the leads that you do get
    • – no system in place for moving people up to the next customer state in your sales funnel
    • – nobody remembers the company, it was just another booth. Net loss after expenses.

    If you look at all these things, it comes down to:

    • – good people, well organized (booth is actually a temporary organization, everyone should be trained and practiced in their jobs, with defined roles. This also keeps you from being overwhelmed at a trade show
    • – nicely designed attractive booth
    • – Events and Promotions that help attract people
    • – A system for handling people, and the enlightenment and sales process.
  • THE LOWER YOUR TOTAL BUDGET, THE BETTER YOU MUST TRAIN YOUR BOOTH STAFF TO WORK AS TEAM WITH A SYSTEM

    Now let’s look over some of the characteristics of a successful booth:

    • – Appointments are set starting several weeks before the show even starts. The booth team is closing business from the show opening. You did save the contacts in your database from previous years or at least contacted potential customers who live in that city, right?
    • – Attractive exciting booth display which is designed to draw people into it
    • – Enough people available to answer people’s questions, but not overly pushy
    • – Fresh, happy, well-fed energetic staff that look like they are having fun
    • – Plenty of promotional literature that is easy to get.
    • – A simple system for channeling people who have greater interest into more in depth interviews in a quieter place
    • – Executives or employees get to speak at the trade show event
    • – Booth looks like a party going on
    • – Booth/Company creates their own events either at the booth or offsite (sometimes parties depending on the industry)
    • – Leads and contacts are followed up with on an ongoing basis, and again next year when you come back.
    • – The trade show hosts consider you an asset to the show and offer you better placement and more speaking opportunities for next year!
  • HERE IS THE SYSTEM

     

    ATTRACT
    CHANNEL
    CONNECT
    FILTER

    Follow up or close right there.

    Of these 5, the first 3 are the most important. We realize that there are a lot of different types and sizes of booths and trade shows. No matter what your budget though the better you can think this through and apply it, the more successful you will be.

    ATTRACT – get them to START, and the booth should have a definite BEGINNING, MIDDLE, and END. It should be obvious to people where people enter and exit. Even if its just a small booth with a table, pick which way the traffic is flowing, and the earliest point becomes your beginning, if you have a booth girl that is where she will be, you train her to attract, and then—-

    CHANNEL – Pass on potential customers to the next staff that then CONNECT – greet the attendee in a friendly manner, and ask questions about them, don’t just jump into a sales pitch.

    FILTER – Either give people promo or not, do the demo or not, invite them to your event/party or not, and and at least get the contact info before the person vanishes into the trade show again. The staff should be trained to recognize people that have a greater interest or are serious buyers and route them to the interview/closing area if your booth is big enough, to leave them alone, to invite them to your event, or to give them some promo or not.

    People attract people, so its fine to have too many people in your booth, even if some of them are just milling about, but this is why your booth must have a more clearly defined “entrance” and “exit”. So people come in, see something or learn something, the real hot prospects get peeled off to have a more in depth interview, and the majority give their contact info, get some promo or swag and exit. It should be clear what part of your booth is for what.

  • SO HOW DOES A CELEBRITY FIT INTO ALL THIS?

    If you saw the outline of the system above, the first step is ATTRACT. Booth babes and friendly female staff always do wonders at trade shows, but a celebrity takes the ATTRACT phase to a whole other level. If your system is in place as above, you now know what to DO with all these new people.

    The celebrity can:

    • * Do an appearance at your booth and attact you a big crowd instantly
    • * Help make your event amazingly well attended.
    • * If they do any meet and greet or speak at the trade show itself, it increases your booth traffic for the whole show

    In other words you are far more credible in one stroke than almost any of your competitors.

    Then, make sure there are plenty of pictures, and that you have a photo op with the celebrity.

    Put a clause in the contract if you can for the celebrity to post to their social media while there at the booth with you.
    Make sure you have in the contract that you can use the celebrity’s name and likeness on your website and for future promotions.

Still want that celebrity? Questions? Call us at 888-359-4521 or visit us at Celebritycred.com today!

  • GETTING THE RIGHT CELEBRITY

    Make sure that the celebrity you choose fits the demographics of your main buyers. Sometimes a B or C-list celebrity can actually pull a much better ROI than an A-lister because of this.

    Questions? Call us at 888-359-4521 We’ll help you find the right celebrity for your tradeshow and get your deal done.

    Hopefully by now you see how you can greatly improve your success and revenues at trade shows.

    BUT, we aren’t done yet.

    Here are a few other important tips we feel are quite useful for having the ultimate successful trade show booth that we didn’t get to cover earlier:

    1) Swap leads and become friends with the other vendors at the trade show, even if they are your competitors. No one is able to get even a fraction of the contacts into their database of the thousands of event attendees. Even if there is a little bit of duplication, just one swap can nearly double your leads to follow up with. In addition to this, your fellow booth people often can save you in a pinch, by giving you some last minute supplies of something you forgot, food when you need it and are swamped, or any number of important things. Offer to help and share resources, you are in this together for the time being, and this will pay off in the long run. Do not, however, let your employees leave your booth because it is “slow” and hang out at the other booths. If it is slow, just attracting ONE person at the booth and having a good conversation about anything, will inevitably attract others. You can have people at your booth when all the other booths nearby are empty. Try it and see.

    2) Always speak at events and get that as part of your deal with the trade show organizers. When you speak, give great value in your presentations but don’t pitch. If your content is good, people will come up to you anyway and you will get plenty of new business leads in addition to what the booth itself does.

    3) Set appointments with key company executives – This is not “selling” it is for people to meet any of the key people in your company. Your key executives are going to be at the event anyway, pimp them out. People love to meet the CEO or other Execs and it helps your company in many ways.

    4) SWAG is great but understand its purpose – it is for ATTRACTION, not for anything else. Even if its super clever it is no substitute for an actual contact in your database as a result of the show, which you get via your system. If you don’t have a huge budget some extra female greeters for your booth are a much better investment.

    5) Bring your BEST employees and salespeople to the trade show, the ones that can’t be spared. Make it a game to see which employees can outperform the others. Almost any trade show is an expensive proposition relative to a company’s revenues, that it makes sense to go “all in”. Have contests, and prizes that the employees can win.

    6) Try to have everyone “working” in shifts of no more than 5 hours, with some down time. Give people time to have breaks. Everyone working open to close burns out your employees fast by the end of the show. You want people fresh. Use any temporary people to give your best employees a little bit of a break, and its better to bring too many people to the show than not enough. You will probably need every hand you can get, and then some. Tired, hollow-eyed employees don’t do anyone any good.

    7) If your trade show allows you to have food/drink/refreshments at your booth, do it. It is a great way to stop people in their tracks and get them into your booth.

    FACT: THE AVERAGE TRADE SHOW ATTENDEE WALKS 15,000 STEPS A DAY – this can be 5-8 miles or more

    8) If your booth is big enough and it makes sense, have a lounge area where people can sit, and try to use it primarily as a “holding area” for people waiting to come into the more in depth interview area. This can double as a place where people can wait to go into the “VIP” area to meet with your celebrity when they are there. Most of your attendees are simply not used to walking the close to 15,000 steps or 7 miles that many attendees do, and they are grateful for a place to sit down, get some refreshments and connect on a deeper level with you. Win-Win.

    9) Make all the notes you can about a particular lead you meet right then, right when they walk off. You will forget, and there is no time like NOW for notes. When you do your follow ups, this information will be pure gold, but it will not seem that way at the show.

Still want that celebrity? Questions? Call us at 888-359-4521 or visit us at Celebritycred.com today!