Jay Ryerse, JTech Networks – December 2011 Marketing Genius Of The Month
Jay recently put his marketing to work for him at a local tradeshow and received 42 responses adding 16 new customers! Just as a snapshot, here’s his tradeshow marketing action list:
- Two days before the event, we sent via USPS flat rate envelope a mouse pad, 2 hour free cards, pens, and a registration form for the laptop giveaway to 17 of the 85 vendors at the expo. These were the business owners that we needed to talk to!
- We had my car wrapped just before the event and had it prominently displayed at the entrance to the parking lot for the event center.
- We had one of our T1 data and voice partners agree to sponsor giving away a new Dell Latitude laptop, Microsoft Office 2010, and we included 2 free hours to setup the laptop. We displayed it in the front middle of the booth and quickly learned to use the free laptop giveaway as a reason to talk to people walking by. We placed the laptop on top of three empty Dell boxes – and used the top one to collect our raffle entry. We stapled business cards to the entry form when things were busy.
- We made a 5 minute video with signs from business parks all over town that people would recognize. We created a storyboard to go along with it to show how we support local businesses and their computer networks. That video looped on a 65” flat screen TV all day long.
- We designed two pull-up display signs. One offered to help business owners get their own QR code. You would be surprised to know that we created and emailed 18 QR codes to local business owners. The other was a bullet list of our services – and targeted “local” service provider.
- We had two full color boards printed (40×72) for either side of the TV. On the left was a picture of me with the quote, “Is your computer guy treating you like a bad date” followed with the usual bullets about not returning your calls on time, missing deadlines, etc. Below that was the “Get Out of Computer Trouble” card which we also had postcards for. We gave them away to any business owner with 5 or more computers.
- We also had the normal giveaway stuff like our notepad/mouse pad that everyone loves. We had pens and stress reliever footballs with our logo on them. We politely threw them at people to open the conversation. By the end of the expo, footballs were everywhere!
- In our booth selection process, our chamber was looking for “sponsors.” I stumbled onto the fact that nobody had chosen to be the lanyard sponsor. So I jumped on that. Every person in the expo had their name badge attached to a blue lanyard with JTECH all over it. As we looked around, everyone saw our logo over and over.
- An hour before the expo was over, the chamber agreed to announce that we were giving away the laptop – and asked that if you haven’t registered, that you have 5 minutes to do so. Once all the entries were in, we took the box and shook it a bunch for everyone to see. We opened the box and then asked one of the chamber staff to pull a card. And for the 10 minutes that this process was going on, there were 100s of people crammed around our booth to watch.
“It’s been less than 30 days since the Expo and we have already added two new customers and have scheduled meetings and quotes pending for several more. The biggest surprise was not the laptop giveaway, although that was fun. It was the 10 business owners that approached me BEFORE the doors opened to thank me for the package we had sent them in advance.
For all of you out there who are still sitting on the sidelines making excuses, please remember that your success (or failure) is your responsibility. Robin already did the heavy lifting – all you have to do is copy and use it. In the almost two years that we’ve been with Robin, we’ve had 150% growth in revenue and we now add more than one new customer per month. I can’t wait to see what the next 12 months will bring us!” -Jay
