PPB March 2019

how to follow up on objections beforehand, with all players practicing their roles. A quick pre-showmeeting before the show opens does not cut it. Expecting toomuch. If you don’t anticipate what you want the customer to do, the next steps needed and the time to do that, you could lose the prospect. Above all, the activity must be simple, quick, easy and fun. Not everyone participates. What do you have to do for those people? What message do you deliver to them? How can you qualify them quickly and get them to a salesperson if they are good prospects? No fun. If your activity seems like a chore, people won’t participate. You can make almost anything fun and interactive but it’s all a matter of how you do it. You may need help from someone skilled in planning experiences to help you work out a strategy. Plan the follow-up ahead of time. Weeks before the event, determine a follow-up plan. What communications will you launch after the event? Who will do them? How quickly? If you wait until two weeks after an event, most memories have dissipated. One Supplier Who Did It Right Quinn Flag Company, which is celebrating its 25th year in business, has grown froma flag manufacturer to one of the largest full-color fabric printers in the promotional products industry. By continually learning what was important to its customers and what the company needed to be successful in themarket, Quinn evolved its product line to include 6,700 products in over 60 product categories frombanners and trade show displays to table covers and even cheering products. The company has earned five-star, A+ ratings with SAGE but wanted to truly set itself apart from the other banner and exhibit companies on the show floor. The goal for its experiential marketing project at the Expo was to show off the company’s full-color printing capabilities rather than just its products, and have show attendees interact with those products in a fun way that encouraged shares on social media. First, they considered what type of environment conveys color and heroic service. A cityscape and a comic book superhero, of course. The scene was a typical 30-foot inline booth. The marketing team created a full-color backlit cityscape backdrop accentuated with colorful paint drippings and a Quinn comic book superhero for participants to pose with. To carry through the theme, Quinn booth staffers dressed in t-shirts in basic CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow and black) colors and waved fun cheer wear products. A steady stream of show attendees accepted the challenge to dress up and pose in superhero garb while staffers snapped photos and encouraged their posting to social media using the hashtag #QUINNfortheWin. The post that gathered themost Likes won a free, fully customized 10-by-10-foot canopy tent. The prize was on display in the product demo area of the booth. Even visitors who didn’t have their photo taken were drawn in by the colorful backdrops and were greeted by the sales team. Halfway through the three-day show the Quinn team reported it already had more leads—and more qualified leads—than it had gotten from the entire 2018 show. In addition, the company’s social media shares were way up and the number of followers had also increased. Within a few days of the show, the company sent emails to all the leads from the show and followed up with phone calls. It was the company’s best response ever from a trade show. Quinn’s booth experience is a great example of how any company can achieve record results without a Fortune 500 budget by understanding the principles and how-to’s of successful experiential marketing. Mary Ellen Sokalski, MAS, owns the marketing agency, the Scarlet Marketeer, and has been creating “wow” experiential marketing promotions for the past 37 years for industry companies. Maryellen@scarletmarketeer.com Paul and Sandy Routzon with HALO Branded Solutions have a little fun in the Quinn Flag Company booth. 44 | MARCH 2019 | INNOVATE