Adapt Your Trade Show Program to your Market Segments
What is Market Segmentation?
Market segmentation is one of the main tools for marketers to profitably increase sales for their company. Rather than appeal to all buyers with a single message, instead you divide your market into segments that look or behave the same way or have similar needs, and tailor your marketing for each segment. Your company may already be organized around market segments, with different product marketing managers or even business divisions.
Successful market segmentation relies on finding customers that are similar within their segments, and different than customers in other segments. These customer segments should be easy to identify, act upon, and be large enough to be profitable. Another tip: once you've identified segments, you're free to pick the segments you want to go after, and ignore the rest.
While Business-to-Consumer marketers define their market segments by gender, demographics, age, and other concepts, as a trade show marketer you're most likely to be a Business-to-Business marketer, and thus would segment according to criteria such as
- Client industry (segments like financial institutions, manufacturers, and hospitals)
- Client company size (segments like Home Office, small & midsize businesses, and Fortune 1000 companies)
- Client service level required (segments like internet self-purchase, customer service rep, or national accounts team selling)
- Client geographic location (segments by countries, especially where business climate and methods vary)
- High quality, service, and price, vs. regular quality, less service, and lower price
What may be the best market segmentation method is segmenting by your clients' desired benefit. While it's harder to recognize than whether your client is a bank or a hospital, once you figure out which specific benefits are most relevant to different groups of your buyers, you can much better go about creating and promoting products and services that are more relevant and desirable to buyers.
A good place to find out how your customers could be divided into benefits-oriented segments is to talk to several of your top sales people. Find out what questions they ask early with a prospect to figure out what goals (and thus benefits) they are seeking with their purchase. If you keep hearing the same thing, you've got your segments. You can also ask your new customers and those prospects who ended up not buying from you what their main reasons were for buying. Then look for several clumps of benefits sought in which different buyer profiles can be identified.
How Market Segmentation Affects Your Trade Shows
Once you start segmenting your market, it affects almost all aspects of your trade show program. If you're already marketing to segments, use this as a spark for further enhancements
1. Setting Measurable Objectives
Once you target a few different market segments, chances are you're not at the same stage of market penetration or market share in each segment. So your objectives will likely be different in each. In a market where you're well established, your show objective may be to contact and up-sell 25 clients within 6 months after the show. But in a new market segment, your objective may be to increase name brand awareness to 35%, or to sign up 5 new dealers in major markets.
2. Selecting Shows
If you've been marketing your products (say, software) in a one-size fits all fashion, you may have been exhibiting at a big show where your kinds of products are sold to many companies from all industries. But once you've zeroed in on an industry (say, Professional Services firms) you want to target, you'll find there are other, perhaps smaller shows, where those kinds of buyers are concentrated. You could afford to go to more shows but in a smaller booth, and target your segments more precisely
3. Exhibit Design
If you're selling different products to different industries with different benefits sought, why have the same graphics at all your shows? Design your exhibit knowing that you'll be changing your graphics to promote messages targeted to the specific pain points of each market segment, rather than a bland message that appeals somewhat to all segments. And if you're going to more segment-specific shows with a smaller exhibit, design your larger exhibit so it can divide up for simultaneous shows that reach different market segments.
You may go so far as to create completely different exhibits for each market segments if the image you wish to portray changes that much.
4. Booth Staffing
Let's assume all your booth staffers are already equally capable. Once you choose shows based on market segments, try to pick staffers that have a similar demographic as the show's attendees. For example, let's say you've been selling a product that is useful to the people in the building and construction industry. Now you've segmented your market, and are going to three shows: one targets architects, one targets engineers, and another targets general contractors. You will likely have more success if you pick your staffers based on their match up with those audiences -- more artsy for the architects, more analytical for the engineers, and more business-oriented for the general contractors.
Most important, be sure to train your staffers how your company has segmented its market, how to recognize which segment attendees fit into, and what benefits matter most to each segment.
5. Promotions
While it's possible to find promotions that appeal to everyone (remember the craze for free long distance phone cards?), you can do even better when you understand what your buyers look like in your various market segments and find promotions that appeal to them as a buyer and a person. So if you're selling a product for dog lovers, you could give away a free dog collar as a promotion. But if you know your market segment is not just dog lovers, but hunters, you could give away a camouflage dog collar, and really hit the target.
At minimum, if you're still going to the big national show, you can save some money by selecting only names from your best market segments for your pre-show promotional campaigns. Also, many exhibitors have higher level at-show promotions for prospects and clients from their top market segments -- gifts that aren't for everyone, just the select few.
6. Budgeting
Your budget is your company's investment in the future it desires. If a new market segment is currently bringing in few sales, but the overall segment you've targeted is expected to be your top segment in several years, you may wish to spend more on that segment's shows -- space, labor, exhibits, staff, promotions -- than you would if it was strictly based on immediate R.O.I. Those are strategic decisions that require you understand the overall goals of your company's top management -- and the market segments you're targeting. If you don't understand your segments well enough to make those decisions, ask as high up in your organization as you need to.
In the continuum of marketing trends, Market Segmentation's ability to promote multiple messages goes beyond Integrated Marketing Communications, which promotes a unified single marketing message across all mediums, and the more expensive to implement One-To-One Marketing, which is tailoring your marketing message to each individual. Use Marketing Segmentation to its full advantage, reaching your customers at the shows they attend with a more relevant and appealing marketing message. You'll improve your marketing effectiveness and generate greater results.