Roadshow Marketing
Roadshow marketing is a promotional marketing strategy that involves visiting several pre-booked locations to get a large volume of attention on your presentation, products or events. This, like an exhibition, allows you to make contact with potential investors, customers and partners on a personal level.
Specifically, the goal of roadshow marketing is to create awareness and leads. The areas the roadshow trucks visits are usually hotspots filled with people who already have a strong likelihood of being interested, also known as areas that have a “high market potential”. This can be anything from industry events to areas where competitors congregate.
This blog will focus on the key components of roadshow marketing.
Planning your Roadshow
Determine an Objective
Before anything else, you must establish what the primary goal of your roadshow is. The most common reasons are:
- Increase brand awareness.
- Generate leads.
- Launch a new product.
- Build relationships with partners or clients.
The objectives to be met must be profitable. However, they must also be specific, measurable and achievable, with an established timeframe. Within these objectives, you must also determine how much space you’ll need to properly execute your exhibition.
Target Audience
With your objective on hand, you need to identify the specific people to whom you’ll be exhibiting. The target audience should be specific, taking into account their age, gender, income level, profession, interests and/or geographical location.
For example, if you’re showing off a new computer tablet, you want to put it in front of those within the age range of people who usually purchase that type of product.
Choosing Locations and Venues
Knowing your target audience will drastically narrow down your selection of places to exhibit. The places you want to take your roadshow and exhibit are the places in which you’ll find a high number of these people at certain times. This can be found through data analysis and audience profiling, looking for trends and patterns within existing customer data and competitor information.
Some of these locations could be:
- Train stations
- High streets
- Festivals
- Shopping centres
- Exhibitions
- Supermarkets
- Outside arenas or stadiums
Ensure that when looking at locations, you consider things such as accessibility, space and potential disruptions.
Develop your Event Schedule
When you have a list of locations, there’s quite a lot of thought required with planning the schedule. For one, you must determine the logistics for each event. Some of these include:
- Transportation – How will your staff travel with the equipment they need?
- Accommodation – Where will your staff be staying overnight?
- Equipment setup – Can your equipment be set up at each location? How long will it take? How quickly can it be set up and taken down?
On top of this, you need to create a detailed agenda for each event. This will include:
- Activities – What are the activities you’re doing per location?
- Presentations – What will the presentations consist of? Is there a script?
- Demonstrations – What features of your product or service will you demonstrate?
- Networking opportunities – Who will you network with and how?
Of course, a big part of developing the event schedule is ensuring it all lines up with the dates and times of your target audience’s availability, as well as the availability of your venue. You must ensure that each event starts and ends with respect and consideration to the amount of time it would take to travel to the next destination.
Promoting your Roadshow
Social Media Marketing
In this new digital age, social media is used even by the biggest companies to reach the largest amount of people. Creating event pages on platforms like Facebook and Linkedin is a great and efficient way to spread the word about your events.
Enhance your marketing tactic by hiring a professional to create eye-catching visuals and engaging copy to push interest and encourage sharing. Hashtags and geo-targeting is also a good way to specify and zone in on your audience.
Another good way to push your event is by considering pushing paid adverts across social media platforms. This is a surefire way to get your ads in front of people.
Email Marketing
Email campaigns are a marketing method that enables you to target the existing clients that you know are already invested in the field within which you’re marketing. These people will have a high likelihood to attend, or at least share the word. You can increase the chance of them attending by informing them, within the email, of early bird discounts or exclusive content for sign-ups to the event. On top of that, you can keep the event fresh by sending reminder emails.
Media Outreach
Creating a press release for the roadshow can allow you to connect with media outlets that have a high viewer base, as well as publications and potential influencers.
In order to maximise your potential gains from outreach, you must write a compelling and newsworthy press release that highlights the stand-out aspects of your roadshow, and the benefits for the attendees. It also helps to ensure that the person speaking has a charismatic flair to engage the audience.
Conclusion
Roadshow marketing campaigns continue to be a highly effective way of garnering attention to your service, product or brand. There have been quite a few roadshows that have concluded in increased engagement for the company.
An example of this would be Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck Tour. The popular ice cream company took to the road and visited several cities in the USA. They offered free ice cream samples, which is perhaps one of the best incentives to show up. During the promotion, they promoted new flavours and engaged with fans on the ground. This resulted in a massive push of Ben and Jerry’s on social media.
If you’re interested in a roadshow, check out our many mobile stand and trailer solutions for your campaign or exhibition schedule.
