Why is the Event and Exhibiting Show still a vital one for marketer's to mark in the calendar?
For expert marketers, live marketing is now an essential element of their marketing strategy. The Event and Exhibiting Show strives to help visitors maximise the value of all their live marketing activity.

The show showcases stand designers and builders, innovation from event suppliers and new event technology. Also, we have invested heavily in the seminar content to deliver visitors with a compelling line up of speakers.

What lessons did you learn from last year's edition?
Don’t run the show on a Friday was definitely one! Also, we will try to ensure that visitors have time to both see the exhibitors as well as attend the talks they wish to see. 

How have you marketed this edition, and have you put an visitor incentives in place? What results have you seen across the promotional board?
We have invested huge amounts of time and budget into our databases. We’ve cleaned all our existing records and bought a number of targeted lists. For example, we bought a list of marketers and event managers who work in the Financial Times Top 500 Companies and we purchased 30,000 professional conference organisers details.

We have also secured deals with all the major media owners in the market place, which means that the show will be covered in the best industry magazines, ditto
 a number of industry trade associations.

We have asked a digital marketing agency to promote the show through the many digital channels and
 our PR campaign will be pumping stories out to help ensure our target visitors put the show in their diary.

What content does the show host this year?
We have nine seminar streams discussing topics on or for Digital Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Event and Conference, Exhibition Organiser, Exhibitor, Operations, Technology for Events, Experiential and Show Time.

I feel we have a formidable line-up of speakers this year and the programme should provide insight and innovative thinking into the marketing challenges we all face. Moreover the programme covers the multi-disciplines required in running events, namely conferences, event managers, exhibition organisers, operations, experiential and marketing.

Why is live marketing still so vital in the overall promotional mix?
I believe that the purpose of all marketing is to, at some point, lead to a sale. So live marketing is vital because it leads to or closes ‘a sale’ better than any other media.

As consumers, we all instinctively know that when we need to make significant buying decisions, we have to see, touch, taste, hear or smell the product. None of us would buy a house, car or clothing without seeing it first. Moreover we like to look into the eyes of the salesperson to see if want to do business with them.

The same applies to our business decisions. All of us operate in a ‘time poor’ environment in which we are bombarded with hundreds of advertising messages every day. When a customer engages with an exhibitor at a live experience or a conference, they are giving effectively permission to be ‘sold to’. In fact, live marketing allows us to do what we all love to do, which is interact with each other.

What barriers are marketers facing these days, in your opinion?
I think it’s difficult for some to keep pace with ever-changing technology that brings new avenues to marketing our products. The huge proliferation of marketing channels is making it harder for brand messages to be heard. Recessional times have also shrunk marketing budgets, but bosses demand the same results.

Also, the way the media-savvy generation consume information is now so different to previous ways that there is no longer a ‘one size fits all’ solution.
 

The Event and Exhibiting Show takes place on 13 and 14 July at the Business Design Centre in London. More information: www.theeventandexhibitingshow.co.uk

Care to comment? Email James Barrett: jbarrett@mashmedia.net