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Linda Musgrove
TradeShow Teacher
www.tsteacher.com

Hello Class! In this lesson we will be focusing on how you can use messaging to appeal to your prospects’ needs. The goal is to get qualified attendees interested in visiting your booth for more information, or even better, buy your product on-site assuming it's allowed at the shows you exhibit at.

Every booth on the show floor is competing for the attendee’s attention; and it’s an awfully competitive environment. What our brains do when they get overwhelmed with information is to filter out what appears not relevant. Long and complex information simply doesn’t get processed, unless something stimulated the attendee to perceive your booth to be relevant. You only got a fraction of a second to achieve that before an attendee decides to enter your booth or continue walking. Crafting such a target message can appear to be quite a tough task. However, tight, targeted messaging, greatly affects your ability to draw prospects into your booth.

Fortunately, creating tight, targeted messaging, is not really that terribly difficult when you remember a very simple rule: "Less is More" and "More is Less". I know this sounds counter intuitive, but remember that our brains are trained to filter out non-relevant information. Therefore, even though you may want to list a lot of detail about your company or products, this approach is counterproductive to attracting attendees to your booth. The more text you write, the less interested attendees' are in reading it. On the other hand, if you use short, relevant, benefit statement messages that speak directly to your key prospects' needs, you will draw them in. Once they've entered the booth, you have the opportunity to provide additional information about your company's products or services.

Good target messaging will not only help you attract qualified attendees, it also helps weed out unqualified visitors. Granted, this might reduce the amount of visitors to your booth, but that allows you to spend your booth time with the audience you want, rather than large numbers of people that don’t have a need for your products or services.
Now that we’ve discovered the importance of messaging, let’s look at how to create the right messaging for your display.

It’s pretty obvious if you think about it, but a clear condition of success is to understand, completely and truly understand, who the key prospects you are aiming to reach are. You can only target your messaging if you have an actual target. The more you know about your prospects, the easier this becomes.

- Make a reference list of prospect types, include their likes and dislikes, what their needs, objectives and concerns are. This helps you understand what is relevant to them.

- Make a reference list of the benefits a customer experiences as a result of buying your product or service.

- Speak directly to prospects about how your product helps them solve a problem, or provides another benefit.

- Use bullet points with 3 to 5 words to list the benefits of your product or services

- Use only 3 or 4 key bullet points (remember less is more and more is less)

- Use persuasive words in your benefit statements to make the messaging more important to attendees. Good examples for that are: Learn how, Increase, Proven and Solve.
Let’s use TradeShow Teacher as an example. Here is "bad" messaging and "good" messaging to help you design your own messaging.

Example 1 - "Bad" Display Messaging
- TradeShow Teacher can help your business increase ROI at the tradeshows you exhibit at.

- We'll discuss your company's needs and determine which services will best prepare your company for improving exhibit results.

- Your booth staff can be trained to effectively interact with attendees to bring back qualified leads.

Why is this messaging in Example 1 "Bad"?
Many of you may be looking at this and think that it got the necessary information about the company across fairly well. While this type of information may work for a website or brochure, it simply will not work well for a trade show display designed to attract the attention of attendees. There is just too much text to process.

Example 2 - "Good" Display Messaging

Ask us How We Can Help You Increase:

- Tradeshow ROI
- Booth Staff Abilities
- Qualified Leads

Why is this messaging in Example 2 "Good"?
As attendees walk through the aisles of booths, they are able to quickly scan this type of messaging. Qualified prospects will have an interest in stopping to ask how these benefits can be achieved. As you can see in Example 2 - "Less is More". Also note, that even though this text is much shorter than the previous example, we were able to fit a “call to action” in there.

Using this lesson and the examples will help you improve the impact of the messaging you place on your displays. Reach your key prospects and draw them into your booth!
That's it for this month's lesson, now it's time to move on to the homework portion so you can apply what you have learned. Bye for now, and have a successful 2009!

Homework

Develop your messaging

1.) Write a list of your key prospects, including their likes and dislikes.

2.) Write a list of problems your prospects experience on a daily basis. These will be the reasons why they would need your product or service.

3.) Write a list of your product’s benefits. How your product helps customers.

4.) Stay away from listing features of your product in the messaging. While features may result in a benefit, features don’t belong on your main trade show signage.

5.) Review the lists you have made and create your messaging by following the concepts you learned in this lesson.

Linda Musgrove is President of the Trade Show Training firm, TradeShow Teacher. She focuses on significantly improving Trade Show Results through Products offered on the TradeShow Teacher website and strategic, customized Trade Show Training for individuals, departments or entire teams. Musgrove presents goal based Trade Show, Marketing and Networking Seminars at Industry Conferences and creates customized training programs for Trade Show Producers to offer exhibitors. She authored "The Complete Idiots Guide to Trade Shows", as well as a Trade Show Training Manual titled "Trade Show Training for Increased ROI" and writes columns for a variety of Trade Show industry publications. To learn more, and sign up for the FREE Trade Show Tactics Newsletter visit http://www.tsteacher.com

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