The decline of Trade shows having implication on lead generation

Trade shows for business to businesses (B2B) used to be places for exposing new products and solutions to the market. Tradeshows had become places for meeting with customers and finding prospects or lead generation. At the same time a vendor, an importer, a distributor or manufacturer could get a quick update on new offerings on the market by strolling through the corridors around his booth as companies were grouped together.

Even financial institutions came to visit trade shows in order to learn about a specific trade or business segment as all-important players were lined up near each other.

Tradeshows could cost heaps of money, but it paid itself back by leads, prospecting, customer contacts and brand exposure. The latter was sometimes even more important in order to show off to your competitors and customers how well the company was doing, by the size and the costs involved in the booth price and running the booth (including parties).

Extinction of Trade Shows by the Search Engines

However times have changed:

• New products are first announced on the Internet
• Vendors and manufacturers do their competitive analysis on the Internet
• Potential buyers or existing customers gather information over the Internet.
• And Sales people are spoiling their time on booths, waiting for a visitor to pass along.

Moreover Sales are starting to spend more time on the mobile phone or behind their portable during tradeshows, than actively looking to capture leads on the trade show. This due to the fact of the ever-decreasing number of visitors on the trade shows.

It is not so much the Internet, which has killed the trade shows, but the search engines. They make it possible to find products and services 24 by 7 in a very easy and convenient way. The whole Internet with all it's websites, have become the biggest tradeshow, night and day and worldwide reach.

People or potential buyers can look for any product or any service by just tapping a few keywords on a search engine. The outcome of the search can be manipulated or website links can added at a cost to influence the potential buyer.

This is all about Search Engine Optimisation and Advertising techniques.

Thus now instead of getting visitors at your booth, your company gets visitors on its website. Not solely during a specific time lap, but any moment of any day of the year.

These virtual incognito visitors pose several problems:

• Timing: any moment of the day
• Frequency of visits: as much as they want
• Interests: anything on your website and they won't tell you what
• Identification: the more anonymous the more they like it.
• Groups by company: people don't come in groups to your website, the do this individually
• Communication: unidirectional (one direction) and preformatted: whatever is on your website is your communication to your visitors.
• Contact data: hardly any visitor leaves a contact like email or telephone number. It is rare but it happens.

Thus a solution is required to solve this problem in order to get leads.

The requirements for solving the Incognito Visitor problem

How to handle these problems:

It is not so much for getting the visitors to your website, but more to know who is visiting and what is showing up as interesting. A tool or service for visitor discovery and identification is required.

Although visitors surf the Internet incognito, they do leave all kinds of trails and indications behind:

+ The origin:

• The previous page visited
• The search engine keywords

+ Browser language, indicating the language used at work.

+ IP of the internet access point, which can be the Internet Service Provider or the company itself

• Which allows for revealing the ISP of Company name
• Which allows for IP Geo-location

+ Location by time during the day of visit: employees normally work during office hours, thus this is an indication of location on the world.

+ Time spend on pages, number of page views of the same page, total visit time

+ Visit paths

+ Returning visitors: by using cookies or other technologies it is possible to recognize returning visitors.

+ ...

This complete set of features allows discovering and identifying the visitor.

Such a solution is LEADSExplorer http://www.leadsexplorer.com/ , which is offered as a web service.

Types of visitors:

It allows discovering and identifying Visitors:

+ Leads: Leads are required to get new customers. Knowing the company name and the products or services interested is already a good start for contacting the company.

+ Customers: A customer visiting your website has certainly a good reason or a requirement. It is time to call the customer or to set up a meeting with them. Customer acquisition costs are high, thus better keep your current customers.

+ Ex-Customers When ex-customers visit your website, it might be they are not so satisfied with your competitors' products or services. Call your contacts and find out.

+ Competitors: Competitors do not visit your website without a reason. By analysing their click path and location, information can be revealed. Questions can be asked about RFP or RFI, or new products to be launched.

+ Financial Institutions: Acquisitions, mergers, additional funding, VC investments, IPO's all these financial transactions can happen with your competitors in your market and can change the competitive landscape of your market.

+ Media: If the media, which are journalists, are visiting, they could be preparing a story or information about the market or your competitors. Media can bring free 'advertising'. Time to call the editor of the visiting media.

The solution allows for the visiting history:

Pages visited by visitor. Represented by thumbnails, as this is more practical than url's (http://yourcompany.com/page)

• Pages visited chronological, most visited first, longest watched first
• Page path

A great visitor discovery service, without installation needed. The service only requires the insertion of a java script line, just like most web analytics or web statistic services.

The problem with e-mailing visitor tracking solutions

An emailing visitor tracking solutions, will send out emails with landing pages or tracking codes. When the receiver clicks on the link he is accounted and tracked on the website.

Due to capturing less leads on Trade Shows, there is also the decreasing possibility of sending mailings. In order to have email campaigns, email addresses are needed.

Good, real and valuable Email addresses don't come without a cost.

It was typical to send out a first mailing after the tradeshow, and include the newly obtained addresses in all the following emails and newsletters.

As there are less leads obtained from tradeshows, less number of people can be addressed.

Which is a problem for all solutions based upon emailing.

Which makes the LEADSExplorer solution even more interesting and needed.