Written by Andrea Stout, ReachForce Customer and Event Marketer at NetQoS

After my last guest post on Getting More Traffic to your Trade Show Booth I thought I would share an inside look at the success behind NetQoS’s trade show marketing. I turned up the heat on Cisco Networkers this year with a party at the Hard Rock Hotel.

Every year, companies spend millions of dollars on tradeshows worldwide. At NetQoS, there is one show each year that produces the best leads. Cisco Networkers Live is an event that brings together thousands of networking professionals for four days of training.

As with any exhibition, the key to success is knowing your audience. With many booths to choose from, it’s hard to get prospects interested in visiting you. In January, the NetQoS marketing communications team met to discuss the overall strategy for the June Cisco show. Knowing that we had to choose a theme, we identified the most important characteristics of our target market. They are as follows:

• Male
• Aged 25-45
• Works in the IT field – most are responsible for the performance of their organizations network
• Unlikely to be elected “Prom King” in high school

With songs like “Party Like A Rockstar” by Shop Boyz and “I Want to be a Rockstar” by Nickelback ruling the radio, we decided that we should treat our prospects and customers like they are rockstars – network rockstars. With this theme, we were able to select promotions for the booth and plan a large customer party.

Each year, we hand out t-shirts in our booth. We decided to design a shirt that fits in with the vintage shirts that are popular today. In addition, we purchased blinking guitar pins that contain our corporate logo. We have found that anything that with a flashing LED light attached to it is a huge item at tradeshows. As a general rule of thumb, if it can’t be stored on a desk or given to a child, it’s trash.

For our party, we designed a landing page where customers and prospects could register online. We asked them to print off their confirmation and stop by our booth during the show to pick up their VIP backstage pass. This awarded us a lot of attention as other tradeshow attendees noticed the exclusive passes being worn around the show by our customers.

Fitting with our theme, we booked the Hard Rock Hotel as our party venue. We passed out Elvis glasses as attendees walked down the red carpet. We set up Guitar Hero and Rock Band in the corner of the room which was a huge hit. In the past we learned that our guests don’t like loud music so we nixed the band this year and opted for a DJ. Also, never skimp on food. If your audience is mostly male, feed them well. We hired a photographer from Event Mall to take pictures of our guests and print copies on site. In addition, we hired two celebrity impersonators to entertain the crowd – Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osborne.

The Results:
For the first time, we ran out of all 3,500 t-shirts we had printed before the show was over. On the first night alone, we scanned 931 badges in two hours. We had 3,190 people sit through product demonstrations in our booth during the show. We handed out 3,000 blinking guitar pins in two days. At the party, we had 400 guests who have given us nothing but positive feedback.

Check out examples of everything below:

Hard Rock Party Landing Page: http://www.netqos.com/seo_promo/hardrock/

Flickr Photos Page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/netqos/

T-shirts:

Front:

Back:

Guitar Pins:

Backstage Passes: