Now Communication’s passion for helping customers market themselves better sent us along to Trustech 2017, one of the leading trade shows in the Security and ID sector.
With over 350 exhibitors and 10,000 of attendees, Trustech can charge tens of thousands for a top stand, so we went along to Cannes to find out what it takes to make a real marketing impact in the Security and ID sector.
Running all the exhibitor’s websites through the Now|Rank algorithm to determine which companies were ranking best in search engines resulted in the following companies making the top ten list:
But when we went to visit their stands to congratulate them on their online marketing success we found that they were hard to find, or had small stands or were simply not there!
Successful Security and ID companies like Infineon, ST Microelectronics, Zebra and Sabic had decided that spending big on a prominent stand for a one-off event didn’t stack up and chose to take a smaller scale approach at the trade show. By focussing their budget on their web marketing and SEO they have achieved year-round engagement and therefore are not so reliant on the big bang, one-off activity at a trade show. As we all know trade shows can be very disruptive to a company, have a large opportunity cost and are often hugely wasteful as not only are there lots of plasticky giveaways that go straight into landfill but often the stands are torn down after the event and just thrown away.
However, despite all the negatives, we did see some impressive footfall around a number of the stands. Our congratulations go to the companies below who did manage to make an impact:
“Our marketing spend is split about 50/50. Half goes on offline activities like trade show or expos, half is spent on digital activities. Inbound demand generation tactics will be our big focus online in 2018 as we develop more thought leadership content in blogs, insights papers and other high value downloads”
Olivier Cechura, CMO at FAMOCO
Famoco‘s holographic phone and display was certainly eye-catching, Welcome RT used the bicycle-powered smoothie maker – although we were dissappointed that they weren’t getting their customers to make smoothies, and we were big fans of Fime‘s cocktail hour as a great way to gain visitors. Aiming big and generating a lot of interest was Entrust Datacard who had hired a yacht in Cannes harbour to entertain clients and meet prospective new ones.
There was certainly some big one-off marketing spend at the event, but as we all know the best way to ensure your marketing works is to keep interacting with and exciting your customer throughout the year. We’ve all seen that situation where these highly prized business cards, turn into a hundred or so leads in the CRM which then, after follow-up, end up as just a handful of sales-qualified leads. But this is where we can really help – the new raft of Marketing Automation systems are perfect for helping to sort out the leads and track these customers as they progress down the sales funnel.
Our recommendation is to ensure your online presence and online marketing is performing effectively and nurturing leads for you – including these new exciting ones you’ve picked up at the event – so you don’t lose them, even if they are early on in their sales cycle.
What does it take to make the top 10?
“I’d say we’re number 1 in this chart because STMicroelectronics serves so many different markets. About 60% of our portfolio is intended for big customers like Gemalto or G&D but we also deliver general purpose microcontrollers to thousands of customers through our network of resellers. That means we’re driving the widest range of people to our site.
Lionel Ravel, Product Marketing Engineer at STMicroelectronics
Judging by the lack of Trustech 2017 spend by,and presence of, the exhibitors who ranked top for web marketing, it appears that once you’ve got your online marketing sorted you can even stop relying on the big-bang trade show approach for gaining new leads, and you can sit back while your website brings in a steady flow throughout the year. It’ll just be a shame to miss out on all those lovely South of France sunsets!