Stop Betting It All on Trade Shows | B2B Podcast - Content Wars EP10

Nathan Yerian: There's a wide gap that most people don't take into account, which is the vast majority of the people that could influence decisions in the organizations that you're trying to target, the vast majority of people that could actually sign a contract for the products or services that you're trying to sell into that market, are not at that trade show, are not at that conference, and more specifically, they didn't have conversations with you even if they were. You're talking to a subset of the attendees of the event. 

Adam, did you know that the average B2B trade show costs companies between $40,000 and $100,000?

Adam Marquardt: Did you make that up?

Nathan Yerian: I mean, what if I did? Fact check them. You should really fact check me. 

No, so I did read an article that on average, and this isn't everybody, right? So like a small trade show, maybe you've got just a 10 by 10 booth, maybe you're only sending two people, maybe that's less, right? But on average, companies are spending between $40,000 and $100,000 per trade show. 

I don't know, that includes your booth, your flights, your hotel, your entertainment, your whatever, it's your entire package, but still $40,000 to $100,000 on every trade show that you go to. I just find that rather interesting. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah, I think that that's a stark statistic that people don't often look at when they look at their marketing budget. They look at it as kind of a line item somewhere else, and they don't really consider where that money is going or what it can be applied to. But when you look at that, did the article mention how many on average they went to? 

Nathan Yerian: It did not mention frequency at all. I think that kind of varies. And obviously your cost isn't going to change. If you go to one or you go to 10, it's going to be whatever your number was, let's just say $50,000 times 10, because you're going to 10 different events, 10 different cities, whatever it is. So it did not mention the frequency, but when I look at our clients, because we support clients in trade shows both in kind of pre-trade show video production so they can kind of announce what they're doing, sometimes at the trade show or maybe post-trade show as well, I'd say on average most clients are doing somewhere between 2 and 6 per year. 

There's some outliers. They do 12 a year. There's some that do only one. But I'd say 2 to 6 in the B2B landscape is probably what's most common. So you take that number, let's just on the lower end, 50,000, say we're going 4, right? You're spending 200 grand to go to these trade shows. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah, the problem that I have, I don't have anything against trade shows. The problem that I have- Tell us what you have against trade shows. The problem that I have against trade shows is that they treat it like it's their one opportunity to show up. Now if you're doing 4, you're showing up once per quarter. But I feel like that's a huge missed opportunity of we're going to show up and we're going to talk to our audience once per trade show. 

Whether that's once a year, once per quarter, maybe even once a month. But yet there are places where your audience is looking and expecting you to show up daily that you're missing and you're not putting any money, any effort into. And I think that's a huge missed opportunity. 

Nathan Yerian: I would say that's the majority of companies, right? They're kind of sectioning that off. And honestly, if you get to the core of what a lot of these companies are looking at, they're looking at the trade show not even necessarily as marketing. Even when you look at the budget, it's not necessarily coming out of the marketing budget. That might be coming out of the sales budget, right? So they're looking at that as maybe marketing, but maybe more of a sales opportunity. We're sending salespeople to the trade show or the conference. 

And then marketing is- it's a lead gen opportunity. We're not talking to customers. We're trying to get them to convert on these forms that we need for the salespeople to follow up on. It's an interesting dynamic because we're sending- when we go to that trade show, sure we're sending salespeople, but we're also sending subject matter experts. 

We're also sending many times executives to these trade shows or these conferences because we want somebody knowledgeable to be able to communicate to these customers. Now, I don't have anything against trade shows. I don't think that they're bad. 

I think that they're bad when that's the only way that you communicate to your audience because regardless of the company that we're talking to, if we, as a collective marketing and sales organization, say, the only time we're going to communicate to our customer about what we know, what we do, the value we create is at these trade shows. And we're going to dedicate our time, our budget, our expertise only on these events. And we only do two or four or however many per year. Those are the only opportunities that we have to actually expose our value to our audience, which is crazy. 

And there's a piece that I think a lot of people overlook that shouldn't be overlooked, which is great. You went to a trade show, you went once per quarter, you did four. That's fantastic. You talked to X number of people, you got some interest, maybe in your new product or a service or whatever it is. And you're going to close, hypothetically, enough business to pay back the investment that you've made. 

High five all around. Except there's a wide gap that most people don't take into account, which is the vast majority of the people that could influence decisions in the organizations that you're trying to target, the vast majority of people that could actually sign a contract for the products or services that you're trying to sell into that market are not at that trade show, are not at that conference, and more specifically, they didn't have conversations with you even if they were. You're talking to a subset of the attendees of the event, which is a subset of the market that either influences or actually has the power to buy what you sell. 

So, is that a different way? You are not maximizing your opportunity to communicate your value to your audience that could say yes to you. It's a major, major opportunity for companies that wake up and say, we still want to do this. This has value. We love this. Our customers love this. This is our opportunity to get in front of them, but maybe there's a better way or a different way to approach it in which we could talk with them more consistently and more importantly, more completely, the full audience. 

Adam Marquardt: Yeah, and I think that there's two things to hit on there. Let's say you're doing a trade show quarterly. What are you doing in between there? How are you communicating to your audience in between those trade shows? You have three months between each one that most people aren't doing anything. They're not utilizing it. Sure, they may send a follow-up email. 

They may do some things on that, but there's a huge gap in time where if they're not ready to buy right on that day and you don't do anything between the Q1 trade show and the Q2 trade show, there's a huge gap where they don't hear from you. You're not nurturing them. You're not educating them. 

You're not communicating to them in any capacity. And I think that's a huge missed opportunity. But the other aspect is that when you are there, how much time do you really have with them? I feel like trade shows can resemble speed dating sometimes where it's 10 minutes with them max, maybe 15 minutes, and you, along with everybody else around you, is just trying to shove as much information down their throat in a short period of time as possible. And while they may be really engaged right in that moment in your booth trying to consume the information, what happens after lunch? What happens after the speaker sessions? Where are they going after that in a way? 

Sure, you can have follow-ups with them, no doubt. But how much of that are they retaining? How much of that is really influencing their decision? How much of that can they play telephone to the buying committee and say, okay, here's what I found a little bit, but it's not as good as doing it over time? 

Nathan Yerian: Oh, definitely. It's very difficult. In a trade show or conference environment, anybody who's being honest with themselves is going to be able to admit we're a little bit in party mode. We're there, we're very conversational, we're talking with people, we're having a good time, sure we're learning about products, we're also thinking about the dinner that night, the cocktail we're about to have as soon as we walk off the floor. 

So there's a fun element as well. So you mix the half-assed vacation we're on, the new environment that we're in, whatever city we went to, the multitude of conversations that these people are having. They're not only talking to you, they're talking to your competition, they're talking to a bunch of people that are unrelated. They only have limited space in their brain to house information and the likelihood that you're the most important thing and that you're the only thing that they're going to remember is very, very low. So it's very hard to communicate your full value and have them remember it. It's imperative that you have those conversations after the fact. It's imperative that you get that contact information and that you have a way to follow up with those people. But even with that, you have created the opportunity to close a few opportunities, maybe, but that doesn't negate the fact that you're missing a wider opportunity to communicate your value to a more complete version of your audience. And not a few times per year, but basically every single day. 

Adam Marquardt: Okay, so let's say you keep doing the trade shows, you keep doing all the activities you're doing, but there's this gap, what should you be filling that gap with? 

Nathan Yerian: So the thing that we need to be filling the gap with is what's missing. So if we take a step back and we figure out why are we actually going to the trade show? We want to have the conversations, we want them to see the new things that we're developing, we want to put our best and brightest, smartest people out in front of them to engage them to talk about the problems that they're having that we can potentially help with, right? That's what we're up to. 

We're just choosing one avenue to do it. So the question becomes, how do we do that at scale? So if we pay huge dollars to take our subject matter experts and use their time, send them to a conference and talk to 20 people, how do we have those exact same conversations, exact same demonstrations of product, exact same showcases of success stories that we have, and allow that to happen at scale in front of our exact target audience on a daily basis? 

That's what the question becomes. We do not have a trade show that happens every day, and even if we did, we couldn't afford to go. So how do we capture that information and make it more readily available outside of a trade show environment? 

That's how we fill that gap. And there's definitely ways to get it done, and most B2B companies aren't even close to doing it, which is where the real opportunity comes from for the pioneers that are willing to say, you know what, this makes a lot of sense. How do we enable our subject matter experts? How do we enable our sales team? How do we enable our executives to start to grab some of that spotlight, to start to position themselves as the experts or leaders that they need to be viewed as, to be able to disseminate that information to those parties on a daily basis outside of a trade show environment? 

Adam Marquardt: They become Uber drivers and share that with every passenger that gets in the car, right? 

Nathan Yerian: You know, that might actually work. I've seen, you know, those signs, you get those little advertisements in the Uber you get in, and you know, it's kind of advertising something to you. They have mints, water, whatever. It's possible. I don't know that that's the recommended way or the most efficient way, but, you know, it's a strategy that might work. 

Adam Marquardt: So the way that we've seen work the most efficiently and the most beneficial is going to be creating content around those leaders, around those subject matter experts, and leveraging that into the platforms where your audience already is. 

Nathan Yerian: Exactly. And to that, I think a lot of companies just say, oh, but, but Adam, I already create content. We already create content. We already do that. So we don't need more of that. 

Adam Marquardt: I bet you're driving them off your website to consume some kind of written long-form content. 

Nathan Yerian: In most B2B environments, content is going to exist in one of three ways. The most common one is going to be a blog on a website, right? That you didn't write. A, it's not social content. B, it's not written by an actual subject matter expert. It was written by the marketing team. It's written by a copywriter. It's written by a chat GPT. It's not written by an expert. It doesn't have real expert industry experience baked into it. It's nothing that anyone needs. 

It's cute that it'll help you rank in Google supposedly. That's not the type of content we're talking about. The next piece is going to be your newsletter. Newsletters are fine. Newsletters can be great. 

Still, what is that a once per month type thing? Does that give you the opportunity to showcase value on a daily basis to your audience? No. 

Does it give you the opportunity to highlight your people and elevate their personal brand and build an audience? No. So that's not it either. The next piece is probably webinars. So nothing wrong with the webinar again, but you're not going to do that every day. That is an awesome opportunity for someone to have a conference or trade show like experience put on a digital event. Get your subject matter expert in front of an audience. Mind you, again, a limited audience because you're forcing this registration to happen. So sure, anybody that registered is going to hear from your subject matter expert. 

Anyone who didn't will not. So those are fine. And if you're doing those, keep doing those. 

There's nothing wrong with that. can be trade shows, blogging, newsletters, webinars, but you're still missing a giant component because none of those allow you to talk to your audience and deliver value from the company or from your subject matter experts or thought leaders on a daily basis. 

Adam Marquardt: Okay, so those are the big, most commonly used forms of content. Then what's the big opportunity? Because I feel like we're not talking about something that is that big opportunity. Absolutely. 

Nathan Yerian: So the big opportunity is to recreate the actual ways you get your thought leaders, your subject matter experts, your leadership in general in front of your audience at scale. We don't want some regurgitated content from somewhere. We don't want, oh, we type something up because we have to send a monthly newsletter. We don't want, hey, we forced a subject matter expert to go deep on a topic just so they could entertain 10, 20, 50 people. We want something that goes to hundreds or thousands of people in your audience on a daily basis. So how do we do that? 

That becomes the big question. I think there's very limited marketing teams, sales teams, executive teams that would say, no, we don't want to talk to our potential customers on a daily basis, especially if we could talk to hundreds or thousands of them on a daily basis. I don't think that marketing team exists. I don't think that executive team exists. I think everyone, if they understood how that might happen, would say, you know what? 

Why haven't we been doing this the whole time? And the reality is, it's not hard. It just takes a different way to think about it. It takes a different bit of authorization sometimes within the company to say, hey, this is the approach we want to take. I personally think it would probably be hard for marketing to just get this done. This needs to be something that leadership is involved in saying, yes, we're going to have our voice a little bit more widespread. We're going to give permission for some of these things to happen, especially permission for our subject matter experts, thought leaders, and executives time to be used to get this done and permission to put them, our team, at the core of the delivery of that message. That's step one. 

If leadership understands, our team can deliver our message to our audience on a daily basis and we can achieve thousands of views on a daily basis, that's going to be step one. And then the question is, okay, what does that really look like in practice? And that's going to be different for every company. But the core of it is whose voice needs to be heard, who's on our content team, and what needs to be delivered. Once you know those two things, you've got 80% of the work done. 

That's what most people get stuck on. Wow, we don't know who's going to be involved in the content. We don't know what they're going to say. 

You figure out those two things and it's not that difficult. You know who they are. They're the people that you take to the trade show. If there was a conference and somebody was going to be on stage, who is that person? Who are those people? 

That's who it is. Not hard. The next piece is, what are they going to say? Real simple. Go ask them. Go ask your sales team. 

Go ask your customer service team. What are the problems and challenges our audience is having today? What are we solving? What are our solutions? 

What success stories do we have? These are all talking points that you can bring to these subject matter experts and say, let's sit down and talk about this. Those are your topics. Talk about them. They talk about these every single day. They talk about them internally. They talk about them with customers. They talk about them at the dinner table with their wife at home. These people know how to talk about this stuff if you organize it in a way and at a level that they know what they're doing and why they're doing it. They can talk about it. That's not the hard part. Once you get that part done, it's just a matter of what does that look like? 

How do we continue that so that we'd be able to do it every single day? There's just two factors that come into that. It is a show or a series of shows, not a one off event. We showed up with cameras and we shot this one thing and it was very good. 

We put it on our website and put it on YouTube and it's done. That doesn't work. It's fine. There's nothing wrong with a single video. If you want to talk to your audience every single day, you have to have something that has repetition to it. It could be a weekly podcast. It could be a monthly round table discussion with two or three or four subject matter experts on a topic. It could be a question and answer session with your leadership about what they're seeing and what's going on and how the company is going to be changing to meet those needs. It could be with your engineering team about the current customer problem that they're trying to solve and how they're trying to solve it and what hasn't worked and what they're trying next to try and make it perfect for your audience. 

It could be a sit down with one of your customers talking about the challenge that they had and walking through the complete solution that you were able to deliver. What I would recommend is that we don't go in and choose just one thing. We're not talking about create one show necessarily. 

You can. One is better than none. But if you have your subject matter experts, your company leaders, your whoever it is that needs to have their voice elevated, pick multiple show formats. 

Pick multiple opportunities for these people to elevate their voice, to create content that matters, to be in front of your audience on a daily basis because diversity and content is going to help you maintain the attention of your audience. If they see the same thing every single time, it's good. It's better than what you were doing, which was nothing. But if you can get more opportunities, more different approaches for them, more topics, more personalities, more settings, more whatever it is, you gain a greater opportunity to gain the attention of your audience and attention is really what we're up to. We want attention so we can deliver a message. If we deliver a message, we can change someone's mind. If we change someone's mind, we can open up the opportunity for them becoming our customer. 

Adam Marquardt: So I think that's great. And I think that to your point, it's going to be very easy to identify those people because you're already utilizing them either in sales conversations or at trade shows. But how does that open up the opportunity to talk to them at scale? How does that open up the opportunity to talk to them every day? 

Nathan Yerian: So you have to turn it into a system. So for simplicity, let's pick one. One show. You're doing a weekly podcast. Or you're doing, you know what, let's pick this one because it's probably more digestible. You're doing a monthly Q &A session with your subject matter experts. Let's say you have four of them. You sit down and you ask them all kinds of stuff. Each question is a standalone piece of content that can be chopped out. Their answer, it can be edited for a post on LinkedIn or YouTube shorts or depending on your mix. 

Tick-tock, right? It really depends, but for most companies, it's going to be LinkedIn. It's going to be YouTube. 

Those are probably the big ones that you're going to hit. Every single question you ask them will be a piece of content. So if you do that once per month and you've got, let's say you had three subject matter experts and you asked them 10 different questions, oh my goodness, you have a video to post every single day of the month. Guess what you have to do next month? 

You have to rinse and repeat. You have to have 10 new questions for them about what are they working on? What's happening? What problems are they seeing? What challenge did they just see from a customer? What's going well? 

What's not going so well? There's questions that can be developed and it's going to depend on the customer, the industry, their customers, but you can repeat that process. Now, again, what I wouldn't recommend is that's all you do, right? If you just put a new answer once per day, that will probably get boring for that audience, which is why you make a diversified approach where you don't just have that one. You might do that, but you might also have a podcast and you might also have a customer interview session and you might also have a fireside chat or roundtable with your experts or your engineers or leadership of the company or fill in the blank. You create that diversity of content and regardless, you pump it through a system, which is a social first approach where you're going in and you're taking your content and you're creating basically social ready content pieces, a multitude of them, every time you turn the cameras on. 

When you do that, you will have two things. You will have more content that you could ever need for a company account and you will have enough content for your content team, your subject matter experts, your company leadership to also have content for their LinkedIn or their social channels to start having those direct conversations and elevating their brand. That's probably the biggest piece that I think people overlook too is the marketing team is great at putting out content on the company's LinkedIn, but when you take a subject matter expert or executive that's built a lifetime network that's on LinkedIn and they post something versus the company posting something, they're going to get usually three to four times the engagement, three to four times the reach, the viewership, everything that then the company is going to get. The people that are viewing it are not necessarily just people from the company or existing customers, which is a lot of times what happens when the company account. These are people in their network, people they've known for years, sometimes decades, that don't necessarily know what they're doing, but when they go and post about it, now you're spreading the word a lot more widely. Now we're getting a lot more of that network effect happening and your message is doing what you want it to do, which is reaching your audience. A lot of companies, even ones we work with, when they see the level or the amount of content that you can get from some of these initiatives, they're like, holy crap, dude, what am I going to do with all that? You're going to think differently because if you're only thinking about your company account, you're missing the opportunity. 

That's great. That's a great starting point, but now you have enough content to really elevate the voices of your leaders and your experts and showcase the knowledge and expertise that you have to your entire market. 

Adam Marquardt: That also brings up a good point that if you're not one of the people that is selected as the thought leader or the subject matter expert to be on camera, to actually create the content, that doesn't mean you're off the hook. We actually just had this experience with a client where the CEO walked in the room when we were there and he actually was just sharing some insight, a pet peeve of his, and he was really frustrated because he was like, we put out content, we put out a piece last week and out of hundreds of employees within the company, only four from inside the company had either engaged with it or shared it or reposted it with their comments. 

I think that that unlocks a bigger opportunity for the rest of the team in this context. He was talking about the sales team, but he looked at one guy and called him out and said, you have 5,000 people that follow you. Why are you not sharing this? Because this highlights our unique point of view. This highlights our expertise. This highlights our innovation driving down this specific industry that we're going after and no one's talking about it. 

No one's sharing it. So I think that it's also important that, yes, if you are on the content team and you are creating the content to publish that and to publish it beyond obviously just the company side, but if you're not, you can still be reposting that with your thoughts and reaching your audience. And if everybody in the company does that, you can truly scale your footprint in the market and have that ability to shift mindsets and beliefs around who you are and what you stand for. 

Nathan Yerian: Absolutely. It's about scaling that conversation. When the company says it, it's one thing. When you've got the company and then a layer of leadership or subject matter experts that are also saying it, you've exponentially expanded your ability to reach that audience. 

Take that a step further and then other people who are not necessarily part of the content team but are vested in the company's success, sharing that, commenting on it, even just liking it, that network effect starts to give that content the ability to reach new audiences that just would never have been possible if you were only focused on that company account. So I think marketing teams that listen to this are going to understand what they're hearing and that this is a major opportunity. The challenge is going to be how do we get leadership to kind of give the green light to give us access to the sales team or subject matter experts or use this time or spend our resources to create the content levels that we would need to be honest, let them hear this. Show them this podcast. Give it to them and say, hey, look, I want to take 30 minutes of your time to give you an idea of maybe how we could do this differently. Don't try and go and explain it to them again. I'm sure there's been marketing teams that have tried to explain this already. Let them listen to this. If after that they don't think it's a good idea, okay, maybe it doesn't work for your company. 

But I think they will. I think a smart leader, a smart executive is going to hear this and go, why aren't we talking to our audience at scale again? Why are we kind of handcuffed to these trade shows only or maybe only doing a monthly webinar or a monthly newsletter? 

Why is that the case? If you're on the marketing team, on the sales team, on the leadership team and you want to have daily influence on your audience, this is the way. Thank you. Thank you.