I went to the Healthy Harvest tradeshow in Long Beach last weekend, mostly out of curiosity, but also to see what level of marketing noise retailers are exposed to when being presented with hundreds of different vitamins, supplements, and everything else under the "natural health" spectrum. I attended as someone's guest and was able to pose as a retailer for the day. One manufacturer's rep I spoke to went so far as to explain the life science mechanisms behind their products and I'll admit, it was too much information. Seriously, my eyes glazed over once he started talking about molecular protein energy cycle actions that go on inside the body, or something. Sure, I had three years of life science coursework at the undergraduate level; but none of it prepared me for the drivel I had to endure over the next several hours as I visited other exhibit booths. Though, not all of it was that bad.
If it's this hard for a retailer to understand a manufacturer's product when this group has the most amount of product data available to them, I can't imagine that this would be an easy task for a consumer seeing these products on a store shelf for the first time.
It takes something spectacular to catch the attention of a marketer at one of these shows. If you don't have a background in life sciences, medicine, or alternative health, you're about at the same body of knowledge as the average consumer who shops for these products. With that said, only the truly whacked out marketing concepts made it past my if-I-were-the-end-user filter...from both well known and obscure companies. I'll post pictures of these samples soon.
It would appear that there are booth hosts who know how to run and organize a tradeshow booth and actively engage future business partners, and there are those where you pretend to avert your eyes as you pass by their booth because you don't want to talk with someone who looks more bored than yourself. The mix of booth hosts varied from distributors, manufacturers' reps, owners of niche product lines, and marketing affiliates. I didn't have many preconceived notions about what I would expect.
I looked at this show from a marketer's perspective, taking in how detailed vendors had setup their booths, product packaging, what types of marketing collateral were being used to pitch a product, how engaging the booth's host was, and what level of knowledge these people had about product and pricing.
Overall, it was a decent experience from an industry outsider's point of view.
Overview: social media metrics
All this hubbub about social media marketing has prompted me to scour the web for what organizations are doing about implementing this as part of their customer life cycle management strategy. If this scenario hasn't happened in your workplace yet, it might some day and it's best to at least have a body of knowledge when your boss or client asks for your insight about this very topic.
For a top-level overview, poplabs has put together a pretty succinct presentation about social media metrics. The premise behind the slides is: how do you measure the impact of your social media marketing campaign?
According to poplabs, social media is supported on the techdev side by entities like YouTube, Technorati, FeedBurner, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook, VIRB, MySpace, twitter, Pownce, digg, del.icio.us, etc. There is a growing trend in the number of companies willing to adopt conversation marketing as a means to include customers in a product or service life cycle. Ultimately, this creates solid customer relationships because the customer believes they are not only being heard, but something is being done about it. Social media is an interrelational strategy that collaborates with and connects to web and internet marketing strategy.
Web strategy encompasses where customers get their news and information about a company's products and services. It should first be a solid, well developed website with all the necessary details a customer needs to perform a transaction, or as marketers call it, to respond to a call-to-action (e.g., customer fills out a contact form, requests more information or a demo, or purchases directly from the website).
Internet marketing strategy covers how the customers are pushed or pulled to website properties, whether it's by affiliate networks, banner ad exchanges, pay per click (PPC), search ads (SEO, SEM), or through online public relations efforts.
Social media enables customers to have an open feedback channel with a company, its core product groups, or with specific brands. It is supposed to use one-to-one relationships and personal-or-business social networks to succeed.
Influence and Engagement are two metrics that poplabs identifies as being the most important for social media. These concepts have always been around since the dawn of marketing where a person's influence traditionally drives referrals and cross-sell opportunities; and engagement is how far a referral is willing to become a lifetime customer of a particular product or service.
Tracking and measuring social media is also nothing new. This involves classic competitive intelligence where you look at key employees and CXOs, relevant industry sites, domains and urls, product/service names, product/service urls, tracking competitor activity for like products/services, insider activity, newsgroups, blog comments, etc.
For a top-level overview, poplabs has put together a pretty succinct presentation about social media metrics. The premise behind the slides is: how do you measure the impact of your social media marketing campaign?
According to poplabs, social media is supported on the techdev side by entities like YouTube, Technorati, FeedBurner, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook, VIRB, MySpace, twitter, Pownce, digg, del.icio.us, etc. There is a growing trend in the number of companies willing to adopt conversation marketing as a means to include customers in a product or service life cycle. Ultimately, this creates solid customer relationships because the customer believes they are not only being heard, but something is being done about it. Social media is an interrelational strategy that collaborates with and connects to web and internet marketing strategy.
Web strategy encompasses where customers get their news and information about a company's products and services. It should first be a solid, well developed website with all the necessary details a customer needs to perform a transaction, or as marketers call it, to respond to a call-to-action (e.g., customer fills out a contact form, requests more information or a demo, or purchases directly from the website).
Internet marketing strategy covers how the customers are pushed or pulled to website properties, whether it's by affiliate networks, banner ad exchanges, pay per click (PPC), search ads (SEO, SEM), or through online public relations efforts.
Social media enables customers to have an open feedback channel with a company, its core product groups, or with specific brands. It is supposed to use one-to-one relationships and personal-or-business social networks to succeed.
Influence and Engagement are two metrics that poplabs identifies as being the most important for social media. These concepts have always been around since the dawn of marketing where a person's influence traditionally drives referrals and cross-sell opportunities; and engagement is how far a referral is willing to become a lifetime customer of a particular product or service.
Tracking and measuring social media is also nothing new. This involves classic competitive intelligence where you look at key employees and CXOs, relevant industry sites, domains and urls, product/service names, product/service urls, tracking competitor activity for like products/services, insider activity, newsgroups, blog comments, etc.
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