Four Things You Need At Your Next Trade Show

There is plenty of detailed information on this blog and others about how to create the best trade show materials to show-off your booth. But it would probably be helpful to know which tools, of all the tools that get mentioned, you really need when you start to put your trade show presentation together. Along with your modern booth and all of its attractive accessories, there are four other pieces you need to bring if you want to find success at your next trade show.

Banners

You may have the best light show and the loudest sound system a trade show has ever seen, but all of those trappings are only doing half of the job. There will be a lot of people at your next trade show who are looking specifically for your company’s booth. If you took the time to market your appearance at your next trade show, then there will be a flock of potential customers who want to talk to you. Banners let everyone know where your booth is located and act as unwavering reminders as to where people can find you and your sales team.

Custom Pamphlets

Too many companies avoid getting custom pamphlets printed for each trade show, which means they are missing out on an opportunity to capitalize on their trade show investment. When attendees get back to their offices, it may be some time before they review the material they collected. They may even go to other trade shows before they get a chance to look at your pamphlet. When you create a custom pamphlet, your audience will be reminded of exactly where they saw you and exactly why they liked your company in the first place.

Business Cards

Your business card acts as a pocket-size d billboard that advertises your business to anyone who sees it. If you do not take a full box of business cards to every trade show with the intent of giving every one of them away, then you are not going to be able to maximize your trade show investment.

Focused Product Information

Not only do you need to have new and customized product information printed for each trade show, but that information needs to be focused on the details that the attendees are looking for. A convention of engineers will not want to see the same information that purchasing managers will need. Each trade show you attend needs to have information that is focused on that trade show audience if you want people to be able to use your information to buy your products and get interested in your company.

When you decide to present your company at a trade show, you have made a significant financial commitment. Not only does it cost you a lot of money to present at trade shows, but it also requires a considerable investment of your time to plan each detail and make sure that the show goes off as you want.

Prior to putting together your trade show presentation, you will make a long list of the things that you will need. Each company’s list varies for every trade show, but there are four elements that every company needs to bring to every trade show if they want to find success. Without focusing on the basics, it is hard to generate the kind of income you need to justify your trade show investment.

Creating A Great Content Marketing Plan

A great marketing plan consists of a time line and then component pieces that are brought together to get the desired results. Since content marketing tends to be an ongoing process made up of many different continuous plans, it becomes important to understand the key component pieces you need and how they work together. Creating a great content marketing plan is all about reaching the right audience with the right information and it takes a seasoned professional to get the job done right.

Keywords

A good content marketing plan is built around a list of powerful keywords, but the concept behind keywords has changed so much over the past year that only professional marketing experts really understand what is going on. Gone are the days when a primary keyword enhanced by a secondary keyword will boost your search engine results. These days, keywords need to be phrases that match what your target audience is looking for and the creation of those phrases has become incredibly complex.

Subject Matter

The subject matter for your content is extremely important to your content marketing plan’s success. Now, more than ever, the subject matter of your content will drive where your website shows up in the search engine results. Website owners are looking for content that drills deep into every facet of their industry to help provide information for their audience and get Google to boost their websites’ exposure.

Sharing To Outlets

In order for your content marketing plan to be successful, you must take advantage of the many outlets available for your content. There are websites that allow you to post and promote your content and you can also explore the possibility of including your content as guests posts on relevant blogs. Always look to expand the reach of your content marketing if you want to gain more exposure.

Social Media

Social media, when used properly, can help your website to gain a significant amount of relevant traffic in a short period of time. Not only should your company be sharing your website content on social media, but you should also have sharing buttons on each piece of content to allow your audience to share your content as well. If you can get your content to go viral on social media, then the returns can be significant.

Written For The Internet

The Internet has developed its own format for written material that includes short paragraphs and bold subheadings. If you want your content marketing plan to be successful, then you need to make your content desirable to your target audience. The best way to do that is to follow the Internet format for written content and break your information down into small, digestible pieces for your audience.

A great content marketing plan can take months to develop, but it can generate years of reliable traffic for your website. Some of the actions you take on your site will cause immediate reactions from the major search engines, while others will take months to gain traction. But when you take the time to develop a great content marketing plan, then you are setting your website up for long-term success in generating traffic and revenue.

What Is Remarketing & Why Do You Need It?

If you spend enough time looking for a good Internet marketing firm, then you are bound to see all of the industry buzz words thrown around and used with reckless abandon. At Tom and Company, we are determined to make sure that our customers not only understand what all of those buzz words mean, but that they also know how those processes can be utilized to increase their revenue.

One of the buzz words you may have heard from other companies is remarketing. This is a process that should be part of your business process and utilized on a regular basis. By examining information from customers who showed strong interest in your site, you can focus in on the keywords and SEO tactics that will generate more revenue.

Remarketing Prevents Customers From Forgetting About Your Company

The concept behind remarketing is actually very simple. Let’s say a customer fills up a shopping cart on your website with $50 worth of products and even goes as far as to give you their email address as well. Then, before the checkout process is completed, that customer suddenly ends the transaction and leaves the cart filled.

With remarketing, we will examine that cart and create a focused marketing campaign designed at grabbing the interest of the client and getting them to complete that shopping cart and buy more product. We will use focused marketing to put links and ads in front of that customer which will make sure that the customer never forgets your company.

We Use Remarketing Information To Expand Your Exposure

Another effective use for remarketing information is to put together advertising programs that reach a more focused audience. For example, that customer with the $50 cart may have put together a collection of products that seem unrelated. But we look at it as a buying trend, and we will create a marketing plan that reaches out to customers just like this one. We will grab people who want that same combination of products and hope up an entirely new client base for your website.

Never Assume That Lost Customers Are Lost For Good

There are many reasons why customers fill up a shopping cart and then leave the transaction incomplete. But regardless of the reason, customers who abandon shopping carts are going to be easier to convert into buying customers than cold leads. When you do not have a remarketing plan in place from Tom and Company, you are leaving money and recurring business on the table.

Remarketing allows you to create focused marketing programs that are designed to inspire customers to buy from your site and become loyal customers. Since the customers we target in a remarketing program have already expressed a strong interest in your business, we can use the products they almost purchased as the foundation for an effective marketing campaign.

Give us a call and we will be more than happy to explain what remarketing is and how it can help you. We will also be more than happy to explain any of those other marketing buzz words you have heard that may be confusing you. At Tom and Company, we want to be your main Internet marketing resource and we want to be the one marketing company you trust to bring you the revenue you need.

Web Design Trends

There are a number of current trends in web design that can really help you get ahead as an business owner, or as really anyone who wants to impress with their site in the modern world. Here are a few such trends, as well as how you can use them to get ahead.

Mobile Revolution

One big current trend is the tendency of the world to go more mobile. There are projections showing that millions of new mobile users will be going online within the next few years. This means that the way Ecommerce progresses in the future will be heavily affected by the mobile experience. In the past decades, most people used a more traditional desktop setup in order to access the Internet and look at web pages.

These days however, the number of devices people use to open web pages is very widespread. Mobile devices can range widely in screen length. Some of them are just a few inches wide, such as smartphones. Others can be up to 10 inches or so if they are tablets. The exact proportions are all varied as well. Many web designers approach this problem by having one regular site for desktop users, and one “mobile” site for users that have a tablet or smartphone. Some even use preset designs that work well on screens with a specific length and height. The problem with this approach is that it won’t work for every device. What’s needed is an interactive design hat can adapt directly to the user.

Interactive designs

A common trend in web design recently is interactive designs that focus on usability for the user. No one wants to look at a screen that’s not designed for a specific device. The words might appear too small, for example. One approach to solving this problem is to code in something that will automatically identify the type of device someone is using. Based on this, the site can then render itself perfectly for that particular device. This is a popular an important trend that web designers should pay attention to if they want to keep the traffic they have and expand it. If a site doesn’t look good, mobile users will move on.

Another important part of this is making sure that everything works on mobile. There are some programs that have special features like animations that are sometimes only useable on a PC. It’s important to at least have a mobile version that allows these same animations and features to work on mobile devices as well. Otherwise, mobile users are going to become frustrated. And you don’t want to frustrate a potential market demographic that will soon number in the billions.

“Unnatural” Design

One trend that happened a while back is the attempt by web designers and developers to make web pages online seem “natural,” that is, similar to non-electronic objects. For example, there was an emphasis on textures. Additionally, a site might try to include a realistic looking book that has “pages” you can turn. Or they might try to make button seem to come out from the page in an illusion. The problem with this is that most people don’t find this interesting anymore. You’re better off sticking with a sparse design that’s easy to use and not too busy on the page.

Five Web Design Trends To Look For in 2014

We’re not much for wish-casting here at Tom&Co., but hey – why not put some skin in the game and take a chance by making some bold predictions for the next year? Now mind you, these are trends, not fads as trends tend to stick around while fads are only hot for a few months at a time. We’re talking things that are emerging and should continue to experience success for some time to come.

Let’s dive right in…

Typography will be more of a thing

We love ourselves some typography and it’s great to see more designers experimenting with it now more than ever. We’ll make a bet that you’ll see more fonts that feel like they can stand on their own two feet rather than just being a small piece of a big pie. That mean a lot less Helvetica and a lot more dynamic, compelling designs and fonts.

RIP, Sliders

If you asked us what the biggest emerging trend in web design would be today – it’d be the death of the slider. What we’re beginning to see is hero areas moonlighting as sliders and allowing you to mouse over certain design elements and navigate a website that way. Sliders are fun and sure – they’ll be a thing for a little while longer, but they’re also on the clock. We think hero areas will be the new trend.

More mobile

I know, we’re SO going out on limb here. And while you’re sneezing thanks to our sarcasm, please sneeze knowing this is really an emerging trend that’s going to keep on emerging. With responsive web design emerging as standard-issue for any web design. In fact, mobile designs are increasingly becoming the norm. Everyone’s consuming content on the run, so be prepared to make the mobile jump if you haven’t already or risk getting left behind.

Video beats text

Video’s been emerging for a long time, but when you think about it – it makes sense for it to start to take over for copy. I mean – why would you read anything you can’t already watch, right? Truth be told – videos are becoming easier to produce, easier to share and are taking half the bandwidth they used to So yeah – move over words and make way for video.

Less complex color schemes

We ARE talking design here, so we can’t talk design without talking about color, right? We predict that in 2014, we expect most leading websites to only employ one or two colors in their design. In fact, most sites now are being launched with little to no color at all; instead opting for simple white and black while adding only a few hits of color to add drama and impact. Talk about the right way to garnish your website!