Vario Creative Blog

We’re busy over here this week creating a Customer Spotlight campaign and display for one of our clients. Some local banks and establishments offer a similar program for their clients to advertise their work or business to passersby. It’s a great way to market your company or product for free to the local community and to build a brand identity at the same time. So pound the pavement and see what’s available in your area for Customer Spotlight or Featured Businesses.

A few quick tips when creating a Customer Spotlight:

1. Brand identity is key. Make sure your logo and website is noticeable.
2. Use eye catching graphics in your display. This will gain the attention of someone who may want to take a second look at what you have to offer. But be careful not to use too much text. People won’t stick around long enough to read through everything.
3. Have a call to action. Make sure you have a tag line that will entice people to come over and see why your business is the best in its class.
4. Check your spelling: Twice! Don’t make the same mistake that the Celebrity Apprentice folks made when they designed their signage in a recent episode.
5. Collect information. Offer potential customers the chance to win something by providing their information or submitting a referral. It’s a great way to build your contacts.
6. Make sure there is plenty of literature for a potential customer to take with them. Business cards, postcards, etc.
7. Use plenty of props! Show off some of the items that your business can do. For instance, if you’re a wedding photographer, leave out a bunch of samples/portfolio of your work.
8. Check with the bank or business to make sure you adhere to any guidelines for display purposes. Banks, for example, may not want you to use table top displays for security reasons.
9. Send a thank you note. After your customer spotlight is over, make sure you send a thank you note to the business that featured you.

Some interesting articles on Tradeshows:

How to Create an Effective Trade Show Display

Tips For a Successful Tradeshow

Top Ten Trade Show Exhibit Best Practices

Displays2Go: Tradeshow Materials

It’s amazing when things just fall into your lap unexpectedly. There’s no rhyme or reason for it. But just when you think there’s no way to solve a problem, a solution arises without even looking for one.

Case in point: We have been busy working with a client to plan a sales conference in Florida. We have all the name tags, place cards and agendas designed, printed and shipped to the location. All the gift bags are packed and the dinner location is booked. But the client ran into a snag earlier in the week: Envelopes that would not fit into her printer.

The client had created some welcome notes for each of the guests to receive upon their arrival. Problem was, the envelopes for the notecards didn’t fit well into any of the office printers because of a foil lining. She tried everything from laser printers to ink jet printers but none of them would cooperate.

Defeated, the client thought of one last hope: Kinkos might have a printer in their store that could print on these envelopes. So over to Kinkos she went hoping that they could help her out of this pesky problem.

The client walked into Kinkos and asked one of their employees about her envelope issue. The employee must’ve heard this problem in the past because before she could finish telling him about it, he said that the only way of printing well on an envelope with this thickness was with an offset printer.

And here’s where fate stepped in: The Kinkos employee said that he was a freelance calligrapher and would hand-write her envelopes for a small fee. What luck! Talk about being at the right place at the right time.

By the next day, the client had beautifully hand-lettered envelopes for the meeting attendees. Now she can be proud of presenting these notes to everyone at the sales conference next week.

I guess you never know who you’ll run into that can help you out of a pinch!

So a company has some custom ‘download 2 free tunes” card done for a tradeshow from Puretracks.  I tested the service Friday after we’d had a couple complaints that people couldn’t download.  What resulted is an utter web horror show.

For the record, I had told the folks doing this promo not to even bother if the download didn’t come in mp3 format.  Which of course it doesn’t.

The problems were quite extraordinary.  First, no macs need apply.  Gee, that’s a great way to win business.  Then, two windows machines were unable to get through the registration process without crashing their browsers. 

I was able to get through the heinous process of registration and actually enter the codes to get my two free tunes.  They downloaded okay, but then promptly through a “License Error” – you see, these were in WMA format, and had to be played via Windows Media Player.  So I followed the troubleshooting instructions and downloaded the latest version of Windows Media Player, then retried.  Still nothing. 

So I tried to open a support request.  Up pops a login screen, only this little gem won’t accept my login that I’d just created and had verified by email.  Turns out you have to register…again for support.  So I did that, and sent off an email. 16 hours later, I’m still waiting for a reply.

Here’s the scoop – if I wasn’t testing, I would have stopped at the registration process.  Forget it, I don’t need the stinking free music if it’s in a format that won’t work on my IPOD, that I can’t switch from machine to machine (I use several different computers, and I’m not about to try to move DRM Licenses around.  This is an utterly failed business model.  A couple of hints:

• The price point of the product that is delivered here is under a dollar.  Make the effort level required to redeem it on par.
• If it’s easier to register for online banking, there’s a huge usability problem.
• If your system isn’t working due to a temporary glitch, let people know via a system message.
• Provide an easy means to get support without making users register (again) and answer support requests immediately.  No email unanswered within 30 minutes would be the gold standard here.  Better yet, a chat service link ought to solve this.

For those thinking about using free downloadable music cards for handouts:

• Use a reputable source 
• Test before you give them to your customers
• If it’s a Rube Goldberg DRM scenario that is virtually unusable, go with something else.  You will just annoy your customers.
• If it relies on a single player, such as Windows Media Player, run away.
• If they can’t use them on an IPOD, don’t bother.
• Most of the web uses ITunes – your downloads should be ITunes compatible.

Okay, I’m not a huge fan of M&M’s but I have got to hand it to them for launching their own custom imprint stuff and doing it over the web.  I’ll be keeping them in mind for any trade show stuff or hand out swag in the future.

http://www.mymms.com/business/

Happy Monday morning everyone! Looks like the world didn’t come to an abrupt end with the time change!

One of my morning blog reads, Erik Weinstein, had a great post this morning about the importance of planning for tradeshows and setting up the proper ‘groundwork’ for success.

Read it here: http://smashhitdisplays.blogspot.com/

I can’t agree enough with the first point about choosing the right show. We can be inundated with different shows and invites and it can be difficult to weed out the worthy ones. Sometimes the smaller shows can be more fruitful if you’re getting the audience that you need.

Having promotional incentives can be a good traffic builder to your site. I can remember a few years back when I did a show for a publishing company and they had those ‘thunder sticks’ that were popular at all the college ball games. People were lined up at the booth to get theirs, and we were able to build our list and our demo schedule based on having a promotional item that everyone wanted.

Overall, though, I think it’s the booth layout and look that can be most appealing to potential visitors. Having a well managed, organized, clean and updated look is crucial when you want to stand out from the rest. Having something that’s ‘above and beyond’ your competition says a lot about the company and shows that they are willing to put the extra effort in when dealing with potential clients.