I was amazed by how many of the booths at the Business After Hours were really badly set up. The most basic tenets of trade show booth design were completely ignored by most of the small and mid-sized businesses there. The interesting thing is, most of them made the same mistakes that small businesses make on all their marketing materials, including websites.

One of the things that good marketing materials (including websites and show booths) should do is weed out the people you don’t want to talk to. How many times have you been at a show and watched people go by because you were talking to someone that turned out to be a waste of your time? Don’t put the name of your company at the top of your show panel.

Instead, put what your business isat the top of your panel. People often scan the tops of the panels to find the booths they want to stop at. If they see the name of your business, they may not know what you do and a potential customer may slip away. However, if you have what your primary business is at the top of the booth (Web Design) (Small Business Marketing) (Construction Equipment Rental) (Limousine Service), then people who aren’t interested in you can move on and the people who are interested in you can easily find you rather than your competitors.

Use your marketing materials of all kinds to be your “editor” or “filter”. I’d rather speak to only three people in a night who are serious potential customers for my service or product than twenty people who just dropped by to see what I do.

Here’s a website I wrote the copy for that will give you a good idea of what I mean. This accounting firm knew not only what kind of customers they did want, but also the kind of customers they didn’t want. And I used the headline to discriminate between the two right from the start. It’s good for the potential customer so they don’t waste their time and it was good for the accounting firm for the same reason:

Bob McClain or WordsmithBob, has been a website copywriter in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, since 2000. He has focused on developing new, more effective approaches to web writing, web content, web copywriting and Search Engine Optimization. Starting with a BA in Technical Communication and a minor in Creative Writing from Metro State University in St. Paul, McClain has worked diligently to end the use of "corp-speak" and "technospeak" online. His approach is to “humanize” the Web, using real information to guide people to buy rather than turning websites into advertisements that people can easily ignore. McClain is also the creator of Cheap SEO Website Marketing, a website devoted to helping people with the best solutions to DIY SEO at an affordable cost with tips and software reviews. More at Cheap SEO Website Marketing

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Originally posted 2008-04-26 13:12:45. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

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