But trade show sponsorship can be a big investment. Premium sponsorship packages for some national shows are topping six figures and even smaller sponsorship options can be costly.

Before you spend valuable marketing dollars on a trade show sponsorship, here are 10 guidelines for choosing sponsorships that are worth the marketing investment:

1. Focus on traffic. The key measure of a sponsorship’s value is visibility. Select sponsorships that place your brand where there is high traffic, to give you maximum exposure to the largest number of people.
2. Going big can pay off. The premium sponsorships at trade shows (such as the opening reception, lanyards, badge holders, and the outside of the tote bag for show materials) are the most costly because they offer the most visibility. If you’ve got the budget to make a big splash and you plan to be a dominant presence at the show (with a booth to match), it may be worth the investment.
3. Stay out of the tote bag. Most trade shows offer you the opportunity to buy placement of an insert in attendees’ tote bags. As a marketing consultant, I advise my clients to avoid this, since I believe marketing messages get lost in the clutter inside the bag.
4. Look for exclusives. Trade shows often sell shared sponsorship of an activity to raise more revenue and make sponsorship more affordable. This can lower your costs but also dilute your marketing message. If your budget allows, select sponsorships where you are the only sponsor of a particular event, place, or activity.
5. Aim for engagement. Some of the most effective sponsorships I’ve seen are for activities where attendees are engaged in participation, such as using technology or playing games. Engagement can increase your exposure.
6. Explore new ideas carefully. Many shows are offering new, interesting things to sponsor, such as charging stations for mobile phones or a Twitter board where tweets with the show’s hashtag appear in real time. Explore these new ideas, but be sure you know where the activity will take place at the show so you can gauge potential traffic.
7. Look beyond your logo. Showcasing your logo may be your only option as a sponsor, but if you have the space and flexibility to do more, take advantage of the opportunity. You should always give your brand top prominence and strive for simplicity, but look for ways to deliver a more complete marketing message, such as including your marketing tagline, booth number, or website.
8. Use common sense. It makes no sense to buy a big sponsorship package if you have a small, hard-to-find booth in the back of the hall or you’re a first-time exhibitor who’s unfamiliar with the show. Select a sponsorship that’s appropriate for your other show activities and base your decision on knowledge from prior show participation.
9. Prepare for next year. One of the smartest things you can do as an exhibitor is scope out this year’s show to plan sponsorship marketing decisions for next year. Walk the show floor and exhibit hall at various times of the day to see how much visibility and engagement different options really get. If only a handful of people are watching the tweet board or everyone is ignoring the branded floor stickers, you’ll know what to avoid when planning next year’s trade show marketing strategy.
10. Think strategically. Sponsorship is just one tactic in a trade show marketing plan. Review your entire show strategy — booth design, placement, and activities, pre-show and post-show promotion, and your plan for differentiating your company from competitors — to choose a sponsorship that supports your marketing plan.

Making Sponsorships Part of Your Smart Marketing Strategy

Trade show sponsorship can be an effective element of a smart B2B marketing strategy and today’s trade show operators are offering many creative ways to display a company’s brand to attendees. Choose carefully to select sponsorships that deliver the best return on your marketing investment and showcase your company creatively and effectively.

What trade show sponsorships are you seeing that justify the cost? What’s working best for your B2B company? I’d welcome your input.

When the audience’s reaction to an ad is “Huh?” instead of “Wow!,” it’s a painful waste of marketing resources.

Here are three examples of advertising and marketing campaigns that fail the “Huh?” test – and three tips to avoid making mistakes like this in your smart marketing strategy.

Value – Huh?

This Allstate Insurance billboard appears on highways around Cleveland, Ohio, where my marketing agency is located. I also spotted it last weekend in downtown Columbus.

What was Allstate thinking when they came up with this headline? No one can read, pronounce, or understand the meaning of the word “Value’Lujah” at a quick glance, not even after seeing this message many times.

Imagine how much more effective the message would have been if instead of “Value’ Lujah – New Lower Rates,” the copy had read, “Hallelujah! New Lower Rates.” Everyone knows what hallelujah means, but “value’lujah?” I doubt it.

Good Banking is What?

Charter One, a regional bank that markets in the greater Cleveland area, has a new marketing tagline that’s a real head-scratcher: “Good banking is good citizenship.”

What? As a consumer, I have many beliefs about what good banking is, but “good citizenship” isn’t one of them. This message may be linked to a creative concept they’re using in TV ads where the founding fathers discuss modern banking, but even if you had just seen the founding fathers spot, would this tagline make sense to you? And what does it have to do with the audience? It’s a message (I think) about the bank, not about the customer.

Monsters Behind the Wheel?

Just last night, I saw this new ad campaign for the Honda Civic HF. The creative concept has something to do with a female college student (she’s in a college classroom and has pink nail polish, so I’m making this assumption) who’s a monster and drives a Honda Civic HF with her girlfriends.

I had to replay this spot multiple times on YouTube to get the basic storyline and even then, my reaction was, “Huh?” What does this have to do with a car? And how does this convey any meaningful, takeaway message that differentiates the product in the marketplace? What you remember after seeing this ad is a goofy-looking girl monster driving some type of white car. I doubt that’s what Honda was aiming for.

3 Lessons for Your Smart Marketing Strategy

Here are three tips to be sure your marketing campaign passes the “Huh?” test:

1. Keep it simple. When I was learning how to write advertising copy, my boss, who is one of the best copywriters I’ve ever met, edited and re-edited my copy to strip the message down to its essence. She often reminded me to use words a fourth-grade audience can understand. She was right. Your odds of delivering an effective marketing message increase exponentially if you keep the message and the concept simple.
2. Clever can backfire. As a marketing consultant, I’m always advising my clients to be original and creative in their marketing campaigns. But there’s a clear line between an attention-getting creative concept and one that’s so incredibly clever it totally loses the audience. If your marketing agency presents a new creative campaign, ask yourself and others how quickly you grasped the message they were trying to deliver. If most people don’t immediately understand the concept and message — in seconds, the very first time they see it — insist on a new approach.
3. Don’t expect repetition to clarify the message. Some marketers believe a complex or elaborate campaign concept engages the audience. Their theory is that the audience will pay attention to such ads in an attempt to puzzle them out, and that repeated viewings will result in high awareness and understanding. I don’t buy it. Audiences don’t have the time or interest to figure out what you’re trying to tell them. No one wants to work at “getting it” – they just want to get it. And making sure they get it, with an engaging, but easy-to-understand marketing campaign, is essential to a smart marketing strategy.

But as a marketing agency president, I’ve learned the hard way that not all prospects should become clients.

Even if you’re a marketing agency looking to grow, sometimes it’s smarter to walk away from prospective new business than enter into a bad relationship.

How do you know when to stay or go?

Here are 7 warning signs that a new prospect could become a bad client for your marketing agency:

1. Extremely short timeframe: Successful marketing campaigns are rarely done overnight. Avoid prospects with a timeframe that makes it nearly impossible to complete a marketing project effectively.
2. Limited understanding of the value of marketing: If a prospect seems skeptical about marketing or wants you to convince them why marketing is a good idea, you can expect the client to challenge or doubt everything you recommend.
3. Internal dissent: If a company’s executives disagree about the role of marketing or the need for marketing, that dissent is sure to continue throughout your assignment. Be especially leery if sales and marketing disagree, which can be a recipe for disaster.
4. Unrealistic expectations about results: When a prospect expects a marketing campaign to produce an unrealistic number of leads or sales, ask if they’ve gotten results like this in the past. If not, help them understand what they can expect and that marketing is an investment with a long-term payoff. Otherwise, any campaign you create is sure to fall short in their eyes.
5. Can’t describe an ideal customer: A client should be able to tell a marketing agency exactly whom they are targeting with their marketing campaigns. If the client can’t describe an ideal customer, they probably don’t have a good understanding of their current customers. That makes it very hard for a marketing agency to recommend the right media or develop creative marketing messages that resonate with prospects.
6. Committee approval of creative concepts: Be cautious about clients that have a complex creative review process. If a big committee has to approve creative concepts, creative is likely to go through many rounds of revisions and ideas may get watered down to the point of ineffectiveness.
7. Negotiating price in the first meeting: Money is the trickiest part of any discussion between a prospective client and a marketing agency. Clients usually have a budget in mind and smart clients ask for a ballpark idea of the cost to develop a marketing plan or campaign. But if they start trying to negotiate price before you’ve written the first word of your proposal, you can expect disagreements about rates, fees, and invoices throughout the project.

When It’s Worth Staying in the Game

Creating a smart marketing strategy requires a real partnership between a marketing agency and a client.

While most companies have good intentions when they seek guidance from an external marketing expert, some have such a limited or misinformed understanding of marketing or the role of an outside marketing resource that they are unable to gain real value from engaging a marketing consultant.

Yet in my experience, such prospects have the potential to become good and even great clients if they:

• Show a sincere willingness to understand how to use marketing effectively;
• Are open to new ideas and excited about trying new marketing approaches;
• Have a cohesive team, a great product or service, and excellent customer relationships;
• Are willing to invest the resources needed for skilled external marketing expertise;
• View their marketing agency as a valuable partner.

The worst offenders are campaigns that attempt to portray real-life situations. The dialogue often is so forced or the setup so phony that your only reaction is to roll your eyes and think, “Yeah, right.”

But lack of believability in advertising is more than annoying. It’s a waste of marketing resources.

Here are two ways to achieve believability in your advertising and two examples of smart marketers, including one in Northeast Ohio, who are doing it right.

Why Believability Matters

Whether you’re marketing to businesses or consumers, prospects have to trust you to buy your products. In order to trust you, they have to believe that what you tell them is true. That’s why believability is essential for effective advertising.

A believable ad campaign is authentic. It feels so real the audience can picture themselves in the situation. There’s a genuine, emotional connection between the advertiser and the audience. The viewer’s reaction is, “Yes, I know what that’s like. That’s just how I feel.”

A message that doesn’t ring true with the audience has the opposite effect. The lack of authenticity annoys and distracts the audience. It takes the focus off the product and makes the audience doubt the advertiser’s veracity. The reaction? A skeptical “Yeah, right.”

Parody and fantasy are different, because the audience doesn’t expect reality. They get it that the marketer is trying to make a point by gross exaggeration. No one believes the eTrade babies are actually speaking like adults about the stock market.

But when an ad isn’t a parody but a failed attempt at creating a real-life scenario, the marketer might as well throw their ad dollars in the trash.

A Case in Point: State Farm

The State Farm television campaign, for example, stars an overly jolly spokesman strolling around chatting about State Farm. In one groaner, he’s talking to the camera with Carrie, a State Farm representative. We’re supposed to believe they know each other so well they can finish each other’s sentences. But their camaraderie is phony, she can’t get a word in edgewise, and he’s rude.  In fact, he’s so unpopular there’s an “I Hate the State Farm Guy” Facebook page with 2,500 members.

In other spots in this campaign, strangers passing by just happen to appear at the right moment to add their two cents to the spokesman’s comments. Not only are these situations obviously contrived, but even the ad backdrops (such as a newsstand filled with made-up magazine titles like “Tempo” and “Woman”) are unbelievable.

And that’s just one marketer. Think about the corny banter around the table in Olive Garden ads or the deeply thoughtful heart attack patients in Lipitor ads. None of these situations or people seem real, even though, in the case of Lipitor, they are.

Tips for a Smart Marketing Strategy

So how do you create advertising campaigns with believability and authenticity? Two ways:

1. Get to know your customers so well that you hear their real dialogue.

You need to understand how people truly feel and what they experience when they interact with your product. It’s not enough to watch a focus group through a one-way mirror. Your creative team needs empathy and sharp listening skills to perceive real emotion and expressions of feeling that can be turned into authentic dialogue.

Contrast this spot from Physicians Mutual Insurance, for example, with the State Farm campaign. The ad captures the subtle but lovable annoyances that emerge when two people live together for a long time. In just seconds, we know this couple is secure in their relationship and their lives, and by inference, that their insurer had something to do with that. You can relate to them; they are real and believable. And you don’t lunge for the remote to change the channel when the ad appears.

2. Use real customers to tell your story as only they can.

Testimonials from real customers are more believable than anything an advertiser can claim in a marketing campaign.  Real words from real people can’t be beat.

Take a look at this brilliant advertising campaign for a Northeast Ohio hospital, Akron Children’s Hospital. These extraordinary vignettes of real patients, real doctors, and real families are deeply emotional and unforgettable.  Hats off to Akron Children’s and its award-winning Cleveland marketing agency, MarcusThomas LLC, for showing how to get authenticity right – and how to use the power of believability in a smart marketing strategy.

A marketing audit is a top-to-bottom assessment of your entire marketing program, from branding to tactics. The beginning of a new year or the start of a new budget period is an ideal time to do it.

How do you conduct a marketing audit? And how can an audit help you develop a smart marketing strategy? Here are some answers.

What a Marketing Audit is About

The purpose of a marketing audit is to objectively evaluate the effectiveness of your investment in marketing. By taking a good, hard look at every marketing dollar you’re spending, you can decide whether to keep spending dollars this way or direct your resources elsewhere.

Most audits review the core elements of a company’s marketing strategy, such as its branding, messaging, marketing channels, marketing campaigns and tactics, offers, sales tools, and creative approaches.

The goal is to determine what’s working and what isn’t, so you can adjust your marketing strategy going forward. You want to know how marketing is moving the sales needle and which elements of your marketing plan are making that happen.

How to Conduct an Audit

In my role as a marketing consultant, I’m often asked to conduct marketing audits for business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. Here’s how I advise clients to conduct an audit:

1. Form a small internal team. Even if an independent marketing consultant will be guiding your audit, marketing staff from across your company should be involved in the process. Keep the group manageable in size, ideally five to seven people. Include staff from different levels for varied perspectives. Consider inviting a few individuals from other departments, such as product management, sales, or customer service. Ask a representative from your marketing agency to participate.
2. Establish an evaluation timeframe. Most marketers look at one to two years’ worth of marketing initiatives to evaluate their programs. Older initiatives usually are not relevant to an evaluation of what’s working today.
3. Do your homework. You will need accurate metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing, such as leads generated, leads converted, direct mail and e-mail response rates, web traffic, search engine rankings, social media engagement, media coverage, advertising impressions, trade show traffic, and brand awareness. Compile and share these numbers in advance to give your team a context within which to view your marketing. Look for industry benchmarks to use as a comparison.
4. Meet offsite. Pick a meeting room outside your normal workplace. Spread all your materials and images out on tables or on the walls.  A neutral environment will help you focus your discussion and see your creative with fresh eyes.
5. Be objective. Try to look at your marketing through the eyes of a customer or prospect. Avoid the temptation to defend campaigns you’ve created or tactics that “we’ve always done.” Be ready to jettison initiatives that aren’t delivering results and be willing to test new ideas and approaches.
6. Examine your marketing in all channels. Look for inconsistencies in messaging and branding and for opportunities to integrate marketing more effectively across traditional, web, and social media. Ask your web specialists to evaluate marketing in traditional media and vice versa. They may be surprised at what they can learn from each other.
7. Compare your marketing to your competitors’. Though your focus should be on your own program, take some time to compare your marketing to what competitors are doing. Try to do a head-to-head comparison of your branding, website, and marketing messages to see who’s having more impact in the marketplace.

Two final tips:

• Customer satisfaction surveys and web comments can help you see how well you’re delivering on your brand promise at the human level, when your staff interacts directly with customers and prospects.
• If you find that you and your team can’t be objective – or you don’t have the time or resources for a thorough, top-to-bottom assessment – get help from an external marketing consultant.

Applying Your Insights

A marketing audit can give you insights into your strengths and weaknesses as a marketer and help you determine how to invest your marketing resources going forward. It can also help you build consensus within your company about marketing and forge a common vision to guide your efforts.

Lead generation via trade shows can be an important part of a smart marketing strategy, but if leads aren’t well qualified at the outset – and frequently re-qualified if they stay on your prospect database over time – your post-show direct mail and email campaigns could be a waste of your marketing resources. Here’s a case study in how NOT to do it.

Is the Prospect Really a Prospect?

In 2005, I attended the American Institute of Architects convention with one of my clients, an organization that sells commercial building products. I spent a lot of time at the trade show, visiting booths of industry suppliers and talking with salespeople to develop a deeper understanding of my client’s market.

I stopped by one company’s booth because my brother works for one of their divisions in Ohio and I wanted to see how they market their products. A sales rep approached me. I explained that my interest was strictly out of curiosity based on a tangential family connection, but he insisted on scanning my badge and adding me to the prospect list. (I’m guessing he was trying to reach a prospect quota.)

As the president of a marketing agency, I’m not a prospect for anyone selling products to architects. But because this company failed to properly qualify my interest in their products, my decision-making authority, my needs, or my budget – in the booth when they met me or during a post-show call or email – they’ve spent the last five years treating me like a potential customer.

Repeating the Same Mistakes with an Old Lead

This company has sent me a lot of direct mail since 2005. Just yesterday, I got a product catalog on CD. Last week, I received a 32-page, high-end magazine.

I might be impressed by these direct marketing campaigns if I were a prospect. But since I’m not, it’s money thrown away.

Even worse than the initial qualification error is the fact that they’ve never called to see if I’m still interested in their products or whether I’m even still in my job. That’s a classic business-to-business marketing mistake, because a significant percentage of business decision-makers change jobs in a typical year, even more so during a recession. If they treat all their trade show leads this way, they’re probably mailing to more than a few empty in-boxes in vacant offices.

The Lead Qualification Steps They Should Have Taken

Here’s the smart marketing strategy this business-to-business marketer should have used to qualify their trade show leads and convert those leads to sales:

• Ask if the prospect has the need, authority, and budget to buy the product. If yes, add them to the marketing campaigns database but also assign them to an inside or outside sales rep for follow-up. If not, but you think they could be a future prospect, find a low-cost way to share product information with them, such as email, and set a schedule for re-qualifying them later.
• Call real prospects shortly after the show to reassess their interest. The prospect is either a hot lead ready to buy, a lead with good potential who may buy soon, or a tire-kicker who may or may not purchase at some point. Put the prospect in the proper group and start a regular contact management program where the frequency and intensity of the ongoing sales contact matches the prospect’s potential.
• Check in with the prospect by phone at least every six months to see where they are in the purchasing process, if they’re still the key decision-maker, and if they’re still with the company. If the prospect remains viable, keep the sales dialogue going.  If not, toss them from your database and target your marketing campaigns toward your real sales opportunities.

Marketers everywhere are making Facebook part of their marketing strategy and many have jumped in with both feet. Advertising Age reports that even marketing giant Procter & Gamble, which initially dismissed Facebook as a fad, has decided that every one of its brands now needs to offer consumers a meaningful Facebook experience.

Yet despite Facebook’s dominance, some marketers still have questions. Is Facebook the easiest, cheapest marketing channel ever invented? Or is it a marketing minefield that can expose your company and products to negative comments? And if your company does belong on Facebook, how do you do it right?

Helpful Resources for Marketers

As social media has matured, authoritative resources have emerged to help marketers understand how to integrate Facebook into a smart marketing strategy. One of the most helpful is Mashable.com’s guide to using Facebook. You also can find great ideas for using Facebook — including tips on how to handle negative posts — on many websites, enewsletters, and blogs. Mashable.com, SmartBrief on Social Media, and Social Media Examiner are three good places to start.

Taking the First Step: A Company Facebook Page

The first step most marketers take on Facebook is creating a company page. Here are five factors to consider if you’re wondering whether to create a page for your company on Facebook:

1. Customers: Are your customers on Facebook? Just like an industry trade show or a print magazine, if Facebook has become a place where your customers and influencers are gathering to discuss topics that concern your business, you need to join the conversation. Search Facebook for groups related to your market, your products, and the interests of your customers. Join these groups to see what people are talking about. Then identify what you can add to the discussion through content on your company page that users will find valuable, insightful, and interesting.
2. Competitors: Are your competitors on Facebook? If so, you probably should be, too. Study their pages and become a fan to see what they talk about, how often they post, and what type of feedback they get. Use this knowledge to create content that will be more dynamic than what your competitors are offering and make your Facebook page a preferred destination for conversation and interaction.
3. Content: What do you want to talk with customers and prospects about on Facebook? If you have news, ideas, tips, case studies, or insights to share with customers and prospects on a frequent basis (at least weekly and ideally more often), Facebook is a great channel for regular touches that build top-of-mind awareness. If you don’t have a steady stream of content or the resources to develop and publish that content, hold off until you do. There’s nothing more deadly than a stale Facebook page where the company’s last post is two months old. 
4. Promotions: Is direct marketing part of your marketing strategy? Facebook makes it easy to target special offers and promotions to your fans, which can strengthen customer relationships, generate leads, and boost sales. But be prepared: Deploying a direct marketing strategy on Facebook requires having a process in place to quickly fulfill offers, redeem coupons, gather data, and track response.
5. Resources: Do you have staff to create, update, and monitor your Facebook page? It’s fairly easy to post news, review comments, and respond to fan posts once your page is up, but a company Facebook page requires regular attention and at least a few hours of time each week to become an engaging, relevant place that warrants people’s attention. If you decide you belong on Facebook but don’t have the internal resources to do it right, hire a marketing agency or consultant.

I’m Jean Gianfagna, president of Gianfagna Strategic Marketing in Cleveland, Ohio. I’ve spent more than 30 years developing marketing strategies and creative marketing campaigns for some of the nation’s top business and consumer marketers.

During that time, I’ve seen dramatic changes in the technology available to deliver marketing messages. But no matter how much the channels change, the fundamentals of great marketing are still the same.

A great ad can’t sell a bad product. Flashy creative gets attention, but if it fails to deliver a meaningful message that sells the product, it’s useless. Your customers expect you to know who they are and treat them like you care about them. Your best prospects are people who look just like your best customers. And everyone who reads your ad, email, website, billboard, or brochure has one simple question: “Why is this important to me?”

Proven principles like these have always been the foundation of successful marketing campaigns. My goal is to help you apply these principles to today’s marketing strategies, through lessons learned, insights gained, and real-life examples.

Did you know that most blogs are never read by a human being—they’re read only by search engines? To be sure my blog earns your reading time, I’ll strive to deliver content that is meaningful and valuable to you—practical information you can use to market better and smarter.

Here’s what you can expect in future posts:

• Marketing strategy: I’ll explain how to plan and create high-impact marketing initiatives that deliver a better return on your marketing investment;
• Marketing trends: I’ll help you spot what’s new and noteworthy, and what it might mean for your next marketing campaign;
• Branding strategy: I’ll show why a company’s brand is such an important asset and how to support your brand promise in marketing and customer communications;
• Winners and losers: I’ll point out what the best marketers are doing right and critique campaigns that are wasting the advertiser’s money;
• Marketing resources: I’ll refer you to colleagues, organizations, and other resources I recommend for executing your marketing strategies and campaigns.

What would you like to hear from me about? Let me know…and let’s go!