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The Carbon TradeEx America trade show and conference was designed as a “hands on” program for professionals in environmental management positions working on strategic planning and investing, energy efficiency improvements, compliance programs, performance benchmarking and market and finance monitoring. The desired goal for Evolution Point was to generate buzz leading up to the trade show event.
We did this successfully using a combination of
We created the logo, brand identity, and messaging for the new tradeshow event. These values were reflected on the new website built on a content management system (CMS). The website also housed 4 independent sub-brands. The challenge was to clearly communicate each brand positioning, and clearly deliver content for each brand.
The website served as a communication tool to highlight the issues of carbon emissions and generate interest of the attendees. It also included RSS feeds, and social media channels like YouTube and Flickr.
The lead up to the event depended on advertising to potential exhibitors, attendees and media partners. We utilized a combination of direct mail, email blasts, e-newsletters, web banner ads and traditional trade advertisements to actively promote the event.
Seen here is an example of an integrated advertising campaign to promote the launch of the new website. This specific campaign was used on direct mail, trade advertisement and web banners. We generated over 6 different advertising campaign strategies throughout the course of the year leading up to the event. The campaigns were targeted to the different audiences – exhibitors, attendees and media partners.
Twitter and Flickr feeds were added in the event home page. The initial intent was to allow people who weren’t able to attend the conference to be engaged with the presentations in real-time. We recruited graduate students interested in carbon trading to sit in on all 5 simultaneous tracks and tweet the main points of each presentation. These tweets were displayed on the website instantaneously, providing real-time blogging to people who were interested in reading about the presentations.
During the conference, attendees were also following the tweets while listening to the presentations. They were following the other tracks that they couldn’t physically attend. The unintended result was that many attendees moved around the different tracks as subject matter of interest came up. Hence there were a lot more attendee movement than in a regular conference. We considered this a major success as there were significantly more engagement from the attendees.
Since we are partners to our clients, Carbon TradeEx asked if we would be willing to execute a webinar to their exhibitors to educate them on the use of social media as part of a tradeshow event strategy. We obliged and did the webinar pro bono as part of our investment in our client and the event.
The webinar went for about an hour and had about 100 registered attendees. If you are interested, we recorded the webinar and added it to our YouTube channel. You can listen to the webinar here:
As part of a comprehensive social media strategy, we created a LinkedIn event page. The purpose was to invite interested attendees to know more about carbon emissions as a lead-up to the event. When people joined the group, everyone knew who could potentially be attending the event. This created a new interesting dynamic between the participants. It allowed people to start the conversation between potential attendees before the event. This engagement could then be carried forward to a face-to-face meeting during the event.
Since one of the main advantages of attending tradeshows is the ability to meet with interested parties in a single location, we encouraged this. This social media strategy ties in with most people’s traditional tradeshow strategy.
As in all trade shows, there was a huge amount of vital information that needed to be shared with all the attendees. We wanted to enable all attendees to customize their experience so that they would walk away with the tools and direction they needed the most. But we also wanted to deliver that level of service in a way that would reflect the industry’s priorities – we wanted to reduce our carbon footprint and produce less waste…
So we dramatically cut back on printed pages of our show directory, and put the information online. This also enabled us to keep the information more current and be good environmental stewards. We did this by creating a mobile website specifically for Blackberries and iPhones, even though it is possible to view the mobile website on other mobile devices as well.
Since web app mobilization is dynamic, we were able to update the app frequently. One of the important daily updates was the attendee list. This allowed people to connect with other attendees and meet new people. The attendee information was voluntarily given by the attendees themselves.
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Evolution Point is a holistic Chicago marketing agency. We grow our clients’ business by developing effective marketing strategies, web and mobile apps, search marketing, social media marketing and advertising.