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Lessons from the Web Directions Expo

Posted by Mathew Patterson on October 5, 2007 2:14 PM

Last month, half the Freshview team headed into Darling Harbour, Sydney, to man a booth at the Web Directions conference and Expo, a two day event.

You can read about the days, and check out more photos over on the Campaign Monitor blog. For the Freshview blog I wanted to explore a little of the background - why we decided to go, how we prepared and whether it was worth doing.

Prior to Web Directions this year we had not had a presence in this way at any events. Dave and Ben had talked at Web Directions last year, and Freshview has sponsored BarCamp and Webjam, but an expo was a new idea.

Why be part of an expo?

When we were approached about the possibility of being at the expo, we had to sit down and think about what we would hope to get out of it. We knew the audience of web designers and developers would be perfect, but would a stand actually help reach them? In the end, we came up with a list something like this:

• Increase the exposure to both Freshview the company, and to Campaign Monitor and MailBuild as products
• It will be easier to talk to existing customers in person if they can find us at our booth
• A good opportunity to demo the products to potential new customers
• Get the attention of people who could potentially be future employees
• Dave and Ben don't have to talk in front of a crowd again :)
• More flexibility to interact directly with people than straight sponsorship offers
• Find out relatively cheaply if expos/ tradeshows are worth Freshview attending in other locations

So having discussed those benefits, and weighed them up against the alternatives of just attending as a team, or sponsoring the event, we decided to give it a jolly good go.

What's involved in having a booth at an expo?

A lot more than we initially thought! Since we were starting from scratch, we needed to work out how much space we wanted, which space to choose, how that space would be designed, what we would actually put into the space, what technology was required, how many people would be needed....

Fortunately, a very helpful professional conference organiser came to assist us in making those decisions and more, and guided us towards what would work for this particular situation.

One key lesson learned is that it is very tricky to work out in your head, or on paper, what something will look like in real life. It's like decorating a tiny room in your house without being able to see it.

You can see what we ended up with in this photo from very early on day one:

The contents of our stand:

• 3 staff members: Dave, Ben and Mat
• 2 iMacs - one to demo Campaign Monitor and one for MailBuild. We also ran a competition to give away the new Mac at the show.
• 200 free t-shirts - the idea was to get people wearing the shirts walking around the show floor
• 2 tables - with rented tablecloths to floor length
• 1 Windows laptop - under the table, acting as the demo server
• 1 wireless internet connection - we didn't rely on it, but it was handy to have available

Continue to Part 2: Lessons from the show itself.

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