DingLi exhibited in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, albeit late in signing up, luckily a company pulls out and space becomes available. Every such event where you spend hundreds of thousand of dollars in the cost of space alone then add up a few more thousand for staff travel, accommodation and meals, its a huge marketing expense. The question that always comes to mind is it worth the cost? To justify the cost the returns has to be measure up. For DingLi, branding wise I think its worth the cost since DingLi is not very well known outside China.
However let's pause for a moment and see if there really is a value for money in attending such event, so the premise here is that the cost you spend for the show should match the cost you will spend if you are to schedule face to face meeting with potential partners. Let's say you have 10 staff, each having a total cost (accommodation, travel, meals) of 5000$ each, making the total cost of attending say 150,000$. Now, let's assume that the cost of meeting a customer f2f is around 3000$ (flight, accommodation, etc). To justify the cost of attending you should have at least 50 meetings/presentations/demonstrations during the first 3 days of the exhibition. The last day is always the day where everyone goes home. If you did not have at least 50 meetings or presentations. In the case of DIngLi that featured 4 of each solutions to the show we have agreed on 8 trial deployments on one solution alone, that is Customer Experience Management. If we take that particular CEM solution we only had about 17 presentations or demos to potential customers, which resulted to 12 agreed trials, 3 follow-meeting to set-up trials, and 2 competitors came spying on what we do. I think we have a very good hit rate considering that 88% of presentations and demos resulted to actionable results. The ultimate measure of course is turning this presentations and demos to actual order and deployment, with that we can then conclude that spending marketing budget in the Mobile World Congress is worth it. Perhaps if you have products and solutions that are valuable to the customer then the marketing cost is fully justified.
I touched upon competition spying on products, I think its not a problem since there are no secrets told during this events, however to visit the booth with without a badge and business card and not identifying your self, is just dirt cheap. Sometime in the future you will meet such person again… and maybe he or she might ask for employment, the question is will you employ such a person? I welcome talking to competition to see how we measure up, however I also welcome a truly open discussion
However let's pause for a moment and see if there really is a value for money in attending such event, so the premise here is that the cost you spend for the show should match the cost you will spend if you are to schedule face to face meeting with potential partners. Let's say you have 10 staff, each having a total cost (accommodation, travel, meals) of 5000$ each, making the total cost of attending say 150,000$. Now, let's assume that the cost of meeting a customer f2f is around 3000$ (flight, accommodation, etc). To justify the cost of attending you should have at least 50 meetings/presentations/demonstrations during the first 3 days of the exhibition. The last day is always the day where everyone goes home. If you did not have at least 50 meetings or presentations. In the case of DIngLi that featured 4 of each solutions to the show we have agreed on 8 trial deployments on one solution alone, that is Customer Experience Management. If we take that particular CEM solution we only had about 17 presentations or demos to potential customers, which resulted to 12 agreed trials, 3 follow-meeting to set-up trials, and 2 competitors came spying on what we do. I think we have a very good hit rate considering that 88% of presentations and demos resulted to actionable results. The ultimate measure of course is turning this presentations and demos to actual order and deployment, with that we can then conclude that spending marketing budget in the Mobile World Congress is worth it. Perhaps if you have products and solutions that are valuable to the customer then the marketing cost is fully justified.
I touched upon competition spying on products, I think its not a problem since there are no secrets told during this events, however to visit the booth with without a badge and business card and not identifying your self, is just dirt cheap. Sometime in the future you will meet such person again… and maybe he or she might ask for employment, the question is will you employ such a person? I welcome talking to competition to see how we measure up, however I also welcome a truly open discussion
