Our Top 5 Tips For Successfully Planning A Roadshow
So you’ve decided to hit the road – fantastic! Roadshow event marketing is a brilliant way to solve your business challenges and roadshow marketing truck tours take your experience directly to the people who matter to you most. Over the last 17 years we’ve seen great success with roadshow tours in several different industries. The most effective tours have one thing in common though; they’re carefully planned out and well thought through!
With that in mind, here's the 5-step planning journey we encourage everyone to take to ensure a highly impactful roadshow marketing tour.
1. Set out your objectives
Now is a great time to put into words – and then communicate to the relevant team members – exactly why you’re going on the road. This will allow you to stay on track with every planning decision you make, every piece of marketing material you create and ensure that everyone in the business understands the exact WHY behind the roadshow!
Here are some examples of concrete objectives you could share with your team:
- “Demo product X to 10,000 customers who live in rural locations.”
- “Train 5000 employees how to use Y software with minimum disruption to their work schedules.”
- “Introduce service Z to 100 trade partners before the trade show season begins.”
Summarising the point of your roadshow in a sentence that can be easily shared across the business is helpful for everyone involved. It will also ensure that you make the right choices at every stage of your roadshow planning.
2. Identify your target audience
You’ve now pinpointed and communicated why you’re hitting the road, great! Next it’s time to consider exactly who the people you’re taking your message to are. For example:
- If you’re launching a new product, who are your customers and where do they live and work?
- If it’s a media launch, who are the ideal press members and bloggers you’d like to talk to?
- If it’s employees you want to train, who and where are they?
Take the time to write out this information and add it to your plan. Now is also a good time to think about how many people you will have in the truck at any one time. EMS trucks come in a variety of sizes and we can cater for both small and large audiences - up to 80.
“Some of these designs are incredible. I can’t believe what you can fit in a single truck.” – Feedback from one of our events.
As you can see, people are often surprised with how roomy our trucks can be!
3. Consider which locations to visit
One of the best things about taking your product, service or training on the road is exactly that – you can take it anywhere! EMS is experienced in helping our customers to reach new audiences across the globe. Think about the possibility this affords – and dream big! It’s entirely possible to reach new markets in rural locations across the UK, Europe or even attend that new conference in the Middle East if that’s where the people you wish to communicate with are.
Based on your answer to #2, you know who your target audience is. Now you can work out how you can literally reach them face-to-face. At EMS, we can advise on cultural factors and considerations and take care of visas, driving and logistics so that you can focus on doing what you do best.
Once you’ve decided on the geographical locations that will benefit your roadshow, the next consideration is what sort of sites you will want to visit in those areas. With a mobile truck you can reach the right people in their environment for the ultimate in convenience.
For example, if it’s complex medical equipment that you offer and you’d like to demo it to specialist consultants, you can do so in their hospital car park to make for a really targeted communication and memorable experience. We have a large database of thousands of sites to help make site planning a breeze for you. Just let us know where you're heading to and we can help figure out the details.
4. Think about the roadshow visitor experience and how it will look and feel
The experience you want to create onboard your truck is perhaps the most overlooked aspect of a tour. It’s one, however, that we feel sets a wonderfully successful roadshow apart from the rest!
The feeling you wish to create will of course depend on #1 and #2 – the goal of your roadshow marketing and who you are trying to reach. If you are launching a new Sci-fi film aimed at children, for example, you can tailor the truck to make it feel like a scene from the film. If you’re launching a new line of beauty products, you’ll want people to feel comfortable enough on board to spend time receiving make-overs in a relaxing space. Get creative when planning your space and the impression it creates for your customer – we have plenty of experience in bringing wild and wacky visions to life!
It can be useful to create a vision board complete with adjectives to describe the experience you’re aiming to craft. In the example of the cosmetic product launch, you might come up with the following:
A serene oasis of calm and Zen for tired Mums or An upbeat space full of aspiration and optimism for millennial workers.
This vision will depend upon your brand and the audience you’re trying to reach. Pinterest is a great tool to use for creating a digital mood board and for finding inspiration for your interior. At EMS we can also work with you to help plan your desired experience, as well as show you how to transfer the physical experience into your digital marketing both pre and post-tour – just give us a shout!
5. Create measures for success
The final step in your planning is to agree with your team on how you will measure the success of the roadshow. Using your main objective (see #1), you can create measures to focus on and track after each event on the tour. This will also allow you to tweak each event along the way and get bigger and better each time!
Some ideas for your trackable measures might be:
- An increase of sales (% or units)
- Educate X number of employees on a new service
- Collect 100,000 email addresses for marketing team
- Increase brand mentions on social media and in the press
- An uplift in your pipeline
- A brand perception shift
So there you have it – a 5-step journey to planning the ultimate roadshow and ensuring that you’re in the right place at the right time. Any questions? Get in touch – we’d love to hear from you!