Exhibitions – What Value Do They Add To A Company Formation

In yesterday’s post Laura Andrews – the author of our series ‘Diary of a Company Formation’ – mentioned an issue which most entrepreneurs will be familiar with; the difficulty of retaining strategic perspective, when you are so close to the day to day operations of your company. Laura decided to remedy this by taking on a non-executive director, with a large amount of experience in the sector. In this post she introduces the person who has taken the role and assesses the relative ROI of exhibitions.
When we decided to do most of our pre-launch activity ourselves, we knew it would be hard work, but the exhibition and all the follow up activity is beyond a joke! We spent three days exhibiting and then a couple of days collating leads, sending out direct mail and samples and to be honest, though it is early days,  I am not sure if will give us the return on investment we originally hoped for.
I think if any other recent company formation or budding entrepreneur is to learn from our launch strategy, it is important that I am brutally honest about all of our experiences. We initially considered exhibiting at London Fashion Week’s ‘Beauty Start-ups’ event last year. Though it was costly, we felt that it would be a great opportunity to introduce our brand to its target market. First of all let’s identify how much it cost;
Cost of the Exhibition:
The stand; £2,300 for two days,
Promotional posters, skins of the stand etc; £988
Media packs, samples; £200
Promotional staff; £675
Total (excl VAT) £4,163
Clearly, as a recently formed company, that is a lot of money to us. So what results did we get?
All in all I think we handed out promotional material – samples, branded leaflets etc – to almost 7,000 people. All of whom could be defined as our target market. Also many of the people we talked to were in the beauty industry, so we made some excellent contacts. Therefore, we succeeded in our objective of raising our brand profile to our target demographic and making some useful contacts. However, exactly how this translates into actually generating revenue and returning the money we spent on the exhibition, is difficult to quantify.
From a leads perspective, we only captured 60 email addresses from the competition we ran to get a free starter pack of our products. We also didn’t have an effective strategy for capturing the contact details of everyone who visited the stand – this was a big mistake.
In conclusion, would we exhibit again knowing what we do now? The answer is probably not. However, as I said, it is still early days and I am hoping that we will benefit from the direct mail and PR contacts we made.
Anyway, it is another lesson learnt and now we are ready to move on to another exciting phase of our company! As I mentioned, we have taken on a non-executive director, who will be a shareholder in the company and provide valuable strategic insight.   Megan Matthews has working in the beauty sector for 20 years. A couple of years ago she started her own online marketing company which will be using to run all of our digital marketing.
Now I have just got to concentrate on our preview evenings – more on that later.
Laura