The best single marketing tip

It's this, and any marketing firm worth its salt should know it and tell you, although many don't.

Today, the best marketing is all about building relationships by communicating value – and this means that communications are not linear but genuinely (not just nominally) a circle of talking, listening and responding. This simple tip can expand to include a whole range of marketing efforts. To start, marketing is not just about delivering messages, although that's still a major part of it.

Marketing is a bigger deal than ever... but it has changed its stripes. It now includes outreach, support, conversation, customer service, technical support, training, and interaction. It encompasses accepting and integrating feedback from customers and influentials and then letting them know you did. It means providing information, resources and forums prospects and customers want. At its best, marketing now means – dare we say it – building a modicum of brand loyalty in an environment in which loyalty is nigh unto impossible to earn and equally hard to keep.

If your marketing is still all about telling, try completing a circle of communication in which  your company not only accepts but elicits feedback and ideas, provides support, hears and responds to needs, and in many ways talks with – not to – the people you need the most.

Easier said than done? Or course. But building relationships by providing and communicating value via a genuine circle of communication is one of the best ways your company can build a sphere of influence (no pun intended) and enhance its positioning in its industry.

Eight ways to leverage your company's trade show participation

If your company exhibited at ten trade shows ten years ago, perhaps you exhibit at five or six now. If you occupied half a city block with your new products and displays at the dawn of the new millennium, you may be getting by with less space. Or maybe your company has continued full steam ahead – with the caveat that results will be monitored very closely. Trade shows today can provide great opportunities. But they are expensive and so each one in which your company participates is no doubt expected to Produce with a capital P, whether the ROI is measured in actual sales generated at or after the show, new prospects gained, new alliances initiated, or great visibility garnered.

For future shows, you may benefit by going well beyond exhibiting and running a couple of ads.

Here are eight ways to make more of your trade show efforts:

1. Plan ahead to talk to a key audience. Up to a year or more before an important show, secure a speaking engagement for one of your key people. Talk about industry trends or innovations. Position your company and your speaker as thought leaders.

2. Get press before the show. Start several months ahead to assure that your company's name and news are in the publications attendees will read before and at the show.

3. Generate more press while you are at the show. Make boothside appointments with editors and writers from key trade publications and blogs. Be prepared to give them a story worth telling.

4. Introducing a new product or service? Go a step further with the media: hold a press conference.

5. Get off the trade show floor to do some serious business. How often do you have this many distributors, customers and key prospects in one place? Organize an event: whether it's a roundtable meeting for select advisors and customers to get input or plan next ventures, a breakfast or dinner to generate excitement about the year ahead or a cocktail hour to connect, a trade show is an excellent opportunity to enhance relationships.

6. Use social media intelligently. Twitter, Facebook and your corporate blog are good venues with which to let your constituencies know why they should interact with you at this show. Read Skyline's good post on this topic for specific tips.

7. Go beyond selling. Show your customers, prospects, distributors, and other audiences that you are a partner and a resource for them. Introduce new training programs, partnering opportunities, Web applications, and more at the show. Showcase new interactive tools on giant screens at your exhibit – seeing is still believing.

8. Don't file your hard work away. Don't put your new leads, contacts and intelligence aside in the post-show scramble. It's all too common to see gains lost when staff gets back to the office and gets busy. Make and adhere to a plan to close sales, engage with prospects, follow up with the press, and act on intelligence gathered.

We'd enjoy hearing what has and hasn't worked for your company at trade shows - here or on van Schouwen Associates Facebook page.