This was the first year we decided to make the investment and be present with a booth at the WMC. Other years we have attended and set up meetings in a hotel near by or the coffee shop
The investment of doing so is not minor at all. Apart from the booth price, you have to take into consideration getting the booth dress up and all the investment on the team (larger one in this case) to be at the booth since sunday until Thursday. In total I estimated that the investments comes to be around 3% of our total revenues (projected ones) for 09, so....
Well I found that:
+ the number of meetings you are able to set up in advance multiply by a factor of 4 or 5x if you have a booth
+ you are going to have a large chunk of walk ins. Overall I estimated that 1 every 3 people walking by and initiating a conversation with us what a potential business partner (either client, partner or content provider). I will say that 50% of those useful ones will be difficult to meet in any other situation
+ it made it easier to reconnect with past friends (they knew where we were and they did visit us, many without having agree to)
+ overall awareness about our company grows and it has a positive impact on our branding
+ it was a huge training opportunity for the more junior people in the team to be exposed, to acquire new skills, to be around and explore ideas for the company and to grow into our company culture
+ we could test with many more people our new value proposition, our attractiveness and capabilities to engage people
+ our location did help, probably the same booth on a different location will have less impact so if coming back we want to be at the same spot next year
+ being so many days together (and being at an apartment (well 3 apartments)) did help sharing more time together and building the team stronger and closer
+ we had much more time with some of our current partners and got to know them much more (both professionally and personally)
On the negative side:
+ we slept much less that when not having a booth :-)
Now seriously the negative side is that cash is king these days and budgets are tight. , but I am sure we want to repeat next year and we have ideas on how to improve our presence and impact without having to really spend much more than this year
On Monday we did sit down and have just on pure commercial follow up opportunities a table with more than 30 items (which we are frantically coming back to although half of the people took a week off after the event. Furthermore tomorrow we will sit the 6 of us who were in Barcelona and have a team debrief on the overall congress not just a commercial follow up. I am interested to see what the team thinks and their take-aways
So, if you were a small company (under 3 Mio Eur in revenues) and present at the WMC, what was your experience and evaluation of your investment?
We exhibited at Innovation Zone, close to your booth. I think it is importante to be there, because it means your are member of mobile industry and your focus is mobile.
ReplyDeleteObviously, cash is king as you pointed, but when planning the maketing budget for the whole year, perhaps the investment in MWC worths.
Scheduling meetings in places around could be ok, but difficult to showcase demos, and have 2 way (visit to visit interactions with possible partners also exhibiting) if you are not there.