Thoughts on Attending Trade Shows – DSP 121

When you’re just starting out, you’ll try anything to get the word out. Trade shows are a fairly common way to generate interest in a new technology or practice, so why not floating?

Graham and Ashkahn have a few trade shows under their belt and they’ve had modest almost success at them. They lay out their experiences and challenges that float tanks face at a venue like this and what you should be prepared for if you decide to attend one.

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is, “have you ever done a trade show for a float center? And what should we consider putting in our booth?”

Ashkahn: We have done it.

Graham: I read that question weird, but I think they just mean representing a float center at a trade show.

Ashkahn: As a float center, have you done a trade show?

Graham: Yeah, exactly.

Ashkahn: We’ve done a couple of smaller things. We’ve done one actual paid, or having a booth at a trade showy thing, bigger with lots of people coming through it. We did that for a few years at a certain trade show. Honestly, at the end of the day, it was real hard to actually make back enough money to cover the cost of what the whole event cost you.

Graham: I mean the nice thing about doing trade shows I think, is as long as you can break even. I mean in our case we were trying to get it to the point where we were breaking even for paying staff to go out there. And spend time planning for it, and setting up the booth, and getting the booth ready ahead of time.

Ashkahn: Which is not a small, considering … I mean if you’re doing it yourself, that’s great. But at the point that you’re having your actual employee’s man the booth and all that stuff, it’s not a small amount of time. They gotta prepare. They gotta get everything packed into a car or whatever. They gotta go there.

Graham: Maybe a truck.

Ashkahn: Probably a truck. You need probably two people, at least, running it. It’s hard for just one person to be there for eight straight hours or whatever it is. It just adds up very quickly.

Graham: I think it’s great awareness if you can even break even, right? Even if you’re not making money on the cost of the booth and paying people to be out there, it’s still great advertising at that point. If you’re breaking even you can almost consider it free advertising, or low cost advertising once you consider what it’s gonna take you to run your own float. So for us, that break even mark was the holy grail of doing trade shows. If we could hit that, then we could do as many as wanted, and just send our staff out to cool events to be able to run them.

Ashkahn: I think we really only hit that once. It was only at one point where we actively, during the trade show, made back enough money to cover the cost of the entire thing.

Graham: Yeah…

Ashkahn: That was the one where we were working and we weren’t really paying that much  staff fees or anything like that.

Graham: I was gonna say is, yeah, once you take out the staffing cost it gets a lot better. I would say it’s a long-term marketing, maybe not the best, but when you’re just starting out … I mean I’m a firm believer in throw as much spaghetti against the wall as you can early on with your marketing efforts. Get it out there, see what sticks. Just get the word out about your business. So in that sense, if you have a big trade show coming through with thousand, or tens of thousands of people who come through over the course of a week, or a weekend, or something like that, then even if you’re losing money, just call it an advertising expense. Put up a booth there. Especially, within your first year, I think it’s great to just get out there and make some face-to-face connections.

Ashkahn: Things that went well, or things that we thought we’re doing well at the one’s we did, I think there’s a few things. One is, I think a lot of people go to these trade shows and stuff like that, often to buy physical goods. There’s some incentive, because you’re right there, and it’s all in front of you. So you need to have something like that with your place too. If not, something to hopefully make it so people make their purchasing decision right there while they’re at your booth. Rather than just being like, “Oh cool, I’ll come check this out.”

For us, that was just a discount. We were selling a discounted float, specifically for people purchasing then, at the trade show, so that worked well. When people were interested in floating that seemed to be one of the things that clinched the deal.

Graham: Here, one of the difficult things is, really what you’d want is for people to be able to float right there at the trade show, right?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Ideally, these things work best when you have a free sample that you can give out. Things like, lip balm, or crystals, or having a booth that is this small item where you can actually give anyone who’s walking by a little free sample of something. It’s the ideal.

Ashkahn: Even when you go into these wellness trade shows, even people who are selling massage end of their services, they’re selling massages for right then and there. It’s like they literally have their tables right there, and they’re hopping on the table.

Graham: Or even, free 10 minutes of just the chair massage. Then they’re trying to upsell to actually coming into their spa or whatever it is. You just can’t really do that with float tanks without way more effort than you’d obviously make back in terms of revenue or attention.

Ashkahn: Again, most of the people selling things there are selling you their services on the spot, or products that people go home with. You don’t quite fit the mold in terms of trying to get someone to make an appointment, and then come in later. But, that’s what you should be going for.

With discounted floats, we have computers so we can book people then, right then and there. Book people in for floats if they wanted to, so you gotta have your mind towards that.

Graham: Even if you hand out a free half cup of salt, or something. We never tried that, but it’s something that could work great.

Ashkahn: In terms of display, I mean it’s the same thing. Best case scenario is you have a float tank there. That’s immediately interesting and draws people attention over to you. It’s self-explanatory, or not self-explanatory, but it’s the best visual aid you could have.

Graham: “I am a float tank.”

Ashkahn: That’s ridiculous. What float center just has a spare float tank sitting around, specifically to take around to trade shows? They’re huge, and heavy, and expensive.

Graham: The more you move them around, the more you’re gonna damage them. So even if you do have a display float tank, you’re lowering the value of it every time you’re moving it around.

Ashkahn: It’s still probably not gonna have water in it, or saltwater, especially. The best we did, was we brought–

Graham: 1,000 pounds  of salt.

Ashkahn: … over 1,000 pounds of salt with us, which was still difficult. We had to truck it over there. We had to use one of their loading docks, and lift all these bags. But, at least it was cool we had something, some visual aid we could have to point at.

Graham: The most common question we got was, “So, how long have you guys been salt distributors?”

Ashkahn: It’s just when you’re at these expo things, it really does become this spectacle game almost. You gotta do something to draw people’s attention, because there’s so much general noise.

Graham: I’ve talked to other float center’s who have done well at expos. What they said, at least what worked for them, was some kind of steep discount, so probably 50%, or more that they’re discounting their floats by. And having a big video screen, or something showing floating, which is something that we never did for our kind of expos.

To us, it always felt weird having a big visual electronic display marketing going into complete nothingness, I guess. That’s again, just personal bias. In lieu of actually having people jump into float tanks, displaying in some kind of way what the float experience will be like. Or, communicating that with visuals, I think ends up being important.

Ashkahn: Another thing I found to useful is a lot of times these expos or trade shows have some sort of speaking track as well. It’s usually really not that hard to get a spot to give a talk. Especially, when you’re doing something interesting and unique like float tanks.

Graham: Often times, you just have to toss them an $100, or a couple of hundred dollars, and they’re actually unpaid spots.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and sometimes it’s just free. They’re just looking for people to give talks. I actually did find that to be one of the more successful things we’ve done at these trade shows. There was one year where we gave a talk, and there weren’t that many people there, but all the people who were there, a lot of them went over and bought floats afterwards. So it was a really good conversion rate, because you actually really had attention. You could talk for 30 minutes. Really go much deeper into it. It gave it some credibility, so I would keep your eyes open for opportunities like that.

Graham: Other good general trade show practices, one is, have a little bin or jar, or something like that where people can toss in their business cards, or write down their email address and put it in there for a chance to win a free float. Even if you’re not making active money, or even hitting the break even part, at least you’re selling something things. In addition to that, building your email mailing list, which is a really important marketing asset.

Ashkahn: One more thing that worked really well for us from back in the day when we were going to these trade shows, is having giant facial hair. When we were doing these we had our giant, ridiculous mustaches, and that was such a easy icebreaker. People would just come up to us immediately and start talking about that. They’d get lured into talking about floating.

Graham: “Do all salt distributors have giant facial hair?”

Ashkahn: If you can pull that off, that actually seemed to work really well for us.

Graham: Another one is try never to have an empty booth, right?

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: If there’s not people standing there talking to you right now, then reel someone in, somehow. That’s where some of your displays can be good, a big screen. But it’s like an empty restaurant, or something, right? When you have action at your booth, and there’s 10 people standing around waiting to talk to you, other people want to come check it out, because that’s how we are, social proof. When there’s no one there, people are like, “Well, I don’t want to be the only one over there talking to them. Maybe someone went over there and it was a really uncomfortable experience, and that’s why no one’s talking to them.” I mean I don’t know how our brains work, but that’s what I think goes on under the scenes.

Ashkahn: I also find it really useful to have someone go around to all the other booths and talk to them. Surprisingly, a lot of the people who ended up buying floats were just people who were running other booths at these trade shows. It’s just this naturally … when you go around and you start talking to them and they ask you what you’re doing.

Float tanks come up, float tanks usually trump the conversation. It becomes more interesting than what they’re doing, and the whole conversation ends up becoming them asking you about floating and stuff like that. I found that to be … Definitely, have someone, whoever’s running the booth, make sure somebody’s got time to actually do a solid round through the entire rest of the show and chat with the other booths there.

Graham: I guess selection of trade shows too. We’ve really focused on wellness oriented trade shows, things like that. Which, I guess would be that’s what the question asker … I don’t know if we have a more official name than that. But, the question asker was also asking about if you’re going to a tech trade show or something like that, I mean float tanks are a still technology. I imagine that the wellness healing side of things probably gets a little more play than other categories you fit into.

Ashkahn: Yeah, for sure. For sure. Some of those bigger trade shows, people are flying in and stuff like that. That’s not of any use for you, so you’re looking for something that-

Graham: Yeah, local healing, wellness based.

Ashkahn: There’s lot of small real cheap … just from people who float with us have come and approached us about a $50 booth with their little things. There’s a few real low stakes way of trying things out, but it’s nice to get a little bit of your expo legs under you.

Graham: So there you have it, we’ve never made it work. I have confidence that if we pursued this as a really strong marketing force that we’d want to develop over several years, we probably could have come up with tactics that get it going. But, it’s not one of those things where you just set up a booth. Have some brochures about floating, and immediately a deluge of customers come through or anything. At the very least, you have to work for it.

Ashkahn: It is, it’s time consuming. Definitely, it takes more time than you think it will just preparing to go out. It often feels like you’re just gonna be spending 20, 30 minutes gathering everything, and it turns into a whole day beforehand. Just prepping and printing information out, and all this stuff you gotta do to have a good booth.

Graham: Yeah, and an exhausting time afterwards when you’ve already been talking to people forever. You have to break everything down, and reload back into storage. It’s not necessarily the easiest thing to do.

Ashkahn: I guess that was part of our lack of motivate. It was just-

Graham: Laziness. We’re very lazy people.

Ashkahn: Yeah. So, if you’re like us, this may be a bad idea. All right. Well, if you guys have other questions, you can hop over to floattanksolutions.com/podcast, and that’s it.

Latest Blog Posts