With a smaller budget and smaller teams, a lot of startups selling to the enterprise market face a difficult decision this year when it comes to attending the right tradeshows. Some startups may only have the budget for 2-3 shows per year, which makes it even more difficult to choose. As a side note, the tradeshow budget includes much more than the tradeshow fee; it includes the booth and everything that comes with it (electricity, carpet, etc.), shipping, travel, giveaways, and while the days of fancy vendor parties are almost gone, for a small company, a tradeshow can be a significant expense (that’s why virtual tradeshows are not cheap, but cheaper than the real ones, although they don’t give you the face-to-face time).
I have attended my share of tradeshows and conferences, and, while I can say that what works for one company may not work for another one, all vendors are pretty much looking for what social media, which we all love and experiment these days, can’t bring: face-to-face time with end-users, press, and analysts (and yes, I include bloggers in the “press” category).
This year, some shows are more popular than others, because they offer exhibitors access to a qualified audience, reducing the sales cycles and maximizing their return on investment. Three of our customers, Pivot3, StorMagic and VirtenSys, will be attending VMworld. VirtenSys will also be speaking at the show if you want to learn about I/O virtualization. Pivot3 will have demos of its Serverless Computing solution, available now for VMware environments (and I didn’t want to use the marketing cliché “award-winning” here, but it really won numerous awards and received industry recognition at other shows, because of its original approach to storage and server virtualization). StorMagic will offer demonstrations and free copies of SvSAN, the StorMagic virtual appliance for ESX environments that allows you to build a high-availability SAN for less than $2,000. The free versions that they are giving away at the show are not trials, but regular licenses, which support up to 2 TB of capacity.
For those trying to save some money and virtualize what is already or what should be in their IT environment, this show certainly brings together small and large vendors, and the focus on virtualization is quite helpful for both vendors and customers. Vendors know that their target customers will be here, while users have the opportunity to attend any virtualization session they can think of, and then see the demos of the vendor solutions that will help them solve real-world problems.
Anyway, there are plenty of other shows this fall (some downsized, but still there), and, from what I hear, a lot of start-ups choose to attend VMworld and maybe another show in the fall. The good news is that these startups still do and believe in PR, they still do some advertising (mostly the online programs that can give them leads right away, such as webinars, white paper promos, etc.), and they still chase their customers for application stories to share with the world.
Our advice to startups looking to maximize their marketing investments: know your target audience, which ranges from potential partners, customers, and investors, to media and analysts, and know where to go in order to reach it. Go back and forth between the real world and the virtual world as long as you attend targeted tradeshows and build targeted Twitter follower lists. You can’t afford to be everywhere and do everything. Also, when ousourcing your marketing functions, such as PR, it will save you time and money if you work with people and agencies who know your market.
It is a tough year for startups, but those knowing where to spend their marketing money in order to reach a qualified audience will get the best ROI. The others will probably end up paying silly money for highway billboards, with no specific targets, but with the pride of having their name up there with the bigger players’. The difference is that those players already have a strong brand name. The billboard only reminds people of it. Building a brand name requires so much more than a billboard, and it can be done in a cost-effective way.
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Ripping or Reading Print?
We see it happening more and more. Print publications move to online versions, they go from monthly to weekly issues, and those who don’t abandon print versions certainly get “skinnier” with every issue. The smaller vendor marketing budgets affect advertising first, and the first area hit by that is print. It’s expensive, difficult to measure, and it will not bring results (e.g. leads) right away, requiring a long-term investment, although it certainly is still a good way to reach the company’s target audience. I personally think that advertising complements PR, and doesn’t compete with it, but, if the company has to spend its limited budget money in one area, it will be PR.
While I still like the feeling of reading a magazine or a newspaper, and I subscribe to a few tech print magazines, as well as some parenting ones, I can’t stop wondering if by the time my toddler and my baby are teenagers, print will become obsolote. Governor Schwarzenegger’s digital textbook initiative certainly seems to take the new generation that way, and it provides undeniable benefits. Maybe that is good news for the storage world as well, both for vendors and IT administrators, because that information has to be stored somehow somewhere by somebody.
As PR pros, we always talk about where print will be in a few years, and while the “old-fashioned” ones want to see it stick around for longer, others are way too involved in the digital, virtual world to care. Time will tell, but, before then, I will continue to read to my children and enjoy the smell of paper books, something that the digital books do not have.
Although, wait, I read the other day that there is a spray out there that gives you the old-book smell while you read your e-books. Interesting idea, but I refuse to think that there is a market for that…