Knowledge Enterprises Boosts Trade Show Attendance by Medical Device Manufacturers
Background
Knowledge Enterprises is a diversified business media company that, among other ventures, produces the annual Orthopaedic Manufacturing & Technology Exposition & Conference (OMTEC). OMTEC is designed to meet the educational and networking needs of orthopaedic industry original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
The Challenge
Knowledge Enterprises needs to attract a sizable audience of highly qualified manufacturing professionals to OMTEC, in order to assure exhibitors’ and sponsors’ continuing participation in the event.
Last year, the company had a house list of prospect names it could use for attendance promotion, but recognized it needed to augment the list with significantly more prospects if it expected to draw an audience to OMTEC large enough to meet the expectations of exhibitors and sponsors.
The target audience for OMTEC includes vice presidents of R&D and directors of supply chain management.
“We needed to identify the names and position titles of people just like to ones on our database,” says Jack Detweiler, vice president, business development. “We had the semblance of a good database, but not every name in the universe. No list like that exists anywhere in the world. We didn’t have the internal resources to do what we knew full well needed to be done for several years, so we decided to fold the project into a campaign by Foundation Marketing Group to get attendees to the event.”
The Response
The telemarketing campaign was conducted in two parts.
First, Foundation Marketing Group updated the names and contact information on the house list. At the same time, it acquired new names, position titles and contact information and added it to the database.
In a second phase, Foundation Marketing Group dialed prospects in order to sign them up for OMTEC. The results of this effort were the real measure of the campaign’s success. The number of pre-registrants increased from 150 to 425.
“Foundation Marketing Group is a first class operation,” says Detweiler. “They were attentive and diligent and designed a thorough process both for building our database and obtaining OMTEC registrations."
“We are a small, closely held company focused on the sales of many product lines. We simply don’t have time to cold call to identify prospects within our audience. We know who our audience is, but there are thousands and thousands of prospective targets and by ourselves we can only scratch the surface."
“Our choice was either to hire more people or outsource the task. At one time, management was worried about outside representatives calling on our behalf and believed, ‘Nobody can do it better than us.’ But the demand for growth required a personal touch from us. Email and direct mail only pay off so much—it was critical to reach more people on the phone. Management realized we weren’t going to get the job done without outside support."
“Compared to the previous two years’ attendance of OMTEC, the results were monumental.”
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