Episode 49 | 3 Reasons You Should Invest in Selling at an In Person Event

Sophia Noreen: Hello, everyone.  Welcome to another fantastic episode of the Boss It Podcast. My name is Sophia Noreen, and I'm going to be your host for today.  And today, we're going to speak about why you should always consider going to on-site events, even if you are an online business or an online marketer. 

Today, I'm going to tell you three reasons as to why you should always consider going in-person to sell your products or sell your services or even to just go and be with other businesses.  I know it's really easy, especially after the pandemic where everything went online so quickly. It's very easy to hide behind your desk and basically not communicate or not interact with your customers. It becomes very easy to hide behind the computer and just market, market, market.  But there's more to the game of business than just marketing, you have to do a little bit more finessing with your customers and your clients, and that's what we're going to talk about today.

So let me give you three reasons as to why you should be considering or even making the attempt to go to in-person events.  Now, when I say in-person events especially for our product-based businesses, I mean the craft shows. I'm talking about the vending events that you might see them all. The small business shows, there are a ton of opportunities out there where you can basically go and sell with other vendors. You buy a table and you go and sell.

If you know anything about our story,  then you'll know that's where we started.  That is the reason why we love going to on-site events, even though it may not be profitable upfront.  So today, we're going to go over three reasons as to why you should still consider this as an opportunity, even if it may not be profitable right in the end. Meaning, say, for example, your table costs X number of dollars, and you don't make that money back.  What do you do?  Is that a failure for your event? It may not be. So these are the three reasons that you should still consider it, although it might not be obvious or although either might not be a financial gain at the end. You will see the benefits of the event long-term.

The first reason is you get to speak to your customers.  Being online is fantastic. Yes, you can work from anywhere in the world.  Yes, you can go ahead and make money while you sleep. Yes, it can be passive income,  but you are missing a huge piece of the puzzle, and that is your customer's feedback.  As you know, many people will generally leave feedback if they have something negative to say about the product or service,  or they would like to see an improvement. People are less likely to leave feedback if it's positive. You can go ahead and research this, this is a fact. I don't know the stats offhand, but you will be more likely to get negative feedback before positive feedback from your customer unless you have an incentive.  

So if you have an online website,  you may consider having a discount added to their next purchase if they leave you feedback.  That's when you can really go ahead and grab a lot of positive feedback but unless you have some incentive, most individuals will not go ahead and provide you the feedback. So when you go to these events, the benefit is that you get to speak to all of your customers, and you will be so happy to hear all of their glorious feedback. All of their takeaways for your product.  They may even give you suggestions for future products, and that's how we started. 

When Also Sophia was in its infancy, Also Sophia is our product-based business, we were going to these types of events.   We were going ahead and sitting with other vendors for the day. We'd buy a table, and we would basically test our products to see if it's what our customers wanted.  We didn't want to go into mass production without realizing that we had considered what our customers had to say,  and then we could speak to them and actually understand exactly what their pain points were, what is a price point they're willing to pay for the product?  That is the best thing with these onsite events. You get to essentially survey your customers,  you get a sample of who your customer could be, and if you picked your event appropriately,  you will even get potential sales.

I know sometimes it seems so hard because you could make the sales online. You could just dump a bunch of money in Facebook ads. But the problem with Facebook ads is that you don't get to get that real-time feedback, you don't also get to understand the psychology of your customer, and we may get into that in another episode because  I can talk about psychology and customers, and the psychology of pricing all day long. So we'll save that concept for another day, so make sure you catch a future episode with us. You can always subscribe to the podcast or to the YouTube channel.  But getting feedback from your customers is priceless, so make sure that you do not forget that no matter where you are in your business trajectory.

Reason number two on why you should consider on-site events is because you may be reaching a whole other potential customer base.  We just went to an event last weekend for Also Sophia,  and obviously, when you think about your ideal customer, you always have somebody in mind.  You nail it down to their gender,  you nail it down to their marital status potentially,  potentially their income level, you talk about their demographics in regard to age.  And so I thought our age group was females who identify as Muslim for this particular event anyways. We were basically at an event for Eid al-Adha which is a Muslim holiday and the event was all around making that event all-around sales for that particular celebration.

And so for that cohort of customers, I was like: Okay, they're going to be female likely between the ages of 30, 32 up to maybe 45. They will identify as being Muslim,  or they may know somebody who is Muslim and they celebrate Eid al-Adha,  which is the Eid event after the pilgrimage to Mecca.  Okay, so what happened? I obviously attracted some of those potential customers but to my surprise, the cohort was a lot younger.  They were in their early twenties all the way to maybe their thirties,  but a lot younger. And I was like, we just captured a whole additional market of potential customers for future years who now know we exist.

They didn't know existed before. We were not on their radar, and now that we're on the radar, we have potentially additional customers in the future.  I know it seems like a big deal, what's the big deal? Like why would that matter?  But it does matter because when you go out to your on-site event, to these vendor events, to these markets,  you have the opportunity to test your hypothesis. A hypothesis is an educated scientific guess of who your potential customer could be or your potential client. Who are they? You get to test it now at these events. Again, you can do the same thing with online marketing, with Facebook ads, looking at your analytics and all your socials. But when you get to see and witness how these clients and customers are interacting with your product and services, it's real-time testing. 

It's amazing. You get to say that we can see that this particular product or service is selling wonderfully with this age group. We can see that this age group or this type of individual is buying these types of products, and so that's exactly what was happening at our little booth there. We had some products that were priced a little bit higher because we had collaborated with another boutique store, which we'll talk about again in another episode, all about collaboration and successful collaborations.  So we had basically shared the booth with her, and we could see that the higher price point items were attracting a certain type of customer, more of a mature customer. Again, the styling of the products was a bit more elegant and more for potentially somebody with different tastes in decor.  And then we had our products which were priced a little bit lower, but we're also more simplified decor.  That's basically giving you guys a delay of the land of what happened last weekend.

We could see in real-time who was buying what and who was buying something else. We could see that some customers were buying both,  but you could also see that some customers were leaning towards one or the other. And again, real-time testing, knowing that we're at the same location, knowing we're at the same booth, knowing that no other variables are there except for the product itself, and saying, have we hit our ideal market? Can we take that information into the future, either with how we promote on social, how we promote on Facebook ads, or which feature events do we attend?  

So understanding your customer becomes even more solidified when you go to your on-site events. You also get to understand the psychology of purchasing while you see them purchasing in action versus going online and purchasing. You have to go and follow along with their mouse, but at the same time, you don't get to have those conversations even if you were to get an app on your online website that would potentially track their mouse and see where they're going with their mouse, and then see how they make the purchasing decisions.  You still are missing a component called conversation, which happens quite successfully when you're at one of these onsite events.

The third reason why you should consider attending an on-site event even if it is not profitable in regards to monetary gains at the end of the event: You get to network with other businesses.  My philosophy, I always say there's enough sand in the sandbox to play.  There's enough room in business for multiple players, even if you have another vendor that's selling a similar product, there is no problem with that. There's lots of opportunity for everyone.  But what you get to do is you get to network, you get to meet other vendors,  other businesses,  you get to communicate with them about collaborating in the future potentially,  or understanding where their pain points are,  potentially getting contacts for other services, and I'll give you a real-life example again. I was chatting with one of our booth neighbors, and we were talking about accounting, and you know how important numbers can be. Having your accounting in check and having your bookkeeping in check is very, very important, and we've had Laura on the show in the past who's spoken about that.  

So she was going to hand me her bookkeeper's phone number.  I get a referral and she's already done the homework, she's worked with this bookkeeper. And quite successfully, is now prepared to pass over her contact.  Now, instead of me going ahead and doing the work of vetting somebody, of course, you are going to vet them to make sure that they're congruent with your business and your work ethic and all the rest of it, but having a referral for somebody who has successfully been able to work with your fellow vendor, your fellow business colleague helps you take the next step to interview and hiring.  And that's again, a real-life example of what happened over the last week.  I was able to network with other businesses who in turn are helping by sharing resources. 

The value and networking, I'm going to give you another real-life example of why going to a vendor event, an onsite event is so important for your business because you never know who you're going to meet at one of these events. And again, I apologize if you have heard the story but I'm going to tell you the story about how we got in front of Walmart without even going to a trade show or signing up on an online platform to be discovered.  We were at a vending event. We were at an on-site event for our products, and we were selling our products. We had somebody from the corporate office at Walmart, she used to work there and she said: Oh my gosh, they're looking for products just like this. You need to get in contact with them. They are looking for suppliers who can provide Walmart prices to the community.  And of course, we were ecstatic to take up the opportunity because that was the entire reason why we started Also Sophia.

We wanted to make products for underrepresented cultures, and we wanted to ensure that they were priced appropriately so everyone could enjoy the holiday season.  And of course, we took the opportunity because that was the vision for the company. We always wanted to provide economically sound products to diverse cultures. When Walmart was like, we would like to introduce you to somebody that can help you in front of a buyer, we said, yes. If we had not attended that on-site event back in 2019,  then we would have never had the opportunity to get in front of Walmart.

We had to go and put ourselves out there at one of these onsite events. You never know who's going to walk by, especially if you're in a situation where you're in a mall, where it's a public space, it's not a ticketed event. Not to say ticketed events are not good. They can be good, and we can even touch on that in this episode.  But if you're in a public space and you know that you can have anybody walk by your booth and you've created your product for a specific community or a specific market that there could be a connection point for you, and you could get in front of the right players to help get you to the next step in your business.

So that is the third reason for networking.  And when you go to these events, you should be taking some time away from your booth if possible, I know it can be busy, and you should go and mingle with the other businesses.  Introduce yourself, tell them what business you're from, ask them about their business, and build that connection. And then ensure that you follow up on social. Go and connect with them on social. If you're on Instagram or LinkedIn or Facebook,  wherever your community lies, whatever social platform you've decided to build your community on.  I know a lot of people are into Clubhouse recently to build their community.  So wherever you decide to connect with your network online,  make sure you do that after the networking event. Make sure you get their social handles and you connect.  

That was three reasons, I'm going to include the fourth, and the reason why is because want to speak a little bit about ticketed events versus non ticketed events and the value of both. I actually think we could again do a separate episode, but we won't, because think it's really important to touch on this now. When you sign up for an event, you need to look at a few things. One being, is your event going to capture your target audience or your target customer as you have defined it before the event? You obviously have created your product and your service for somebody specific, and we've spoken about your ideal audience and your ideal customer multiple times in past episodes.

So if you're new to Boss It Club or Boss It Podcast, make sure you go back and listen to the past episodes on your ideal customer or your ideal client.  The reason why you need to be diligent in picking the right type of event is that you want to make networking, you want to test your hypothesis about who your ideal customer is. You also want to survey your customers. You want to talk to them.  You want to get the right network, the right community if you're going to network with other businesses, and perhaps you will reach a new customer base. 

We've spoken about all of those things in this episode, but you have to remember if you've placed your product in the wrong event then it's not going to help any of those things that we want to achieve during our event.  We haven't even spoken about sales. Obviously, we want you to sell if it's a vending event for you to sell and market your product.  Obviously, if you're going to a trade show, you're not actively selling to an individual customer, you'll be selling to a business.  So that is also a customer of yours is the business, it's B to B, business to business.

These events that I'm speaking about our business to customer, so B to C.  Sometimes these B to C events will have tickets.  So Also Sophia, the product-based business, the two events over the last two weeks. One was ticketed and one was in a mall, so it was free to enter. Both were successful, both drew in different audience members and both had benefits.  The ticketed events I find personally are great because individuals who attend the ticketed events, they've paid money to enter with the intention of purchasing generally. It depends if they're buying their ticket for something else. So for example,  the event where we were discovered by Walmart, was a ticketed event.   Obviously, it was by chance that a ticket-holder had gone in and was part of Walmart. That's why you never know who is in your network that will push you to the next step in your business.

The reason why it's important to say ticketed events could be worth your time is because one, they've really zoned in on who the target audience is. So if you know who your target audience is, and you're saying without a doubt, I know it's that community, I know it's that demographic, and your ticketed events are your audience, that might be worth the investment.  Although your foot track may be less, it could be more,  it depends on how big the event is going to be.  It also depends if the event is meant specifically for shopping or is it meant for also other attractions, say it's a lecture, say it's a conference of some sort, say it's entertainment.

Despite what the tickets are for in the end,  generally ticketed events are really zoning into who your customer is. If you are well-defined on who your customer is,  I do think that you should look at doing ticketed events. With that said, if you're a brand new business and you do not know who your customer is and you're trying to figure it out, I would avoid ticketed events. You might be better off starting with events that are open more to the public because then you can really test.  

Now again, you may not see the return on investment from a monetary perspective or ticketed event,  because you're still testing your market out. But specifically for events that are non-ticket, are free to enter free admission, sometimes the customers are there just to browse and for anybody who is listening to the podcast, I just did air quotes for browsing because if you're buying a ticket and you are already psychologically prepared to spend money to go shopping, you're purchasing your ticket to go into the store.  You know, without a doubt, you need to get all your presence for the event.  The customer psychology is already primed and ready to purchase. Your ticketed events might actually give you more return on your investment because the customer is to already purchase versus a non-ticketed event, the psychology might be just to go and look around.  

I know that's a really,  really basic way of putting it but  I want you to just keep in mind that if you put yourself in your customer's shoes and you were to buy a ticket to an event if it's simply to go shopping, the more likely will be there to purchase, versus if they don't purchase a ticket and they can go in for free admission, they can just go browse.

But again, like I'm saying, if you don't have a well-defined audience,  it might be worth your time then and go attend events that do not have a ticket because you want to survey a bigger and broader community.

I hope that wasn't too confusing.  The point is these on-site events are amazing. You do have to make sure you take the opportunity to network.  You have to take the opportunity to showcase your products and survey your customers on-site.  And then, of course,  you might have the potential of even meeting a new audience that you didn't even know your products were attracting, your services were attracting.  You never know who you're going to meet at these events.

Again, I told you about the Walmart example. That was at a ticketed event, but again, that was somebody who was attending the event and sell the products. So you never know who you're going to meet and when you're going to meet them. We can likely go into this topic again about ticketed and non-ticketed events, and when you should attend one versus the other.  But in a nutshell, we spoke about that today too,  that if your audience is well-defined, it might be worth considering an event that's ticketed.  I know we also spoke about when you should attend a ticketed event and a non-ticketed event.  Lightly, you should attend a ticketed event when your audience is well-defined when your target audience is well defined,  versus if you're still figuring out who is your ideal audience. It's best to attend an event that may not have a ticket associated with it.

I really hope this information was helpful.  If you have any questions at all, I know it can be very confusing at the beginning especially when you have so many opportunities for on-site events,  you have to always consider the cost of the table and how to make back your table costs.  But I think we'll save that conversation for our future episodes.  I will definitely put together some information for you, perhaps a checklist of some sort,  because I do know some individuals are very confused about where to market and who to market to.  And again, I do not want you to think that onsite events, vending events, on-site marketplaces are a waste of your time.  I know there's a lot of effort and energy that goes into it, but you do gain a lot as well.  

Okay, guys, that's all for today. and I hope to see you next week, same time, same place. And remember,  make a plan and take action, and yes, you can have it all.  Talk to you later. Bye.