BStartup Show 11/11

On Friday Henrietta and I visited The Business Startup Show at Earl’s Court. As a new business we were excited the see what the show had to offer us in terms of advice and help with the challenges we currently face in our business. Although we do have business accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and we write both blogs and newsletters we felt that, having reviewed what was on offer, social networking was what we wanted advice about. With this in mind we had booked a Smart Marketing 1-2-1.

We arrived in time to have a quick look and assess where we would like to go after our 1-2-1. It was only 10.30am but the show was already busy with two long queues of people waiting to get in and get their name badges. One exhibitor told us that there had been 16,000 visitors the day before. The show provided so much in the way of stands, workshops, seminars and talks and we met some great people while we were there. Sadly we missed the talk given by Penny Power from ecademy…

Having arrived at our Smart Marketing we sat down with the representative of the company who had volunteered to give us 30 minutes of advice. It became apparent quickly that he was not there to give us advice because he had been sold the idea of doing 1-2-1s as an opportunity to sell his product so he told us, a little defensively. We were speaking to a sales representative rather than an expert. We suggested that what worked with our business and what would most definitely work with his was to give a little bit of information free of charge so that people feel that you are interested in helping them and then, either on the spot or at a later date, they would return and pay for your services. He suggested that we create Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and write blogs - things that absolutely everybody is doing now and so we left it at that..

Overall the show was a success in terms of the meeting with companies that will potentially be able to support our business in the future and we met many people to whom the show had proved the valuable source of information it promised to be. Looking forward to next year already… we won't need advice on emarketing by then...