I attend quite a few events. Even at great ones (take BlogWorld for example), exhibit space is littered with free swag, booth babes and promotional offers used to suck us all in. We wanted to do something a little different at Social Fresh Charlotte… help others.
Phonebooth is a phone solution for SMBs with Free and OnDemand ($20 a month unlimited use) options. When we attend events, we love taking a phonebooth (the good old fashioned red ones) for pictures and brand awareness. Our goal at events is to meet potential customers and build strategic relationships, but this time around, at Social Fresh Charlotte, we wanted to really engage and add value to the interaction. We had our phonebooth wired up with a business phone and a Phonebooth account configured to call several experts.
As an attendee… you step in the booth, you pick up the phone and you’re talking to one of several extremely bright folks about a problem you’re trying to solve for your business. The video below is a quick summary of what we did with a few call excerpts.
Check out a full conversation below between Jason Peck and Tim Hayden.
So what was our main takeaway?
Focus on value, not the product
One common mistake I see from marketers and exhibitors is that the focus is usually on the product. Here are all of our widgets or here is a really cool feature. Yes, these are important… but what is in it for me? Our goal as a sponsor for Social Fresh Charlotte was to facilitate helpful conversations by using our product and not force feeding our key message architecture or value propositions to attendees. We plan to take this concept and continue to build an evergreen community for small and medium sized businesses to get advice from experts in their relevant industries. We won’t be pushing or selling our product while we do this, but we’ll be using our product to make it happen.And now to the videos
Check out all The Great Phonetree of Knowledge videos and we hope that you enjoy watching and listening to the conversations. Please let us know what you think on Twitter @phonebooth and if you do happen to have a genuine need for a small business phone solution for 1-100 people… you can get it online at phonebooth.com. 🙂