By Hailey Vileta
Designer & Promotional Products Coordinator
It’s fitting that my first aesthetic industry show would happen under the bright lights of Vegas at the Vegas Cosmetic Surgery (VCS) show. As a FIDM graduate and visual designer, there was MUCH to appreciate and plenty of design eye candy!
Pinpoint attended VCS this year as guests and subject matter experts on loyalty marketing in the patientNOW booth. It was our honor to support the launch of their new subscription, membership, and loyalty module as they launched the release of their cloud-based software platform.
As the promotional product guru at Pinpoint, I was particularly excited to see how the trade show promotion we designed and produced for patientNOW was received by guests! After all, I played a pivotal role in the selection of the promotional product they chose, and was the one who got to make the “panic phone calls” when UPS hadn’t delivered it on time where they were supposed to! As a lover of S.W.A.G., it was evidentiary proof for me that promo products WORK! I watched several attendees rummage through their registration bags, making a “keep pile” and a “discard pile.” ALL the handouts with a promotional product attached to it made it into the “keep piles,” including patientNOW’s! It was also so fun to see attendees putting the patientNOW luggage tag and checkered silver tradeshow bags to good use on their pull cart handles and on their shoulders throughout the exhibit hall and breakout rooms.
While much of our time was spent at the booth networking and creating relationships, there were several seminars that made our “must see” list. My top two favorites were Tom Seery, CEO of Realself. He touched on a really interesting concept in his seminar titled Your Patients Have Uber Expectations: What it Takes To Meet Them. Tom challenged us to acknowledge that in today’s world, we have all been “uberized.” Businesses must think in terms of instant gratification for their customers to order to be successful in their experience-factor, digital marketing, web presence, social media platforms, reviews sites, and more. He urged practices to compare themselves against their competition in terms of their ability to engage, refresh, and provide new, up-to-date content—enabling prospects to become “familiar” with your practice without ever having stepped a foot into your office.
Another really captivating seminar was Jennifer Longtin’s It’s 2018, What’s Your Video Strategy. Her statistics regarding the difference between a person’s attention span on a website with video content vs. one without video content were staggering. Did you know visitors typically stay on a web page with video content 2.6x longer than on a page without? Furthermore, companies that link to video footage in their email marketing have a 27% higher click-through-rate than those who don’t. She went on to illustrate that the quality and the content of the video is by far the most important factor when considering implementing video into your social media platforms. Her quick tips to generating fantastic video content to engage potential patients included:
- Ensuring the doctor is in the video
- Keeping the camera moving
- Tidying your background/foreground (no messy desks/papers)
- Include a call-to-action! Close with what do you want the viewer to do with this information.
- Don’t be afraid to show your personality!
Overall this show was a very eye-opening experience to better understand the incredible niche we work within, and how much of an impact we have on people’s overall well being and personal ideals. I can’t wait to attend next year!