I love Mopro - they built my site, did a great job, and continue to try to help me market myself in the online universe into which I was not born. As a non-native, I need all the help they can give me. Recently, I used a feature from them to see where visitors to my site discovered me; what websites and google searches they used to find Thin Air Productions.
Surprisingly, one major source was a blog from 2011 which, as far as I can tell, is now inactive. If you want to skip to the end and read the blog in it's entirety, just Google a line from the excerpt below and it will take you there. For those who want to experience the spell-binding suspense of reading it in serial form, here is the first installment.
Trade Show Magician Fees
As of this writing, an experienced trade show magician can run between $5000 and $10,000, and even higher. This does not usually include expenses.
Having said that, I should take some time to share what I’ve learned about using a magician in your booth. It can be the most productive traffic building tool you can implement, and it can also be a total bust. Much depends on you doing your homework before contracting the individual.
As a Director of Marketing for a few different companies in a career that expanded more than 40 years I had seen many magicians, good and bad, on the tradeshow floor.
My first exposure came in 1987 at the National Office Machine Dealers show, in Chicago. The show had two magicians. They both knocked my socks off. Amazingly I can still remember the names of the company they represented - Labelon and Burroughs. I guess that is the ultimate testimony to their individual abilities. These guys were fun, engaging, and skillful. Their booths were jam-packed with show visitors and the way they weaved the corporate message into their magic shows.
As a marketing professional I saw the entire picture. The booth was loaded with potential customers. They were having fun. And, they were hearing about the company and its products. I watched as show visitors followed each of these gentlemen into the booth like the people of Hamelin following the Pied Piper. At that time, my accumulated marketing knowledge told me that this was the singularly most effect tool a trade show exhibitor could employ. It was a device I knew I had to use in my own booth at upcoming shows.
Three months later I dug out their business cards and called for a quote. Although their rates were competitive, both were more expensive than I would have thought. For some reason my marketing persona got lost. Instead of measuring their rates against the results I saw them produce, I was thinking in terms of an expense rather than as a return on my investment. This was a huge mistake as you shall soon see. (To be continued.....)
