As I wrote in a previous post we thought it was a buoyant show this year despite the economic climate. We had certainly put a lot of effort into some new innovations to make sure that our successful formula isn’t getting tired and to make sure we are moving with the times and using some of the new platforms that are available.
We hope you noticed and approved of some of these changes. To have at least some idea of this we emailed a survey to those of you who visited. Nearly 300 of you completed this and we have shared a detailed report of the results with those of you that did. I thought it would also be great to share a brief summary of our findings with anyone else who might be interested or visits this blog!
Here they are :-
Nearly 40% of you were new to the show.
Out of all of our new innovations the one-to-one surgeries were the ones you were most aware of before the show however less than 5% of you used them.
Both our Goody Bags and Prize Hamper had a good pre show awareness of over 75% but less than 10% of you would use them again. Our Naturally Trail also had a good pre show awareness and more of you made use of it at the show(16%) and would use it again(13%).
Our two new areas, ‘Regional Food and Drink Gift’ and ‘Newcomers Area’ had a reasonable level of preshow awareness of about 60% and about a quarter of you used these areas at the show and slightly less than this would use them again. It certainly seems that there is more we could do here in terms of publicity for these areas. The same can be said for our ‘Designed & Made in Britain’ which disappointingly only 50% of you said you were aware of before the show and yet this area had the highest figures for use while at the show and for desire to use again.
We used a variety of means to publicise the show this year including platforms such as Twitter.
It was great to see that over 90% of you were aware of the show website and nearly two thirds of you found it helpful or very helpful. Nearly 40% of you had also read the blog posts on the website with half of these people finding them helpful or very helpful. Out of those of you who had read the blog posts, a third of you found them very informative, a quarter of you found them very enjoyable and about a fifth of you would recommend them to a colleague. Thank you to those readers and please do get recommending! But also if you do think there are ways these posts could be more informative or enjoyable or just meet your needs better please leave me a comment so we can learn.
It was reassuring to see how helpful you find receiving your badge and show preview by mail (85%) and also the catalogue and floor plan at the show (82%). Direct emails with show info were looked at and found to differing degrees helpful by 93% of you (perhaps this is no surprise and the survey responses were gained via direct email!)
Finally we come to our newest platform of all, Twitter. Only 22% of those who responded said they were on Twitter and of these only 7% said they followed the show @giving_living. There is certainly work for us here in terms of increasing the awareness amoungst the Twitter community of the Show and the possibility of following it. It will also be interesting to see how that figure of 22% changes by the end of next years show. Twitter certainly seems a platform that is here to stay and numbers of those getting involved can surely only grow?!
