ProMatDX 101: Getting Started with the Digital Experience
By Alex Batty, MHI Marketing Communications Coordinator | @mhi_alex
Welcome to ProMatDX!
If you’ve been with us for ProMat events in the past, this year is obviously going to look a little different. We’re working to provide that same great ProMat experience… we just have to package it a little differently due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
If you’re new to ProMat or exhibiting with MHI events, welcome! We’re excited to have you onboard.
We’re all in a little bit of uncharted territory here, so we thought we’d offer a quick start guide to what ProMatDX is, what it offers, and how it’s different (and the same) to in-person ProMat events. We’ll be periodically writing posts like this to go more in-depth on need-to-know information, but we didn’t want to throw too much at you at once. Let’s get started!
What is ProMatDX?
ProMatDX stands for the ProMat Digital Experience, and it’s MHI’s new digital event designed to give manufacturing and supply chain professionals cutting-edge education, a place to engage and connect with each other, and solution sourcing with companies like yours.
ProMatDX combines the power of ProMat’s exclusive audience of manufacturing and supply chain buyers with the latest digital event and lead matchmaking technology. Exhibiting at ProMatDX is your unrivaled opportunity to showcase your solutions, connect with new business prospects and generate high-quality leads during the most important week of 2021 for the manufacturing and supply chain industry—and it launches April 12.
One other important thing to know about ProMatDX: the term we’re using for companies who are participating as solution providers is sponsor. If you’ve been with us in the past, we usually use exhibitor, but we wanted to differentiate between the in-person event and this new virtual event, and language is an important part of that. But just to prevent confusion, if you read “sponsor” it means the same thing as “exhibitor” in past events.
How is ProMatDX different than regular ProMat?
Besides the switch from in-person to virtual, we’ve added a bunch of new features and offerings to ProMatDX to help sponsors and attendees connect and find solutions.
Sponsor Showcase
The heart of the sponsor experience is going to be the sponsor showcase. This is the virtual analog to what your physical booth space would have been. Here you’ll host everything an attendee will need to know about your company and where you can promote your company and product offerings, as well as sharing content with attendees like white papers, product collateral, promotional videos, and marketing messaging. Attendees will also be able to “drop a business card” virtually at your showcase. Check out all the info on showcases in the marketing kit at promatshow.com/marketingkit
Sponsor Packages
Your sponsor package goes hand in hand with your showcase and is the virtual analog to booth size. We’re offering four different packages, each with different offerings. Rather than trying to explain in a very wordy way, you can get an at-a-glance visual depiction of the tiers at promatshow.com/marketingkit/promatDXpromos#digitalPackages
But how do we connect with attendees if they can’t walk by our booth?
Ah yes, the toughest nut to crack of the virtual experience. We’ve teamed up with some awesome vendors to create an online matchmaking platform that uses AI-driven recommendations to match your company with attendee profiles and schedule meetings during ProMatDX. These matches will allow you to research buyer profiles before the show and prepare your team for targeted engagement. Your package comes with a certain number of representatives to engage with and offer meeting invites to attendees that have opted-in to the matchmaking platform. Attendees can also request meetings with Sponsor Representatives based on their custom schedule or drop a virtual business card.
We are also providing several chat and forum options to create the virtual analog to just stopping to chat with someone in the aisles at an in-person show.
I’ve never done a virtual trade event before…
That’s why we have ShowProDX! We offer ShowPro every year as our exhibitor education offering and this year we have tailored it not only to being a solution provider in a virtual event, but to learning more about maximizing your ROI in ProMatDX specifically. We’re hosting a series of webinars in Q1 of 2021, and you can get all the details on that at promatshow.com/showpro.
So that’s been a lot of information thrown at you, so we’ll wrap it up here for now, but tune in in January for more content about the sponsor experience and what you need to know. If you have questions in the meantime, all of our information is up on the promatshow.com website in the Sponsor section. We recommend checking out our Marketing Kit and the Prospectus for to see everything we’re offering. And of course, you can contact us here at MHI at any time. For contact info for our Sales team (our resident SMEs on ProMatDX) visit promatshow.com/exhibitors and scroll down.
