Last week we exhibited at our first trade show. We announced the launch of Cell a House at the National Association of Realtors Mid Year conference and expo in Washington, D.C.

As an entrepreneur and small business owner, you need to be really selective about where you will use your marketing money. We can’t afford to just throw money out and see what sticks. Well, I can definitely say, this soon after exhibiting, that we made the right choice here.

Development, and the concept of Cell a House began before I started building Mobivity. It was research into Cell a House that led me to build an easier way for businesses to get onto a short code quickly, easily and inexpensively. The project was in beta for a long time while we worked on our main mobile marketing and SMS engine.

Not sure when we were going to officially launch Cell a House, we didn’t want to commit to doing this trade show too early. Eventually we got back to finishing development, and grabbed one of the last 3 booths at the expo. Within a few weeks time, we put together all the materials we needed to be able to promote the service, and demo it to agents on the trade show floor.

Given that we were one of the last 3 exhibitors, we didn’t have the pick of the litter when it came to choosing booth location. Well as it turns out, we got a tremendous amount of traffic. The show ended at 2pm on Friday, and we were still showing the product to attendees up until the closing bell!

We made many valuable contacts, and probably did over 200 demos of the system for agents. Even though there were 2 similar products at the show, it was clearly Cell a House that the agents would remember as the product of choice. (Blog post on this subject coming up next.)

In fact, one demo led to our press release being put on a very large real estate news site, which brought hundreds of visitors to our website. Many of those visitors signed up for our free trial and/or became paying customers, and the phones were ringing off the hook.

I have done trade shows in the past, and I have never really felt that it was worth the time and expense until now. Being able to take out our mobile phones, and show them this product right there on the trade show floor was powerful. Seeing that “Ah-Ha!” look in the eyes of the prospect was extremely gratifying. They were getting it. They saw how text messaging, MMS, and the mobile web could give them that competitive edge in this lagging market.

I need to thank the Mobile Visions’ team for an excellent job throwing this together last minute, and pulling it off with such ease.

We’re all looking forward to the follow-ups this week, and continuing our successful launch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 7:46 am and is filed under News, Mobile Marketing, SMS, Startup. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.