Making Your Exhibit Stand Out

How Staedtler combined real-time sketching with short educational videos to raise awareness of visual note-taking among teachers and students.

The Problem

Every year the Staedtler team exhibits at The Education Show, a national trade show for teachers and educators. The conference is the largest education trade show in Australia, and an enormous marketing opportunity for Staedtler to showcase its products.

The Staedtler marketing team usually run a competition in order to attract visitors to their stall (“guess how many pencils in the jar and you win them all!”). In 2018, the team decided to try something different: they wanted to capitalise on the growing interest in sketchnoting, or visual note-taking. The problem was that their target audience didn’t really know what the term meant.

At a Glance

Project: Education Expo + Video Series
Client: Staedtler Pacific
Delivered: September 2018
Duration: 6 months
Categories: Education, Illustration, Graphic Recording, Explainer Videos

See the videos

A Process for Excellence

Discovery
During this phase, our famous Empathy Forecast workshop will help us understand your audience, your key message, as well as getting everyone aligned.
Concept
Our professional scriptwriting team will work with you to turn insights from the initial workshop into a snappy script that communicates your key points.
Create
In this stage, we explore character development, themes, and visual storytelling, captured as a storyboard for you to review and help us refine.
Magic
Once the words and pictures and signed off, we’ll book a date in our studio where voiceover, music, sound effects, and post-production animations come together.
Launch
In this final step, we’ll deliver your finished product and any supporting assets, and optionally work with you on a roadmap for hosting and promotion.

Our Approach

Sketch Group’s founder, Matthew Magain, is one of the pioneers in the field of sketchnoting. His work has been featured in the best-selling The Sketchnote Handbook, the definitive title on the topic, and he has taught dozens of sketchnoting workshops in Australia and overseas.

Our Solution

We helped Staedtler educate their target audience about sketchnoting by developing content for four channels:

• Signage to decorate the Staedtler exhibit
• An A4-sized booklet to hand out to delegates, full of examples and handy tips on what sketchnoting is, why it’s so useful, and how to create your own
• A series of free “how to sketchnote” workshops throughout the two-day conference
• After the trade show was over, Staedtler expanded the engagement to include a collection of sketch videos explaining the what, why and how of sketchnoting for use on Staedtler’s social media channels.

The Outcome

While exact engagement metrics at the trade fair are unavailable, anecdotally the team reflected that having the reference sheets and mini workshops meant that more delegates approached the stand and inquired about sketchnoting and Staedtler products than in previous years.

Client Feedback

Thanks so much for your time and efforts on the stand over the two days, it was very much appreciated. We certainly saw the positive effect you had on our stand and hopefully you managed to gain something from this experience as well.
Adrian Aliberti Head of Marketing, Staedtler Australia

Ready to get started? Let’s chat.

1300 SKETCH 1300 753 824 or Get in touch online