First of all, there is no substitute for a face-to-face meeting with clients and potential customers. In order to bring your brand to the limelight of your market it is essential to include a trade show exhibit into your marketing mix. They offer an excellent promotional balance of traditional elements like banner stands and giveaways with innovational components like social media and video conferencing. To keep your brand awareness in front of a live consumer audience, it is essential for you to engage in trade shows.
If you consider to take part in trade shows you should know about some advantages which this type of marketing has to offer for your company:
Sustainable Impact
Trade shows offer an effective way of building a remarkable and eventful connection with your targeted customers that lasts way over the actual event.
Beyond Regular Face-To-Face Possibilities
An event like that does not just offer the face-to-face experience but also gives you the opportunity to present your product live or create web based relations and establishing a network.
Lead Generation
Out of the office it can be challenging to generate new leads. Trade shows offer a great chance to let the leads come to you. Every closed deal on a show means achieved revenue. This represents the biggest reason and gain you can get out of an event like that. Another advantage that on-site selling entails is the fact that it can measure the success of taking part in an exhibition in a very precise and good way.
Trade shows are a very traditional way of promotional activity. Sales leads coming from this type of life marketing event are the most qualified you can get. Regardless, many companies are wondering if they should follow this strategy since trade show marketing is known for causing the highest cost per lead, exceeding $250.
So to wring out every bit of value out of your marketing budget that you invest in trade show participation, you should make sure to be aware of our best practices and ideas to make your next trade show exhibit a winning marketing investment. Furthermore it is important to stand out on an exhibition. On a trade show you will not just be compared with your competitors but with every other exhibitor. In order to gain a long-term impression at all visitors of your booth, check out our Top 10 of ideas, practices and tactics for having a successful trade show:
- Stay “Plugged In” – Access to the Internet at your booth is an essential factor. There are a lot of reasons for that. You not just want your representors but also any visitor to have a working internet connection, in order to run presentations of your company and products, using social media platforms or support your on-site selling with generating the needed paperwork.
Social Media: Offer little giveaways to customers when they post something related to your social media account, e.g. taking a picture in front of your company logo or a specific display and upload it on Instagram using your company’s hashtag or tagging you in the post. Use an event hashtag on social media platforms also to let people know where they find you.
- Call-To-Action – Speaking about Social Media, create a clear call-to-action and a metric in order to track and measure your success on the trade show participation. Examples for that can be the mentioned hashtag usage on social media platforms or encourage people to download your app or visit your homepage that you promote in your booth.
- Entertainment – Use humor. Do something that surprises people and breaks expectations. Moving things in the booth gain attention. Offer entertaining games (e.g. contest or raffle) with some desirable prizes that gain attention from the visitors. Thus you generate a memorable impression at your potential customers. Don’t give away trinkets though. Customers are looking for something useful. Think about something they can use in their everyday life like bottle openers or phone screen cleaner. In this way they are reminded of you every time they use it. In addition let the participants fill out forms (use tablets for that in order to make the process fast and standing out) as kind of a requirement to take part in the game with their personal information like name, address and e-mail.
- Send A Marketing Person To Run Your Booth – Employees staffing your booth should be aware of how to attract customer’s attention and be representative. They should ask open-ended questions and should adjust to the respective person they are talking to. As soon as they break the ice with prospective clients or customers and invite them into your booth send them over to sales persons who may stay in the back and explain them all about your products and can answer their questions.
- Pre Planning – Send out invitations to customers and clients and run general advertising to promote your booth at the show. Create a desire to come by telling them about upcoming new products and potential benefits for them. Set appointments for the event with people that seems to be interested in your product and want to meet you in person.
- Define Your 30 Second Pitch – 30 Seconds is what you have to tell visitors you’re talking to about your company, product or whatever you want to spread among potential customers before you lose their attention. So before going to a trade show make sure to have an attractive and effective 30 second pitch.
- Standing Out Advertising – Think about a cooperation with a local newspaper and let your advertising be wrapped around it as well as other media sponsors of the event.
- Pick An Offbeat Show – Sometimes it’s a good approach to pick an “off-topic” show to stand out at the event. Make sure to still pick something qualitative where the demographics of your targeted audience is correct, in case to reach your target market
- Don’t give out too much literature – Most of the literature you give out to prospective customers doesn’t even make the way home. Visitors don’t want to carry around a lot of stuff at the event. Rather tell them that they get all the information they need or might want to receive on a convenient way via e-mail. If you not already have that information through a form they filled out you then get that information on a very discreet way.
- Follow-Up Plan – Keep track of any germane information and what was promised to the client in your lead notes. Things like, “follow up immediately with phone call” or “requested product brochure and wants pricing” so that your sales representatives know exactly what the customer was promised. Be sure to record any information that will assist you or your sales team in prompt and detailed follow up after the show.
A successful trade show is dependent upon proper planning, execution and follow-up. Even more important is the positive attitudes and communication among your booth staff. Give your attendees something to remember, and if they have fun doing it, you are sure to be a success!
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