A great trade show experience builds relationships and creates deep, lasting interactions. It’s easy for agencies to say they’ll do this, but we’ve seen a lot of haphazard strategies and static displays in our time.
This guide will break event-based marketing and PR down for you, step-by-step so that you can leave your next conference feeling great about the investment you made to attend. The good news is the odds are in your favor: according to a recent survey of professional marketers, 70% agreed that marketing at in-person events tends to have the biggest payoff (at least for B2B).
- If lead generation is your “WHY,” consider putting a marketing person in the booth, in addition to customer service or salespeople. Keep in mind that the priorities and skillsets of salespeople (cultivating prospects and converting them to customers), and those of marketing people (generating leads) are often quite different. Having multiple skill sets available allows you to better manage your booth traffic. Marketing people can focus on gathering leads, customer service or salespeople can focus on qualifying prospects, and salespeople can work with customers who are ready to buy.
- Limit giveaways to those who give you their contact information. In other words, try to avoid giving marketing collateral to unqualified leads. More generally, it’s important to quickly qualify any attendees coming into your booth, so you can spend your time wisely.
- After you return from a tradeshow, it’s critical to promptly set up a post-mortem debrief meeting with members of your sales and marketing teams. It’s important to get a 360-degree download of the show: successes, failures, shortcomings, the good, the bad and the mediocre. The reality is that sometimes your best ideas may fall flat when put into practice or your team is forced to improvise or adjust for one reason or another. Post-mortem debriefs are helpful to identify any lessons learned and action items that need to be taken to improve the success of the next tradeshow.
- There are some conferences and trade shows that are must-attends because they’re consistently successful: CES, SXSW, etc. These types of events are gimmes, in that you know there will be the promotion in place on their end to draw the speakers and media outlets you want to see at these things. But if the conference is new, or is only in its first few years, it can be difficult to tell if it will be worth your while…this is where the points below come into play.
- Plan for every scenario you can think of – from the ideal to the awful – and come up a few canned responses. Practice with your co-workers, one acting as a salesperson the other as the consumer, and rehearse these lines. Improv at your will to sharpen your wits even more. The goal here is to become a master at leading the consumer through a pitch.
Planning for a trade show doesn’t start a month in advance. It doesn’t start two months in advance, either. In fact, it can take anywhere from six months to a year of planning to do it right. Trade show marketing is a very strategic process. You have to determine your strategy and messaging and make sure everything relates back to your business goals. This includes all of your online and offline promotions as well as any handouts and giveaways you distribute. It’s no simple task and not every trade show is the same. This article hopefully helps you how to apply inbound approaches to your trade show marketing efforts.
– If you need professional assistance from concept to execution of your tradeshow marketing plans, contact us today for a FREE initial rendering of your booth design.