Trade Show Marketing - How to Maximize Your Impact

Personal one-on-one contact is the ideal method to interact with and gather intelligence about other companies, as well as gain valuable inside information about customers, prospects, suppliers, and partners. Trade shows provide an invaluable opportunity to network and develop relationships with others in your industry and are an extremely cost-effective outlet to showcase your products and services. Shows put you in contact with large numbers of customers and potential clients, whether you participate as a prospector or an exhibitor.

Pre-show Planning

In your pre-show planning, you should consider the following:

Pre-show marketing can be a valuable way to attract your current and potential customers to your booth. For example:

n Press Release: Press releases are a cost-effective way to contact clients and prospects through your industry trade associations and press.

n Pre-Show Mailing: These mailings should be sent to the most promising prospective, pre-registered attendees and your past and current customers.

n E-Mail Announcement: If possible link the e-mail to the show’s official web site. More than ever attendees are turning to the Internet to plan the exhibits they want to visit.

n Telephone Calls: These calls provide a one-on-one opportunity to invite your current customers, hot prospects, and even inactive customers to your booth to encourage increased traffic and potential sales at the show.

While at the show, check out the competition’s booth displays. What sales strategies tend to be successful? What is eye-catching? Which exhibits encourage you to enter and engage sale personnel? Why? What makes them stand out from the crowd? How will your products meet the needs of the customer? Show how your products compare to the competition.

n Look for the badges of your targeted customers to get names and company information.

n Stay alert and talk with others.

n Be brief.

n Carry your business cards with you wherever you go.

n Write important notes on the back of cards immediately.

n Look professional.

n Don’t try to sell your products or services, just try to set up a future appointment.

n Establish needs, determine the potential client’s level of interest, and confirm a call back/appointment.

Being a booth exhibitor provides you an opportunity to reaffirm existing business relationships and to identify new customers and potential partners. While at the show, you can check out the competition and build awareness about your company. To maximize your impact, it is a good idea to obtain a copy of the last show’s attendance list and identify those companies you want to interact with at the show. A good way to reach these companies is through a pre-show mailing.

What to include in a pre-show mailing:

n Company and product information.

n Names of the people who will be at the booth.

n A map and floor diagram of your exhibit space, showing location and booth number.

n Attention-getting devices, so that prospects will remember your company and visit your booth. This could be something as simple as including a return mailer that has to be turned in to receive a giveaway item or to attend a special briefing.

n An opportunity to request your brochure or have a follow-up call, in case they miss you or are not attending.

At the show, the presentation of your booth is crucial for attracting potential customers. It is best to work out the details before you arrival, since setup can be a hectic time. This should be done at a pre-show meeting that should be used to identify your goals and objectives, set guidelines for interaction, develop company literature, and decide on giveaway items. Remember that anything you pass out will in the end reflect on you. If you give away a 10-cent pen that stops writing after a few days, then your company might also be perceived to lack quality. You are far better off spending a little more money on the right people than going the cheap route and hitting anyone and everyone. Remember it’s quality not quantity of contacts that matters. While at the show, plan to arrive early, work hard, and stay late. Be courteous and helpful to visitors, and be a good listener. You might think about treating big customers with extra attention, possibly by hosting a cocktail party.

n Stand up the entire time.

n Assign booth coverage times and responsibilities.

n Pay attention to potential customers immediately.

n Cover your booth 100 percent of the time.

n Have lead sheets to gather information from qualified prospects; fill these out immediately.

n Reserve giveaways for qualified leads.

n Photos, brochures, your business cards.  A picture album of success stories.  Be creative.

n Make a home video, bring along a t.v., and run the video (people, faces, people, faces, ADS) on a loop.

n Make a PowerPoint presentation.

n Get the table display.

n Have a drawing - the business card in the fish bowl thing. If you walk out of there with 100 new email addresses for your ezine, that’s gold.

n The candy bowl – have something people can come by and pick up free, but be original. Maybe at a trade show what people are really looking for is a "wipe it" packet to refresh their grubby hands, or a pen to write with (with your name on it), or a single rose, just 'cuz, or a booklet of inspirational quotes, or a coupon for one of your ebooks free .... I'd consider it a worthy challenge to figure out something besides "candy" for heaven's sake.

n On the other hand, chocolate is chocolate

Introduce yourself with a firm handshake, briefly tell the person about your business, ask open-ended questions, and establish a dialog to determine if this prospect is going to be a quality lead. Provide the customer with your promotional material and arrange a time to get together, either during and/or after the show.

Trade shows are intended to generate leads that will produce qualified prospects and eventually sales. Ironically, few sales are actually launched and closed on the show floor. It takes good planning and follow-through to establish the dialogue, relationship, and agreement needed to win a sale. At the show, develop a profile of your potential client. This way you can easily determine if this person will qualify as one of your targeted prospects. This profile (scanning badges, filling out lead forms, or collecting business cards and writing information on the back) will help you to capture the information needed to follow up and produce a valuable sales opportunity.

After the show, or at the end of each show day, send prospects informational kits about your company and follow up in a few days to make sure prospects got the material and to explore ways to meet their needs. As soon as you return from the show, send a follow-up letter to your entire pre-show mailing list. Then send your most promising leads a more detailed mailing about your company, its products and services, as well as following up with a few old-fashioned-telephone calls. Some type of follow-up letter or e-mail including links to your Web site should be sent to every lead generated from the event.

Post-show follow-through is an important step in the success of this and future events. It allows everyone to share what he or she heard and learned. It also helps to ensure that leads are followed up. Those leads and resulting sales are the real payoff and are a measure of an effective trade-show performance