Recently updated on March 29th, 2023
Trade Show Marketing Ideas & Tips To Help Improve The Event
While trade shows can be an effective way to bring in sales leads, many people believe that generating them can be difficult.
This shouldn’t be true if you put in the right amount of preparation and thought into putting your presentation together.
There are a variety of trade show marketing ideas that you should be aware of when you’re putting together your trade show. By doing so, you’ll be able to maximize your return on investment (ROI) and bring in as many sales as possible.
Trade shows are one of the most effective ways of presenting your business to the public.
While they can often require a more significant amount of time and effort than many other marketing strategies, they allow you to offer a more personalized image of your company.
This means that they can provide more sales leads and conversions than many other forms of marketing. Alongside this, they can help you to receive feedback from potential end existing customers, which you can then implement over the long-term.
While this may not have an immediate impact on your sales, it could mean that your overall strategy will adapt to market demands, which should have a domino effect on improving your market share.
Trade shows can also let you network with a variety of suppliers and business contacts, which can also prove useful.
To take advantage of these benefits, you’ll need to ensure that your trade show booth and presentation is optimized for success.
It should be noted, however, that this should take a significant amount of time and effort to do so effectively.
By using the right visuals for your business and ensuring that you have a professionally designed booth and presentation, you should be able to optimize your trade show booth’s attractiveness.
Exhibition halls can be quite large, which can make it quite challenging to stand out among all of the other booths that will be there.
This means that there are a variety of tips and ideas that you’ll need to keep in mind when designing your booth’s appearance and preparing for the show.
While each of these trade show marketing ideas will have an impact by itself, it’s worth investing in a combination of them that will provide the maximum number of benefits.
When you’re preparing, you should also ensure that you know what your goals are before the exhibition. This will help you to customize each of the below to better fit with what you’re looking for.
Alongside this, you should know who your target audience is and how to best market to them. This will play a significant role in whether certain approaches will work and which ones that you should choose.
Start Your Marketing Early
Many entrepreneurs will focus on creating the signage and presentations needed for an exhibition.
While this isn’t a bad thing to do, it’s not the only area you should think about when preparing for a trade show.
One area that many people will overlook is marketing their appearance in the weeks before the event. This can be a mistake.
Once you’ve confirmed that your business will be attending the trade show, you should then start spreading the word on your website and social media channels.
While the people who are holding the event will put a significant amount of time and effort into marketing it, this may not attract as many potential customers you as possible.
If you happen to have customers spread across the country or even the state, then this is something that will bring many of them to the show.
The main driver behind this is that many existing customers may want to put a face to the business, which means that they could come to the trade show once they know you’ll be attending.
This is something that you should want to take advantage of, as it could allow you to create better relationships with your existing client base while expanding it.
The majority of business owners will focus on improving their market share; this shouldn’t work against the ones you already have.
By promoting your upcoming appearance at the trade show, you’ll be able to invite as many of your customers as possible.
When you’re doing so, you should aim to start as early as possible. This will ensure that they have an ample amount of time to make themselves available for the event.
Learn & Improve
Nobody goes to their first trade show and creates a significant number of leads without knowing what they’re doing.
This means that you’ll need to spend a certain amount of time learning from people who have been attending the events for a significant amount of time.
By talking to people, you’ll be able to figure out what’s worked for them and what hasn’t. This will allow you to avoid any of the mistakes that they may have made when they first started attending the shows.
This is true regardless of how much preparation and effort you put into your booth. The people with the most experience at the events will always be able to teach you something new.
You should aim to speak with other business owners as early as possible during the event. By doing so, you may be able to make a few tweaks to your presentation before the show itself starts.
While the main goal of a trade show is to market your business, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be able to improve your business in other ways. Networking can be a valuable aspect of the experience, especially if there are other companies similar to yours that have been in operation for much longer.
This will help you improve not only your trade show presentation but also your overall business. You may also be able to meet contacts in companies that you may be able to do business with in the future.
This could include suppliers for parts of your product or even firms that you may end up supplying a large number of your products or services to in the long term.
As a result, you should put a certain amount of time into networking.
This doesn’t mean that you should ignore increasing your sales or learning from other business owners. Taking the time to explore the trade show could provide you with some useful tips and creative ideas on how to market your company.
Make Sure Your Signage Is Up To Par
Your signage is one of the most critical aspects of your trade booth, which is why you’ll need to spend a significant amount of time ensuring that it’s done properly and professionally. This will gain the interest of potential customers and invite them to come into your booth and speak with you.
Once this is done, you’ll be able to engage with them and start the sales process, which is the primary reason why you should be at the event. While you may only have a limited amount of space to place your signage, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get creative with it.
There are a variety of different signs that you can choose from, such as ones that hang from the roof, or a standing one that’s visible from several angles. Depending on the amount of space that you have, you should choose to have a few of these in place.
The signage itself should fit with your overall branding and should feature colors that can grab a potential customer’s attention. On top of this, it should feature a certain amount of information, such as your company’s name and what it offers.
Once you’ve brought in the customers, you can then speak with the potential customers about what the product or service does and how they can benefit from it.
Invest In Multimedia
Having a multimedia experience is highly recommended, as it can often be much more engaging than just having a sign. This could include videos, music, and much more. These can help you to create a much more positive atmosphere and help you to communicate your message when you’re speaking to potential customers.
While a screen will be the obvious way to go about this, it’s not the only way that you can do so. You could invest in video walls, and even touch screens and monitors. While a video wall may be an expensive investment, it can often provide a much larger ROI than many other pieces of signage.
This is because they can catch a person’s interest much better than other features while being able to quickly and accurately inform them about what your business does. These video walls may take a certain amount of time to design properly, but it will be worth the time and money that you spend on it.
Have An Activity
Having an activity can be an effective way for you to engage people in your booth, although this is often one of the more underutilized approaches. This could include industry quizzes and much more, with all of these helping to get people into your booth and thinking about your product.
This could help to attract much more attention from passers-by, which will further enhance your efforts at the event. By doing so, you could create a significant amount of buzz about your business while you’re there, which you’ll then be able to use to your advantage.
This could also be a great way to receive information from your potential customers, such as their name and email. These can then be used to market to them in the future and increase your overall conversions.
As there can be a variety of approaches to take, you’ll be able to customize the way you engage people while you’re there.
Have Promotional Materials & Giveaways
Just because the trade show has ended, it doesn’t mean that your marketing efforts should need to. During the event, you should aim to give out as many promotional materials as possible.
There are a variety of ways that this can be done, with the more obvious ones being to hand out flyers and other marketing materials. These should include a certain amount of information, such as the business name, what it offers, and how customers can get in contact with it.
Similar to your booth’s signage, you should spend a significant amount of time ensuring that everything is well-designed and best represents your business. You shouldn’t be limited to just flyers; instead, you could include bags, mugs, and almost anything else that you can think of.
By handing these out, you should be able to expand your company’s reach during the event. This is because the people who you give these to may become somewhat of an ambassador for your company during the event. This may result in many people asking them where they received the products, which should draw people to your booth.
There can be a variety of twists that you can put into this to help expand the benefits that you’ll see during the event. For example, you could have some form of a giveaway for people who receive the materials. This could get people to come back to your website at a later date, which could feed into your sales process and lead to more conversions.
Follow Up
Once the trade show is finished, many business owners may simply pack up their booth, go home, and start preparing for the next event. While this is recommended, there are several other things that you’ll need to do in the days or weeks following the event.
This should be done quickly, as the longer you leave it, the more likely they are to forget about you and your business. While this means spending a certain amount of time getting information from potential customers during the event, this can be worth it.
During the event, you should aim to get their email and encourage them to follow your company on social media. This will then let you follow up with them quickly and effectively, which means that you’ll be able to bring them closer and closer to a sale.
During the event, you’ll be able to make a connection with many potential customers, which is something that you should capitalize on quickly. This means that you should contact them promptly to take advantage of it.
You could be able to put a certain amount of preparation into this before the event takes place. If you’re collecting names and emails, for example, then you can create a newsletter template before the event thanking people for coming to your booth.
Once the trade show has taken place, you can add the emails to the newsletter and send it out quickly. You shouldn’t be afraid to do so within a few days of the event; you should typically send this out a day or two after the trade show is finished.
Figuring out what the best trade show marketing ideas for your business can mean that you’ll need to take a personalized approach to the event. This is because every company will target slightly different people, which means that you shouldn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach.
You should see each of the above ideas as a starting point for your trade show exhibition. By using each of these to start with, you should then be able to see a significant number of benefits when it comes to your sales and marketing strategy.
