Often, trade shows are one of the most effective ways for B2B brands to build brand awareness and market and sell their products and services. Quite often, trade shows are associated with a trade publication or professional association. Creating strong alliances with these publications and organizations can help you in trade show marketing.
If you are a startup and have few financial resources to participate in a trade show, often just attending, networking, passing out your business cards and gathering contact information from potential customers is the least expensive option for connecting with and beginning conversations with potential customers. If you have enough financial resources, you should consider paying for a booth on the trade show floor. At a minimum, you will need a table and table skirt, a retractable trade show banner, simple fact sheets/brochures and business cards. These can be quite inexpensive, however you can pay for much more elaborate display components.
The most important thing to do at a trade show is to have conversations with potential customers and collect their business cards. Now days, as a trade show exhibitor, you will either receive a list of trade show attendees and their contact information or you can scan that off of their trade show IDs. If you still need to collect their information, you can do that by collecting their business cards or entering their information on a laptop computer. You can also set up the laptop computer so that they can enter their own information. Often, an incentive for collecting contact information can be helpful. Incentives can range from food/snacks, photos with celebrities (expensive), branded promotional giveaway items or free product trials. Make sure you have thought through the best way to collect all relevant customer information at the show well before the show.
If you cannot afford a booth (or even if you can), another strategy is to sponsor a happy hour at a nearby bar, restaurant or hotel the evening before the trade show begins. You would invite potential customers to that happy hour. You could offer one drink for free, or depending on your budget, have an open bar. Make sure as many sales people from your company attend as possible so that they can "work the crowd." It is usually cheaper to hold the happy hour at a venue other than the trade show hotel or hotels as their charges will almost always be higher.
If your company has significant marketing resources, it could hold the happy hour on a boat, on which the attendees are a captive audience for a couple of hours. Twilight or evening cruises tend to attract a larger number of people.
Having a speaking spot at the trade show or conference can be very helpful. However, those spots almost always require an extra payment. It is best to have one of your very satisfied customers speak on your company's behalf. And it is always better if the talk is about a topic of general interest, such as a new industry development, how to best use AI in the industry or some similar topic. But the talk should also convey your company's unique value proposition.
Some conventions and trade shows offer cyber cafes for the convenience of the attendees. You company can sponsor the cyber cafe.
Another strategy, if you really want to "own" the trade show is for your company to offer the organization producing the trade show a parallel users conference produced by your company with a number of workshops led by industry experts, thought leaders, consultants and influencers. Usually, these people will jump at a chance to have an audience with people at the trade show.
To promote your company during the show, you can purchase outdoor advertising space during the period of the show near the hotels and convention center at which the trade show is being held and along the highways from the airport to the hotels and convention center.
You can also purchase advertising on hotel room television sets at the trade show hotels and you can pay to have branded door hangers placed on hotel room doors.
You trade show presence should achieve one or more of these goals: (1) build brand awareness, (2) identify potential customers, (3) begin to create a relationship with potential customers, (4) collect potential customer contact information and (5) sell products at the show.
If your primary goal is to sell products at the show itself, you should offer a special trade show price discount to motivate immediate purchase.
Before the show, you should identify your top prospects so that you can schedule meetings with them ahead of time, send them special invitations to your happy hour or booth or at least make sure you connect with them at the show. If they are your most important prospects, you might also invite them to dinner at an upscale restaurant before or after the show.
Whether you are a startup with few funds or a large corporation with a huge marketing budget, attending carefully selected trade shows and conferences should be a part of your marketing plans, especially if you are a B2B company. It has been my experience that having a significant presence at a large national show is better than participating in numerous local shows. I would concentrate my marketing funds on the large national show rather than diluting them across dozens of local shows.
As salespeople, you know that if you have made a potential customer contact at the show that you suggest a next step or call to action with each prospect that you meet.
A final thing about contacts made at trade shows is that they can be entered into your company's CRM system and tracked throughout the sales funnel process to determine trade show ROI, something that chief marketing officers are always interested in as they justify their marketing spend to CEO and CFOs. It will also help determine which shows are most and least productive, leading to reallocation of marketing dollars across shows.
I wish you great success with your trade show marketing.
