Shot Show is January 17-20 in Vegas
SCI International
Show and Convention is February 1-4 in Las Vegas
First Fly Fishing Show is January 6-8 in Denver
First ISE Show is January 5-8 in Denver
Renting exhibition floor space, staffing the booth, getting staff to and from the event, hotel accommodations, meals, entertainment, designing and outfitting the booth, and marketing your presence at the show make this a costly endeavor.
With your competitors just down – or even across – the aisle from you, getting the biggest bang for your marketing buck demands an all-out effort to drive traffic to your booth and capture every top-quality lead.
Still, many, maybe most, are not taking advantage of all that social media and inbound marketing have to offer in the context of a trade show. Making use of all the social media tools at your disposal helps you solidify the connection from your real world presence to your online marketing channels. It ensures you create buzz leading up to the event, maximizes the traffic to your booth, and keeps the relationship going as the event luster fades away and your prospects move down the funnel from leads to closed sales.
An effective trade show-social media connection begins long before the event. You must have an established social media presence before the show and know which sites to use, and when, and what content you’ll be posting.
Prepare Quick Response (QR) tags and have them set up next to the corresponding products in your booth. If you’re doing a demo, video record it and link to it via a QR tag. Creating QR tags is easy and it quickly moves customers and prospects from your show booth to your online presence. A QR tag puts a link to your online marketing initiatives in the palms of prospects hands via their smartphones. From there, they can share it with co-workers, colleagues, and their friends in their social networks. Include the QR code on your business cards too. One click with their smartphone and customers and prospects are drawn to your online presence, ready to learn about your company and share it with those in their network. Use a QR code to link to an email sign up page, capture names and information from show visitors as they stroll down the aisle filling in your form online.
Create a show page to add to your website, as much as six months in advance of the event. Naming and tagging the page with your website and the show name and year, such as mycompany.com/ISE-SHOW-2012, not only provides your customers and prospects a place to go for information on the upcoming show, but as the show date approaches, people Googling the show will hopefully get your page in their search results, improving your SEO with every click.
Create a landing page specifically for show attendees, link to this page with a QR code. You can use it gather valuable information while setting appointments to meet with customers and prospects.
There’s something about a free T-shirt. You would think they could be pawned for gold, but people will do almost anything, it seems, to get their hands on a free T-shirt, especially one from a time-limited offer, such as an annual trade show. Tweet, post on your Facebook page, and blog that the first 25 (50, pick your number) people to visit your booth at the trade show get a free T-shirt. Then, be prepared to be amazed as people beat a path to your booth for the bragging rights having that cool T-shirt brings with it.
There are so many things to coordinate and so many balls to keep in the air before and during a trade show that having a plan, an editorial calendar for your social media messaging, goes a long way toward ensuring your messages go out in a timely manner and have the effect you’re hoping and counting on them to have.
Plan and write your messages in advance. Keep a certain amount of flexibility in your plans as things always change before and during a trade show that require you tweak your Tweets or reposition your messaging in a Facebook or blog post. Then, use social media management tools, such as HootSuite or SpredFast, to schedule your posts going live and track them along with the returns they generate.
5 Trade Show Tips from the Pros
Trade show consultants routinely find that marketers are stymied when it comes to preparing for a trade show. Here’s what they recommend to make the most of your trade show investment:
1. Pick the show that best aligns with your marketing strategy
2. Plan marketing strategies for pre-show, show, and post-show
3. Reach out to every visitor to your booth post-show via email or phone.
4. Analyze which strategies worked and which didn’t
5. Calculate your ROI on the event once the sales cycle has closed.
Bottom line is if it did not get a return on your investment you did it wrong, you sat behind a table waiting for someone to stop and talk to you have wasted your time and money. Have a plan and work that plan at every show… book trips every day!