Few Quick Tips To Improve Your Trade Show Booth Marketing Strategy

10 Quick Tips To Improve Your Trade Show Booth Marketing Strategy

 

Did you know that 64% of trade show attendees are not existing customers of exhibiting companies? Moreover the newer studies also suggest that 92% of the attendees come to explore new products and services. These statistics shows how vital your trade show marketing strategy is in promoting your brand and improving your business generation potential.

Trade show events are great opportunities to meet up prospects and build networks. Your booth marketing plays an important role in attracting these potential prospects and converting leads.

But there is a catch here!

There are other competitors in your line of business vying for the same attendees’ attention. In such a scenario, you will need to do your best to keep the trade show participants hooked to your booth with innovative trade show booth ideas.

When you market your trade show event, you score a lot of points on the engagement factor. Your staff has its task cut out when it has the prowess of trade show exhibits backing its sales pitch.

So how do you ensure the success of your trade show? Utilize these 10 marketing tips to improve your trade show booth marketing strategy:

 

1. Design your Trade Show Booth Strategically

This pre-show planning is important to help you meet your trade show marketing goals. Most of the exhibitors aren’t backed up with huge promotions budget. Hence they need to justify every dollar they allocate towards this event.

To work wonders with a limited budget, it is important to figure out how you can design an eye-catching display at the event.

List down what you need to accomplish your larger event participation goals. Right from iPad and touchscreen to a large monitor and workstation, all factors have to be considered.

By delegating the design work to a professional exhibit design agency, you will be assured that all points like placement, literature positioning, lighting and entrances will be factored in to get a unique design.

 

2. Have a Crisp Trade Show Booth Messaging

One of the most important parts of booth marketing is the graphics and the messaging on the booth. It is important to employ catchy copy writing to convey the maximum with the minimum number of words. Captions and taglines can greatly improve the ‘pull’ factor for attendees. However, make sure that your messaging resonates well with the participants.

Imagine you are participating in a web design and development trade show. A booth proclaiming “Great web designs for less” doesn’t say much about the value proposition that an exhibitor brings to the table.

Moreover, isn’t this messaging a sort of ‘given’ for every exhibitor? So where is the competitive difference displayed by your brand’s trade show marketing campaign?

This is the sort of burning question we need to factor in when we get down to creating awesome trade show booth messaging.

You need to use language that conveys key USP points to its targeted audience. This way, a passerby can know at a quick glance about the competitive edge that your brand provides over others.

 

3 – Consider your Giveaways with Care

We have been to many trade shows that hand out giveaways without really considering the target buyers’ persona. T-shirts, pens, and mugs don’t really cut it with the highly authoritative decision makers who attend the trade shows.

While giveaways do look to be an obvious part of an exhibitor’s promotional measure, the giveaway item itself needs to be chosen carefully.

To effectively market your booth, it is a wise trade show display ideas to move beyond a bowl of mints or candy to lure visitors and have them stay for a little longer at the booth premises.

 

4 – Put the Right People in the Booth

If your trade show marketing strategy primarily focuses on lead generation, then this tradeshow display point will be highly critical to its success. You need to consider adding trained marketing personnel to the staff when you are chasing new leads at the event.

They will be a vital addition to your staff list and will be influential in driving the outcomes at the event. When you do this you can accomplish two clear goals:

the marketing team will promote your brand to attract attention and bring prospects to the booth

the sales team will cultivate prospects and push them further down the sales funnel to enable conversion

When both skillsets are present and have clear roles defined, you will notice that the trade show booth traffic too can be better managed.

6 – Bring in Gamification

Gamefication is the new way of boosting your trade show strategy and engaging with the audiences at any trade show event. People love engaging in fun activities and will stay in your booth for long owing to the games and entertainment. Having competitions and scorekeeping can be a great way to improve booth traffic while still being able to clearly convey your brand messaging.

If you have a new product launch on sensors, how about adding a level of gamification to boost engagement? With score based rewards and leaderboards as novel trade show display ideas, you can keep the participants for a longer duration at the booth premises.

While it may cost a bit higher to set up such innovative ideas at the trade show booth, the number of leads and footfall you will receive will far outweigh the cost and efforts involved.

 

7 – Quality over Quantity … Every Time

It may happen that you would have access to the list of attendees prior to the show. Make sure to feed them into your CRM system.

Do research on their line of business, their existing professional network, and their on-going projects (if possible).

Doing so will give you a lot of ideas to personalize your marketing strategies depending on the individual prospect being targeted.

Make sure that your sales team has the CRM system loaded on their tablets or iPads. They will know the exact needs and preferences of a prospect the moment he/ she walks into the booth.

This will give rise to more meaningful conversations in the booth, a fruitful utilization of time, enhanced engagement, and a higher likelihood of conversion. This emphasis on relationship building will always work in your favor at the trade show.

 

8 – Wide Open Spaces

It is never a good thing to clutter up too many things within the limited real estate you get for setting up the trade show booth.

This is especially true for smaller spaces like a 10×10 booth. You need to ensure not to overcrowd the space so much that it becomes uninviting.

One of the good booth display ideas is that the design should have a dedicated space for every accessory. But it shouldn’t be at the cost of the visitor’s convenience.

Make sure that they have sufficient space to move around. They need to have easy access to marketing collaterals like sales literature or workstations.

Also, the layout should reflect the workflow involved in the promotional processes. So, the marketing team will have a more frontline presence, while the sales team can have a corner/ lounge.

This space will be dedicated to their function of catering to known prospects who are likely to discuss further opportunities for collaboration.

 

9 – Communicate at All Stages of the Trade Show

When you have a great tradeshow strategy you will be able to share clear communication before, during, and post the event, to engage better with the people you met.

Make sure that text-heavy emails go out to the prospects rather than image heavy emails. In case the recipient’s browser or mail system doesn’t support automatic download of graphics, it will create a poor experience.

This will be especially applicable during the show when most of the participants would be on cellular data and would view the emails on a smartphone rather than a laptop with Wi-Fi.

To accomplish this trade show marketing goal, you need to have a firm grip on the marketing message you are conveying.

Right from the subject line to the body, every word of the copy needs to be geared towards improving the mail-open rates and response rates.

 

10 – Post-Show Analysis is Vital

It is clear that you will be attending more shows in the future. For this, you need to take the learning from this one and use it to improve your trade show participation and marketing endeavors at the next event.

For this, you need to do a thorough post-mortem of the trade show with the entire team. Intel from the on-site staff participants can be blended with thoughts of those entrusted with post-show follow-up.

This way you can learn about what went well, what point needs improvement, and how the participation and exposure measures can be optimized further to cut down on wasteful expenditure. This will be the starting point of your trade show strategy for the next year.

It is proven that an average trade show attendee spends 5.5 hours on a live event like a trade show. This presents a short window of opportunity for your brand to catch the attendee’s attention, make them come to your booth, and engage with them for successful conversion.

The initial phase of attracting eyeballs can be carried out with the help of trade show exhibits. They not only communicate your brand USP but also help you craft a distinct identity in the crowded exhibit space.

This speaks volumes about the importance of marketing the expo booth. By adopting these promotional strategies, you can be well on your way to success in attracting maximum exposure, engagement, and conversion with a well-crafted and well-promoted trade show rental booth.

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