Trade shows offer business owner an opportunity to promote their brand on a budget. Also, it helps them to gain a better sense of current consumer taste and business trends that will help develop a presence in the industry. If you are a small business owner, you may be tight on your expenses as you likely know – arranging trade shows costs money. However, setting up and running a show isn’t easy, but when executed correctly, your business thrives in this competitive industry.
In-person interaction creates meaningful relationships with prospects. And this is the only reason why trade shows events are so valuable to B2B marketers. In fact, the average size company allocates approx 31.6 per cent of their total marketing budget to exhibiting and events.
To ensure you’re heading towards a successful trade show booth display, we have some great tips to boost your trade show ROI that will guarantee your success.
Keep reading!
- Develop a pre-show content strategy.
As the name suggests ‘pre-show’ strategy is the key to maximizing Return on Investment. It’s not enough to have a fantastic booth, but marketing personnel also need to generate excitement beforehand. You have to get prepared more targeted content that illustrates the value of your trade show, and the value audience will gain if they visit you.
Kick-start your pre-event content marketing by following the simple rules:
- Schedule appointments ahead of time: Get yourself the list of attendees so that you can target them easily. Provide prospects with a brief overview of your product and inform them how long you’ve been in the business. Also, ask if they’d like to schedule ten minutes of booth time.
- Promote your booth: Exhibit halls are crowded. Inform your prospects where your stall is displayed. Give them a booth number or a map of your booth. Make it easy for people to find you.
- Tailor content to the theme: Avoid overarching theme––make it relevant, but not overly promotional. Moreover, you need to create different types of blog posts, infographics, E-Books, videos, etc. – that feature this theme. Further, you need to distribute this content to your prospects.
- Leverage social media: Make the best use of event hashtags and specific social media pages to promote your event-themed content.
- Optimize your trade show booth
You need your booth to stand out by converting prospects into customers. Attendees may flock to your booth if they see eye-grabbing, gimmicky designs, but to boost your ROI, you will need to offer something of substance.
This is how you can get attendees to your booth and convert them into leads.
- Get creative with your design: Put your products front and centre.
- Use giveaways to boost conversions: It doesn’t mean you should give out free stuff to entice the audience to stop by your booth—but offer giveaways if you get something in return. For instance, you can offer a larger prize only to attendees who sign up for a next step or provide their contact information.
- Generate media coverage
If an event is large enough, you should invite news outlets, bloggers, and industry leaders to talk about your brand and provide press coverage.
This strategy might cost you a lot, but it is undoubtedly the best way to grab audience attention towards your booth.
Here is how you can grab media attention at your booth:
- Obtain media list: Ask trade show organizers for a list of participating media reporters. Or, take a look at last year’s media coverage at the event. Chances are, these bloggers, and reporters will return for a second time.
- Request interviews and demos: Send an initial email to media members. Give a brief introduction of your business, CEO message, and what a company plan to showcase at the event. Further, you need to request to schedule a short interview the day of.
- Offer something new.Remember: media looks for stories. They never care about your brand or product unless it’s truly newsworthy.
- Post-trade show follow-up.
It’s not just enough to perform well at the trade show. Attendees should be looking forward to your calls.
Consider taking the following necessary steps to improve your trade show ROI:
- Prompt response: Reach out to your prospects right away to differentiate yourself from other vendors present at the event. Send emails not too early and not too late.
- Personalize your emails: Make separate emails for every single event you attend and give reference of each show in the subject line of your email and later in the body of the email to avoid confusing people.
- Remind them of your booth: Post-show correspondence must highlight similar images and language to that of your booth design. Moreover, you can also attach pictures as a small reminder of your brand.
Another great option to boost the ROI on your trade show, is to have virtual trade booths. To learn more about virtual trade services, call GSE AV today.
- Measuring ROI
Jubilation! The trade show has come to an end, and your database is full of qualified leads. That product launch generated buzz. High fives all around! Now, its time to measure return on investment.
If you don’t track trade show ROI, you’ll never know if your strategy works well––generates results or grows stale.
Formula to measure ROI
(Profit – Expenses) / Expenses.
Example: $40,000 – $20,000 = 1, making the ROI 100%
$20,000
The “Profit” only indicates––direct sales made as a result of the trade show event. Of course, it is hard to compute figures right away, therefore, you must follow a full sales cycle to determine exactly how much you earned.
Other Trade Show Booth Tips
- Dress right
- Set goals––generate 100 qualified leads
- Make sure it’s worth your while––build brand awareness by 20%
- Be ready to answer questions
- Prepare a checklist
- Be there on time
- Fill your booth with products
- Give Out Samples/Promotional items
- Provide hospitality
- Spruce up your trade show booth with audio and video elements
- Hire a spokesperson
Keep reading to learn more about the importance of trade show events.