Trade Show Marketing

By Kirk J Bentham
Article published in September / October 2005 issue

No matter what industry you’re in, trade shows provide a fantastic opportunity to witness the extremes of business acumen. From the savvy, market-leading big brands, to the emerging “next big things,” to the little guys who just don’t ever seem to catch the big wave—it’s all there being played out in every isle of every hall.

It’s truly amazing how much money is spent just for the chance to be in the thick of it all. And depending on your approach, trade shows can either be an extremely effective part of your sales and marketing strategy or an absolute waste of time.

As with all sales and marketing activities, there is no standard formula that will guarantee success, however there are some key elements that can maximize your potential for achieving it.

First you need to start with the basics:

• Do you have a product or service that fulfills an existing market demand?
• Can you get prospects to your booth and put products in their hands.
• Are your products “value for money” priced or can you convince prospects that they are?
• Can you demonstrate an ability to fulfill all orders?

If the answer is no, if you don’t have these basic elements in place, you should probably save your money and not exhibit. But if the answer is yes, and you’re looking at trade shows as a way of increasing sales, here are some of the key elements that should become part of your trade show marketing strategy.

Start With Planning

As with any marketing activity you need to turn your ideas into plans, your plans into actions, and your actions into results. Trade shows are the last place to be making it up as you go along if you expect to be successful, or, at the very least, want to make good first impressions. As with all good plans, you need to start preparing well in advance of the event—months, not weeks.

If you’re not an experienced planner, the best place to start is by defining your objectives. Basically, this means creating a list of exactly what you want to achieve (direct sales, orders, new contacts, relationship building, customer feedback, editorial coverage, etc.) from your trade show appearance. This should also include financial objectives, so you will need to create a detailed expense budget to allow you to set sales targets and discern how much revenue is needed to break even.

Once your objectives are clearly defined, it’s time to come up with strategies and actions that will help you achieve these goals. These plans will help your team bring all aspects of your event into view and provide you with a roadmap and checklist so that everyone stays on target, every step of the way.

Position Yourself

Positioning is like planning. It is a key ingredient of a successful trade show appearance, yet many companies overlook this area. Positioning in essence is how the marketplace perceives your business, and it’s up to you to shape that perception. This is essential in helping your target customers find you in the sea of exhibitors. Once you have clearly defined how you want the market to view your company (your positioning objectives) you’ll need to focus your activities and communications towards achieving your desired position.

Everyone who sees your booth, logo, or company name listed in the directory, should be able to easily identify what your company does, sells, manufactures, specializes in, and what makes you worth checking out. To get an idea of how to do this well, just take a look in any trade show directory to see which companies stand out and what they did to achieve that position. Then do the same for yourself. Tell your own unique story.

Consistent Corporate Identity & Branding

So you know what you want to achieve and you know how you want the marketplace to view you; now you need to make sure that your look matches your position and, most of all, is consistent! After all, who wants to do business with a jewellery company who has no attention to detail?

Once your positioning objectives are decided upon, you need to make sure that your corporate identity (logos, colors, booth design, displays, name cards, brochures, sales materials, etc.) and brand (the core values of your company and products) live up to who you say you are. If your products are bold and edgy, and your company has a fully modernized order fulfillments systems and highly knowledgeable staff, you need to present yourself across the board in contemporary, bold fashion. A combination of old and new materials along with varied use of colors, logos and sales materials tells prospects and clients a lot about your company’s consistency and attention to image.

While many large companies have good creative people in-house that are well versed in developing CI and trade show materials, most successful smaller operations outsource to a communication firms capable of building CI & Brand Packages. Investing in such materials will quickly pay for itself and become the foundation for all business development.

Booth Design & Set Up

So now you know what exactly you want to achieve, you know how you want your company/products to be positioned, you know how you want to present your company visually and conceptually. Now it’s time to bring all of these elements into your booth.

Booth design is completely up to you and how you want to manage your floor, window, and meeting space. The key is making sure that your booth feels comfortable and inviting, not crowded, stuffy, intimidating, over done or overwhelming (video monitors and displays hanging from the sky, etc.).

Your booth needs to be consistent with your corporate colors and sales materials and if possible represent the personality of your company or brand. And if you are just using your brand’s logo for exterior signage, you may want to consider small tag-line text that let’s people not familiar with your brand know what you are selling. There is no point using a less-is-more brand logo to name your booth if people aren’t’ aware of what your brand is.

Don’t expect that everyone walking by will take the time to look in your display cases either, especially if it’s not clear who you are. Think about how many booths you’ve walked by without taking much notice of that are only identified by a name. While trade shows are a place to showcase your savvy they are also a street-fight when it comes to getting walk-by traffic into your booth. So make sure that you do whatever is necessary to make it as easy as possible for your prospects find you.

Promote Yourself

By this step you have your set up well analyzed and under control. Now you need to work on pulling qualified prospects directly to your booth. Again, there is no magic formula for how to do this successfully, it usually comes from a number of different activities. Obviously you will need your sales team to spend some time researching and creating a list of qualified prospects. This can come from trade magazines, pervious show directories, association/chamber of commerce directories, internet, etc. So how do you go about letting them know that you will be attending the next big show and what’s on offer?

Here are some standard approaches:

• Direct Approach – Call them on the phone and quickly explain who you are and why your products should be of interest to them—an invitation for an appointment at the booth is offered.

This should be followed up with a formal invitation/confirmation of the appointment being sent to them by mail and a similar message being sent by email. Your email should be HTML and reflect your corporate identity with a nice product shot to trigger interest.

• Email Blast – while a bit like spamming, it is an invitation to a qualified prospect. This is done as an e-postcard with minimal text (positioning statement), a good product shot, your booth location, and an invitation to confirm a meeting time by clicking reply.
  
• Postcard or Regular Mail Invitations – same as the e-postcard but make sure you mail them to arrive at least 2 weeks before the show.
  
• Print Advertising – although costly, print advertising can reach a wide range of prospects prior to your show. It also makes an impact on prospects who may not be attending the show. Keep it clean, corporate identity and branded, nice product shot, a small amount of product positioning text, and contact/booth details.
  
• Editorial Coverage – if you believe that you have a newsworthy story angle, make sure you get your Press Release out to as many relevant publications that are likely to be read by your target prospects. Having editorial coverage for your company in a well-read publication leading up to a trade show appearance can be gold. Every show has its dailies and you should find out which trade magazines are running dailies at the show and try to get your media kit to them both before the show and during it. Be prepared to provide print quality product images and do an interview.

People in the booth

So you’re all dressed up and ready to go… Are you? What about your sales team? For all the time and effort you have spent developing your trade show marketing, it all comes down to how well your people perform. This is something that many companies overlook. Your sales team should not only be well versed in product knowledge and selling techniques, but be evangelists for the company’s brand and corporate identity. Because at the end of the day, people are the heart of your business, not your product.

Make sure that your trade show team are a part of every aspect of the set up and marketing for each show so that they feel ownership in the project. They need to know the revenue targets, the break even points, the thought process behind the corporate colors, logo and brand values. Don’t just give them materials to read up on, role play and test their knowledge and skills before you even get them to the booth. Fine tuning and prepping your team is just as important as how you set up your displays, because if your people aren’t making the right impression, there’s a good chance someone else’s will.