Trade Shows are an excellent opportunity for small or big businesses to reach out to their targeted audience and create brand awareness. If you’re participating in a trade show, one of the major considerations is to chalk out a strategy that will bring enough traffic to the exhibit booth and justify your investment. This is because no matter how impeccable your exhibit displays and booth designs are, your exhibit participation can’t be a success if you’re unable to drive qualified traffic.
An exhibit event might see a lot of attendees on the floor but if a sizeable percentage isn’t visiting your booth, there’s definitely something seriously wrong with your marketing strategy and plan. Your exhibit booth marketing is a vital part of your larger sales and marketing machine to maximize ROI.
We, at Exhibit Express, have been following industry experts and in this blog post, we’ve put together some tips and advice to boost or drive more traffic to your trade show exhibit booth. Keep reading if you want to learn some of these trending tactics.
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Set Your Goals First
As an exhibitor, your first action should be determining your trade show goals for the particular event before making marketing plans. Be clear about why you want to participate in that specific show and what exactly you want to get out of it. Whether you want to create brand awareness or build brand reputation, generate leads or close sales, set your goals well in advance. Your goals will help shape your event marketing strategy and plans accordingly.
Experts are of the view that you should also pay critical attention to show selection criteria to ensure you reach your target traffic. There’s no point in participating in a show that sees no attendees from your target group.
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Develop an Effective Planning Before the Show
After you set your goals, take time to develop a result-driven, practical trade show plan that includes deciding your objectives, brand message communication strategy, promotional initiatives, and advertising campaigns before, during, and after the event. It’s very important that you have a solid plan ready for different phases of the show. This means you should have distinct plans for pre-selling existing customers and prospects, engage them during the show, and generating additional sales after the show through prompt follow-ups.
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Choose Your Booth Staff Carefully
Your booth staff directly represent your brand and the attendees will only be interested in interacting with them if they’re inviting and approachable. This is why you should hire the right people, be it your own employees or professionals. They should be knowledgeable about your products and services, can answer queries of the attendees, generate leads, trigger sales, and be able to handle the chaotic environment of a trade show floor.
Make sure that the booth staff avoids these five mistakes at all costs during the event. Also, when you provide them training before the show, make sure to highlight the importance of dressing and grooming. Learn more about dress code tips for exhibit booth staff and set the agenda according to the needs of your brand.
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Plan Targeted Mobile Advertising Before and During the Event
Marketers are fast realizing the advantages of mobile advertising to keep campaigns relevant to target groups and increase engagement rates. Since everybody is walking around with a smartphone these days, make use of this potential advertising medium to drive traffic to your booth and generate leads. Use geo-targeting to increase awareness about your brand’s participation in the event. Build awareness, develop excitement in your products and services, announce special promotions, and inform your booth location on the vast event floor.
Communicating the location of your booth is important because if attendees don’t get a chance to spot your brand, they’ll move on to your competitors for solutions without comparing products and services. This commonly happens when your booth is located in a relatively less visible area of the trade show floor. Mobile advertising can help you to take control of such situations immensely.
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Create a Solid Social Media Plan
It’s a proven fact that brands that stay active on social media before, during, and after the trade show sees a steady growth in their follower base. It also significantly boosts traffic to your trade show exhibit booth. Determine on which social media platform the majority of your prospects and customers are available and take advantage of it. It’s a good idea to focus on four popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram for promoting event-related content. Make use of the featured official hashtags of the event in your social posts to let attendees know about your company, products, and services. This will also help you monitor conversations easily, identify influencers, and qualified prospects.
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Send Direct Mail to High Potential Prospective Clients
You must make a list of targeted high-potential prospects, and existing clients and customers well before the event and send direct mail to them. This will encourage the best kind of leads to visit your booth. Conduct a meeting with your sales team and ask them to prepare a list of such contacts. The pre-show direct mail should include all relevant information about your company, products, services, the details of the event, and your willingness to set up an appointment to discuss what you have to offer along with RSVP cards. This will help you have an idea of who will be attending your event and you can tailor your message, pitch, and presentation accordingly to convert them into consumers.
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Run a Contest during the Show
In-booth contests with exciting rewards are a great way to encourage more traffic to visit your booth and interact with your staff. But make sure that you run a contest properly to get more traffic. Remember that it’s important to:
- Design a contest that’s relevant to your brand.
- Have attendees visit your booth and interact with your staff to get a chance to enter the contest.
- Advertise the contest well along with your pre-show and during-the-show promotions on social media. This will expand the outreach and more people will get to know about the contest.
All of these steps will help attract more visitors. You can also increase your possibilities by offering an incentive or a special entry to a secondary contest on social media to people who share your event and contest related posts or retweet them.
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Design and Execute a Practical Digital Marketing Strategy
A proper digital marketing strategy can also help boost traffic to your trade show exhibit booth. You should develop individual tactics in different phases of the event to get maximum ROI. Read our comprehensive digital marketing guide to ensure exhibit success to get ideas and customize your strategy based on needs and budget.
You need to devote time and put in a lot of effort to design a proper plan to attract booth traffic because it doesn’t happen by accident. Consider these tips from industry experts and take cues from them if you want more attendees to visit your trade show booth. Only when you have enough visitors, you can engage them with your brand and products and turn them into your valuable leads.
