Companies are often hesitant to exhibit at trade fairs. The reasons are fair, exhibiting is an expensive project that requires time, money and personnel. But when done right, exhibits bring in quality leads and help capture sales.
Here are Exponents Las Vegas, we have worked with dozens of clients from all over the world. And, we’ve observed some best practices followed by our clients to achieve success for their trade show booth rentals at Las Vegas.
1. Set your expectations
Trade shows are busy places. There are a lot of activities happening on the trade floor. For an exhibitor this means several visitors coming in and out of their booth. Therefore, you can’t expect sales conversion to happen at the trade show since you won’t have the time to engage in long business conversations with any of your visitors.
So most of your leads will stick to the start of the sales funnel. To convert these leads you need to have strong follow-up strategies and an easy to use lead capture system. Only then can you get the most out of your trade show exhibit.
2. Estimate your ROI beforehand
Success in business is about managing risk and maximizing profits. So before your finalize your decision to participate in a trade show, do the math and find out if your expenditure will provide the returns you are forecasting.
Having a clear ROI will guide you towards the right strategies that suit your business goal. Some examples of ROI from trade fairs would be, meeting new prospects, collecting executive-level leads, and collecting customer feedback for a new prototype.
3. Is exhibiting the right fit?
Trade shows are the first and foremost channels for brand marketing and product sales. Their uniqueness comes from the audience it attracts, which at most shows are industry professionals. Trade shows are ideal for businesses that are looking to expand their brand presence.
It is also the best platform to network and form partnerships with vendors and other businesses that compliment your own. If that’s not the case and you are only looking to keep you existing customer base happy or improve your online presence then social media marketing and customer engagement are better avenues.
4. Brainstorm with intent
Thanks to how is easy it is to get creative with your trade show booth design, brainstorming can often get out of control. Your marketing team would want to have a goodies bag for each visitor or run contests for brand engagement, but your sales team would want you to have an exclusive lounge or a meeting room for prospects.
Both are right. But your priorities define which is relevant for your current strategy. To achieve success you need to say no to ideas that don’t follow the path, you’ve set as your target.
5. Invite your loyal customers to your booth
Social proof has a strong impact in marketing. It may seem unnecessary to invite your loyal customers but your customers interacting with visitors is the best word of mouth marketing for your company.
Visitors get to interact with your most satisfied users, which is better than reading a testimonial in a brochure. Also, by inviting them to your booth you end up deepening your business relationship.
6. Plan your follow-up
Most of your sales conversion will happen after your show is over. Planning a post-show follow up is where the more successful companies pick up the slack. But, you and your team will most likely to be tired and would want to move on to other projects.
To combat this slowdown, brief your sales team before the show with lead follow-up strategy. Have a lead capturing software for your on-site staff to use. Most lead capturing software comes with its own tagging system to categorize leads and sends it to your sales and marketing team. This saves a lot of time and lets your off-site team get into action.
7. Reach out and network
Trade shows often provide a confirmed guest list. You can use this to find out your target audience and offer them a formal invitation to your booth. Then, there are social media pages run by trade shows where you can post about your company to boost your brand presence, you can also look for other companies and collaborate with the ones that compliment your business. This will effectively boost your lead pool during the trade show.
8. Participate for events
To build the knowledge base of its visitors, trade shows often conduct discussion panels and seminars. Your company can have a spokesperson to participate in these events. Since this boosts your company’s brand image and also establishes you as a thought leader within your industry. That’s not all, quite often companies that participate get special mentions by the trade show organizers through social media channels.
9. Concise brand message
Your brand message should summarize your brand within seconds. It should be easy to read and instantly tells the visitors how your brand is the solution for their problem. Images combined with the appealing text is going to make visitors stop in their tracks.
Do this for your booth graphics and marketing material, emphasizing the benefits your product offers. Finally, drill the brand’s elevator pitch into your staff, so they don’t fumble when a visitor catches them off-guard.
10. Have a script for your staff
Failing to qualify, due to bad first impression hurts. To avoid that, we suggest that you get your marketing team to create a ten second script for your staff. Get a copywriter involved, since they specialize in creating pitches that engage customers. After your script is ready, all that remains is to drill your company’s value proposition into your staff through repetition.
So there you have it our 10 tips to help improve lead generation for your exhibit. We consulted our sales and marketing team for creating this curated list of tips. In our 30 years of providing clients trade show booth rentals in Las Vegas, we have observed that the successful ones had used the above tips. We hope that you are able to use them for enhancing your exhibit success.
