Rosa Rabinovich

How to amplify your tradeshow potential – a step-by-step guide

So, you've invested quite a bit in a stunning trade show booth. The team is buzzing with excitement expecting it to be the center of attention. Yet, when the day arrives, the anticipated crowds turn out to be rather scarce. When this happens, you've probably missed a key aspect of trade show preparation - not fully integrating digital marketing into your trade show strategy.

The Challenge: Bridging the Gap to Maximize Potential

Too often, companies focus heavily on their booth's physical setup and ignore the digital engagement that goes with it. This oversight can lead to disappointing foot traffic, missed opportunities, poor engagement with potential customers, and a less effective exhibition as a whole.

The Strategy: A Holistic Approach - Integrating Digital with Physical

Achieving trade show success means thinking beyond the booth. It involves a proactive approach before, during, and after the event to ensure all marketing efforts are harmoniously aligned to maximize your return on investment. Let's explore the steps you can take to make this happen:

Laying the Groundwork: Pre-Show Essentials

Just as the booth and marketing materials are planned months in advance, your digital marketing strategy must follow suit. This helps make sure that every aspect of the exhibition strategy is aligned and optimized for maximum impact. Setting Goals Start by establishing clear objectives:

1.  Increasing brand awareness by strategically utilizing your presence at the expo.
2.  Maximizing traffic to your exhibition booth
3. Creating a database for ongoing engagement and nurturing
4. Defining KPIs - Measuring performance and continuous improvement (eg. Number of campaign impressions, website or landing page visits, email open rate, event participation, and more)

Targeted Messaging Strategy Development: Two months before the trade show, start with a deep dive into your industry's landscape to come up with a marketing concept and message that is both relevant and memorable to your audience. Digital Infrastructure: Make sure you set up a dedicated landing page and integrate a CRM system to effectively collect leads that will allow you to follow up with interested prospects after the event. Ramp-Up Engagement: A month out, it's time to ramp up engagement with targeted ads to raise awareness. It's here that your social media strategy kicks in, building anticipation through ad and email campaigns, regular and engaging social media content, and events so that your physical and digital efforts complement each other seamlessly.

During the Show: Capturing and Engaging

When the trade show is underway, keeping the energy high is crucial. Continuous updates, engaging social media posts and stories, interviews with keynote speakers, and live interactions help keep up the excitement and draw attention and visitors to your booth. You might also want to consider adding interactive presentations and videos that boost visitors' experience, leaving a lasting impression

Building Connections: Post-Show Follow-Up

The interaction doesn’t stop when the show ends the work is only just beginning. The focus now shifts from the show to leveraging the connections you've made. Now's the time to implement a structured follow-up process to keep your brand top of mind for future marketing opportunities. Design and implement targeted follow-up campaigns, using structured email marketing complemented by a strong social media presence to continuously nurture new contacts until they are ready to reach out to you. Last but not least, tracking the results of your campaigns and marketing activities is a must to measure their effectiveness and adjust them accordingly. Be sure that the initial contact was handled and nurtured, and answer customer questions as soon as possible. (more on that another time).