This blog will serve to help those interested learn some of the best ways to promote their products at trade shows. Visit often as we will be posting tips, tricks, and thoughts on a regular basis.
What You Can Gain From Exhibiting at a Trade Show – Leads
What You Can Gain From Exhibiting at a Trade Show – Leads
Companies participate in trade shows for a myriad of reasons. Sometimes it is to showcase a new product or service. Other times it is to be visible among the competition. Still other times, companies exhibit at trade shows to meet key people in their industry. But the main reason a company exhibits is to generate leads for business.
Lead generation is one of the fundamental truths of any business. If you want to grow your business, you follow leads that will become customers, and that will lead to more sales. More sales lead to more money, and more money makes a business successful. An easy formula, but how do you collect those sales leads, turn them into prospects, and then turn those prospects into clients?
First off, you need to have a way to manage the leads you bring in. There is software to help you do this, and it is important for a sales rep to follow up on a lead within 48 hours or so of the initial contact. So, if the trade show is on a Monday, the lead needs to be contacted by Wednesday.
It is fair to treat every business card you collect at a trade show as a potential lead. Unless the card is from a person who is in direct competition with you, you can likely leverage that contact for more business, whether it is from them or from someone they know. Your contact management software should allow you to mark the leads you want to try to sell to differently from the leads you want to introduce you to the people they know.
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Social Media and Your Trade Show
If you’ve ever wondered how to integrate your social media efforts with your next trade show, you’ve come to the right blog post. Social media and trade shows go together like…things that go together very well. Here are some ideas.
Before the Show
Invite your LinkedIn contacts to visit your booth. Invite people who are not your contacts yet to your booth. Offer a LinkedIn discount, or have some sort of promotional giveaway for the people who come in and mention they got the invitation on LinkedIn.
Similarly, tweet invitations to all your followers. Tweet a picture of your booth, and offer people who visit because of the Twitter invitation a special Twitter promotion or free giveaway. Make this a different giveaway than the LinkedIn invitations.
Do the same for Facebook followers. Offer yet another giveaway for people who come in because of Facebook.
At the Show
Use Twitter to live tweet the event. Use the show hashtag, and offer some sort of event-related prize related to Twitter.
Take video at the event. You can use the video you take with all of your social media outlets, outlined in the next section.
Make sure your giveaways and event literature tells potential customers how to find you via all of your social media outlets.
If someone mentions that they got the invitation via LinkedIn AND Facebook, or any combination of the venues you used to send out invitations, give them an extra incentive for following you on more than one social media medium. Give them each giveaway for each invitation type, combine promotions, and make them feel extra special.
After the Show
Use the video you shot at the show to create YouTube videos, sales and marketing materials for your website or blog, and for emails that will go out to your opt-in subscribers. You can use Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to send out the video clips you’ve taken.
Keep track of who shows up to your booth via each social media outlet. Send thank you emails or mailers to the people who responded to the various invitations, and keep track of how many new followers and fans you get because of the event. Make social media work for your next show, too!