14 Ways a Marketing Agency Can Help You Exhibit Successfully at Trade Shows

As a B-to-B company, exhibiting at trade shows offers numerous benefits: you can increase brand awareness, seek out highly targeted leads, create new business relationships and develop current ones. It also gives you a chance to see what your competitors are doing in terms of new additions to their product line and how they are marketing them.

What can an agency do to help you stand out at a tradeshow?

With the help of an experienced marketing agency, you will have a full creative and strategic team of marketers to develop innovative ways to help you stand out pre-trade show, during the trade show, and post-trade show.

Here’s how a marketing agency can help…

Before and during the trade show:

1. Develop messaging that conveys the key benefits for the products and/or services you want to promote at the show.

2. Design visuals and various marketing materials that are consistent with your brand image, messaging and key selling points.

3. Nurture leads prior to the show.

4. Develop an email campaign that will inform and engage with your current mailing list of customers and attendees, notifying them of your presence at the trade show and enticing them to visit your booth.

5. Utilize social media to notify followers as well as your attendees.

6. Contact the PR/marketing department of the show and work together on promoting your booth on the trade show’s website, in show guides and trade publications, social media channels, email, direct mailers, etc. This direct association will authenticate your presence at the show and extend your reach.

7. Design a memorable and eye-catching booth that will grab the attention of anyone who walks by.

8. Plan an interactive experience for visitors such as a raffle, giveaways or a live demonstration of your products and/or services.

9. Develop creative give-aways. Step away from the average free pen or notepad and hand out something utterly unique that will set you apart from what everyone else is doing.

10. Utilize mobile geo-fencing to deliver enticing ads to show attendees, encouraging them to visit your booth. 

After the trade show:

11. Post recaps to social media and create blog posts about the trade show as part of your content strategy. This content has a dual purpose: it will remind those who attended the show that you were there, as well as those who weren’t able to attend that may have an interest in learning more about you.

12. Develop a post-show email campaign segmenting the leads into those that are most likely to be customers, those that you’re not sure of, and those that are not buyers but could be influencers. Re-cap what you promoted at the show and encourage viewers to take action.

13. Evaluate your teams’ success at the trade show: How many business cards were handed out? How many freebies were given away? Was there an unusual increase in your social media following? Were there any potential leads that expressed interest in your company?

14. Analyze your strategy and see what worked and what did not for use at future trade shows.

An experienced marketing agency can take your trade show experience to the next level. For more information on what CGT Marketing can do to help your next trade show efforts, give us a call today.