For most exhibitors, a trade show’s success is measured by the number of leads and sales it generates. Forbes Agency Council shares strategies for optimizing booth performance during and after the event.
Ensure your booth staff accounts for more than badge scans and new LinkedIn connections. Provide attendees with a consolidated information request form linked to appropriately targeted high-level info and deep-dive resources.
Set Your Goals
A trade show booth from Infinity Exhibits must be memorable and eye-catching, but it should also provide real value for attendees. Gamification, interactive content, mobile-optimized forms, contests, and giveaways can all help engage attendees and convert them into leads.
Focus on the quality of the leads, not just the number of them. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and use them as benchmarks to measure your success during the event.
Ensure all staff understand the event goals and their role in achieving them. This will help them approach the event with a more focused and consistent mindset. Minimize labor costs by establishing a pre-show plan for packing and repacking shipping crates to reduce the time needed for setup and teardown. Partner with complementary businesses to share booth space, expenses, and marketing materials. This strategy helps lower costs and attracts more visitors. Embrace proximity marketing technology like Bluetooth and iBeacon to send targeted promotions to attendees’ mobile devices near your booth.
Design Your Exhibit
Identify one primary goal that will serve as your focal point and use it to guide you in choosing booth activities, engagement strategies, and technology investments. Create key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure progress toward your goal, such as the number of quality leads generated, social media engagement, and press coverage.
On average, attendees have only two to five seconds to capture their attention and encourage them to enter your booth. Make a quick impact using bold colors, large, easily readable typefaces, and backlit trade show booths. Leave plenty of white space for the eyes to rest, and avoid covering surfaces with photos that compete for attention with your brand messages.
Get people interacting by offering gamification elements and product demonstrations. They’ll spend longer at your booth — giving marketing and sales representatives more time to qualify them as leads — and will have a better understanding of how your products can help them. Then, they’ll be more likely to follow up with you after the show.
Plan Your Marketing Campaigns
It’s vital to start promoting your trade show booth well in advance and executing marketing strategies until the event itself. This will help ensure you get the most value from your exhibiting budget and attract your desired audience.
At the event itself, be sure to offer a variety of engaging activities for your attendees. Live demonstrations and presentations are practical tools for attracting attendees, as are interactive contests and games. A 2022 study by EventTrack found that participants in booths with games and contests had a 91% higher level of satisfaction with their overall experience.
It’s also essential to make it easy for attendees to follow up with you after the event. Provide a contact form that lets them choose from a list of industry/role/journey-specific follow-up info, and use “smart content” to send them the appropriate email when they’re ready to receive it.
Create a Strategy for Post-Show Analysis
Once the show ends, you must take stock of how well your goals were met. This helps you assess your ROI and identify future improvement areas.
To measure the effectiveness of your trade show strategy, you must define clear, measurable objectives and create key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, how many quality prospects will you add to your database? How much pipeline will your team generate? These are tangible goals that you can easily track with data analytics solutions.
To ensure that you are marketing effectively to your prospects, have a system to follow up with every attendee after the event. This means ensuring your Sales Reps contact each qualified prospect and schedule meetings after the show. This should be done on the phone or by email. It is also a good idea to send out text-heavy emails to avoid wasting bandwidth on images.