See previous posts in this series: Basics, Look at What Others are Doing, Don’t Publish Selfish Content, Don’t Just Push Stuff Out, Build Relationships and Try New Things.
Now that you’ve worked your way up through the basics (social media audit, social media policy, listening) and have been exposed to the various elements of social media/tradeshow promotion, you’re ready to create a playbook.
This roadmap will take you through each show throughout the year. My suggestion is to create a playbook for each show that you go to, although if you do several similar small shows, you can probably create one plan and work it for each of those shows. For the bigger shows, though, you should create an individual calendar.
First, settle on your realistic goals. Determine what you did last year in terms of leads, press mentions, sales, etc., and then set this year’s goals in each area.
Identify your point person for the effort. Often this is one person who leads a small support staff.
Identify content you want to create, and how you’re going to create it. This can range from blog posts, to videos (testimonials, client interviews, guest interviews, demos, etc.), photographs and more. Identify who’s going to create and curate the content.
Identify any promotions you are implementing that are show-specific. These could focus on new product releases, special show deals and more.
Integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing efforts. Too often, companies fail to successfully create a synergy with the social media marketing and the traditional marketing efforts such as radio or TV, print and direct mail. By getting these two areas together (if they aren’t already), you can create a monster promotion that is more than the sum of the two parts.
Finally, create your calendar. A good calendar will start a year before the show, and will include any post-show efforts of content release from this year’s show. About six months before next show, you’ll want to meet and brainstorm ideas for using social media to bring people to your booth. Then set the various tasks at 3 months, 2 months, a month and the weeks leading up to the show. This might be something such as searching for the show’s hashtag to check activity or contacting any promotion partners to start implementing the various tasks that complement each other. Toss any ideas into your calendar – chances are you can’t overdo what the calendar tells you to do. Make notes as you go along and use those to adjust and make course corrections for the next show.
Now that you’ve created your playbook with promotion, content ideas and tasks, just execute the plays as they come up.
Recapping…
- Set realistic goals
- Identify the point person
- Identify promotions
- Integrate social media with traditional efforts
- Create your calendar
- Execute the plan!
