Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.
Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.

Post-Show Follow Up

Roadmap to Tradeshow Success

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. Famous words, no doubt, and they certainly apply to any marketing endeavor you’re undertaking. If your goal is to simply appear at a tradeshow, you don’t have much of a roadmap. It might look something like this: rent a booth space, get an exhibit (doesn’t really matter what size or what it looks like); bring a few people from the office and talk to people that stumble across your booth.

Success! Of course, since you didn’t really have much of a plan, how could you fail?

On the other hand…

If you want to talk to bring home 300 leads, that requires a longer plan and a better road map. Setting a goal – any goal – immediately puts restrictions on your map. It forces you to go in a certain direction. And the good thing is that it makes you ask questions, such as:

  • How do we get enough people to our booth to collect 300 leads?
  • What kinds of leads do we want?
  • How do we qualify the leads?
  • What information do we want?
  • Do we need to do pre-show marketing to bring people to our booth? If so, what will that take?
  • How many people should we have in our booth?
  • How big of a booth do we need to support those people?
  • What will it cost to create that exhibit?

And so you. You get the idea. Sure, you can simply set up a booth, hand out a few brochures and samples and cross your fingers, but if you really want to bring home the bacon with a bagload of new prospects, it takes more than that.

It takes a roadmap that only you can put together, based only on what’s important to you.

If you want a little help, you could do worse than picking up my book Tradeshow Success. It’s got a pretty good roadmap planning guide, chapter by chapter.

But whatever you use, if you want to get somewhere, you need a map.

8 Records to Keep at Your Tradeshow Appearance

Ever have one of those moments when you wish you had a picture of something from the tradeshow appearance you did, oh, six months ago, but you can’t find it? Setting up your exhibit at a tradeshow is a fleeting moment, and the more photos you take and the more records you keep, the better off you’ll be as you prepare for next year’s show. Here’s a quick video on a handful of things you might consider tracking from show to show:

Tradeshow Tips From Twitter

Every now and then I cruise through Twitter looking for a handful of marketing tips for tradeshow exhibitors. Let’s see if there’s anything there now!

First up, TSNN gives us some planning tips to engage virtual attendees.

Next, Lotus823 links to a SmartBrief post that offers thoughts on pre- and post-show planning.

Then, SourceGroup links to an article with 7 Tips to Hosting a Successful Virtual Networking Event.

Ljubica Maletković tweeted out a link to an article that helps you make the most of your tradeshow marketing budget.

Finally, Exhibit Options linked to a TSNN article on how to embrace the new normal for 2021.

Twitter can be a lot of things, but when it comes to finding useful information for your industry, it’s pretty good most of the time!

Follow me on Twitter.

How to Find a Whole Lot of Tradeshow Marketing Tips (Video)

With tradeshow marketing on the sidelines, now is as good a time as any to brush up on your tradeshow marketing skill and knowledge. And here’s a great place to find a whole lot of tradeshow marketing tips – all in one place, and all worth their weight in gold. Check out this short under-three-minute video:

Find all of these tips at TradeshowBuy.com!

Guest Appearance on Power Up For Profits Podcast

I’ve known Kathleen Gage of PowerUp for Profits for years and she recently asked me to be on her podcast. Like me, she posts both audio on her podcast page and video on her YouTube channel. Kathleen knows how to get to the center of what is helpful to listeners, and this time was no different:

If you’d like to click through to the post that is specific to this interview, click here. She has broken down the conversation into the topics we covered, including Foundation for Success, Follow Up, Make Your Booth Time Engaging, Pre-Show Marketing, Swag and more. We covered a lot of ground in a short conversation.

Visit Power Up For Profits here.

When Tradeshow Marketing Gets Overwhelming, Concentrate on Just a Few Things

Many people look to a yearly tradeshow as a single event, a one-time experience where everything is on the line. In a sense, it’s hard to argue against that viewpoint. So much is on the line. The booth rental space is expensive. It’s not cheap to get your exhibit there, or the travel costs for your booth staff.

And yes, there are a lot of moving parts. Making sure the new product samples are ready, appointments are set ahead of time, the booth staff is up to speed (or professionally trained), the lead generation and information-capture system is in place. And so on and so on.

It can get overwhelming. Which makes it easy to let a lot of things slip through the cracks. And when that happens, it’s easy to beat yourself up for not getting the results you wished for.

Let’s take another approach, especially if you’re a smaller company with limited resources and a limited number of people that can attend the show on behalf of the company.

Learn to do a few things very well!
Learn to do just a few things really, really well!

Let’s say you have as many as 14 things that are on your list, things that are important that they get done. But because you don’t have enough people to do all of them effectively, pick just a few, maybe two or three or four things and focus on those. Give a little attention to the remaining things but pick a few and make sure you do a bang-up job on them.

Maybe you choose to focus on one in-booth activity and the follow-up details on those interested in your products or services. Let everything else come in after that. Yes, spend a little time, but make sure you do those two main things as best as you can, every single time. If you focus on those two things, you can create an in-booth activity that succeeds more than you ever hoped for. And your attention to detail on the follow up, such as when/where/who/how/what will make sure that each and every post-show phone call or email or in-person follow up is exactly what the prospect expected. Wouldn’t that be something? Wouldn’t your booth staff like that? How about your sales staff?

And if you do more than one big show a year, carry that concentration on just a few things to each of the other smaller shows, and then measure your results. Once you have figured out how to do those few things with excellence, add another item or two, such as pre-show outreach or marketing or building a tradeshow-specific landing page or checking out the competition. Doesn’t matter.

Just don’t try to do it all at once, especially if your company doesn’t have the bandwidth. Focus on a few things and grow from there.

Top Ten All-Time Most Viewed TradeshowGuy Blog Posts

I got an email the other day from someone whose newsletter I had just subscribed to, and in the introduction email there was a link to the top 5 most read blog posts on her blog. That’s when an idea light lit up over my head and gave me an idea for a blog post (as a blogger, you’re always looking for ideas, right?).

Next thing you know I was pawing through my Google Analytics account to find out what were the most-viewed posts on this blog. These are the ones that floated to the top, for whatever reason. It’s all organic. I don’t advertise, but I do share links now and then on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. On occasion there might be a link here from Pinterest. Or another blog.

This blog is aging. It’s over ten years old, having been launched in November, 2008. There are almost 1000 posts.

One more note: the analytics breakdown shows the front page as “most-viewed” and a couple of pages (not posts) showed up in the top ten as well, including the Contact Me page and the We Accept Blog Submissions page. But beyond that, here are the top ten blog posts since the beginning of the blog (in traditional countdown order):

Number Ten: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Exhibit RFPs. I created a one-page sheet on what should go into an Exhibit RFP (Request for Proposal), and posted it on Cheatography.com, a site for thousands of cheat sheets. Kind of fun. They regularly sent me emails telling me how many times it was downloaded (500! 1000! 1500!). Not sure how accurate that is, but obviously it’s been seen by a lot of people. From September 2017.

Number Nine: Breaking the Ice: How to Attract Tradeshow Visitors. I referenced a number of techniques taught by tradeshow colleague Andy Saks for this article, which appeared in December 2015.

Number Eight: 23 Pre-Show Marketing Tactics, Promotions and Ideas. A laundry list that was posted in October 2009 when the blog was not even a year old.

Number Seven: How to Build a Tradeshow-Specific Landing Page. Inspired by Portland’s Digimarc, it’s a look at the steps you can use to put together an online site specifically to interact with potential tradeshow booth visitors. From December 2017.

Number Six: Write More Orders at Tradeshows by Replacing Paper With Digital Technology. One of two guest posts on the Top Ten list, this is from Sarah Leung of Handshake. April 2015.

Number Five: Tradeshow Debriefing Questions. Another oldie but goodie, this post from September 2009 guides you through the after-show info-gathering process.

Number Four: Virtual Reality for Tradeshows. You’ve seen them at shows: people wearing VR goggles. Is it worth it? A brief exploration, from June 2016.

Number Three: Exhibit vs. Booth vs. Stand. They’re called different things in different parts of the world, so I took a whack at trying to explain it. Just last summer in July 2018.

Number Two: 10 Skills Every Tradeshow Staffer Should Have. Margaret Coleback of Vantage Advertising LLC dashed of a great list for staffers, which appeared in January 2015.

Aaaaand, at Number ONE: SWOT Analysis for Tradeshows. It still surprises me that this post gets a whopping 3.95% of all of the traffic on the site. At the time I wrote it I had been spending a fair amount of time with a friend who was going through school to get his degree in marketing, and one thing that we discussed in depth was the SWOT Analysis. S=Strengths; W=Weaknesses; O=Opportunities; T=Threats. It’s a great exercise to work through in regards to your tradeshow marketing appearances. Check it out. It’s from February 2015.

Got any favorites?

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