Driving traffic to your company’s booth and increasing your brand awareness among event attendees should start well in advance of an exhibition, trade show, or conference. Show attendees typically have limited time to walk the show floor, so you want to make sure that your exhibit is “first in mind” and a “must-see” on their list of booths to visit. By using marketing communications and other company resources that are probably already in place, you can keep customers and prospects current on what exhibitions you will be attending and convince them that you are a “must see” on the show floor.
Your marketing communications efforts should start as soon as you have committed to exhibiting at an event. Regardless of your company’s size or exhibit budget, you should likely be able to easily incorporate established methods of communication into your exhibit promotional plan.
Consider the following marketing communications vehicles/options:
- Company website
- Social media.
- Email
- E-newsletters
- Drip campaigns
- Public Relations
- Advertising
- Direct mail
- Sales support teams (internal and external).
Use some or all of the above means to communicate with your audience on a regularly scheduled basis, and make sure to keep your messaging, content and delivery method consistent and relevant to your intended target. As with any marketing communication plan, you should establish appropriate metrics up-front so that as your plan is deployed you can gauge whether your messaging is resonating with your audience or if you need to revise or change its delivery method prior to the exhibition, tradeshow, or conference. Finally, establishing baseline metrics at the start will better equip to evaluate you ROI (return on investment) later.
Please look for the upcoming Part 2 of this post, which will address building on pre-show communications to address and incorporate exhibit -specific opportunities.
This is part 1 of a 2-part post explaining how to develop and deploy integrated marketing communication plans for your company’s upcoming exhibitions, tradeshows, and conferences. Part 1 (above) addresses using already-established company methods of communication to promote your event appearance. Part 2 will discuss how to use these established means of communication in an integrat3ed fashion to provide optimal support exhibit-specific opportunities.
Sandy Cebulis, Exhibitions Marketing Practice Director— Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Naples, Florida
Contact GF&Z at solutions@globalmarcomm.com.