Win at Trade Show Marketing

If B2B companies aren’t at a trade show, they’re probably planning for one or working leads gathered at one. Trade shows are to B2B what the holiday season is to B2C .

Okay, maybe it’s not quite apples to apples, but there’s no denying how important trade shows are to most B2B companies. Trade shows are where you get to talk with prospects in person and show off your products, services, and brand in a way that advertising alone just can’t do.

It’s vital for companies to have a strong presence on the floor, but what happens once prospects leave your booth is just as important. CID has worked with countless clients on different aspects of their trade show presence over the years, from booth and collateral design to digital marketing post-event, and everything in between. If you’re eager to make a big impact at your next trade show — even with a modest booth — you’ll want to keep reading.

Drive Prospects to Your Booth

A successful trade show presence starts long before your team packs up their sales sheets and product demos. Along with the usual trade show tasks like updating outdated booth graphics, messaging, and collateral material, develop an outreach plan to help build buzz for your company’s presence ahead of time.

Consider repurposing some of the messaging you’ve developed for your sales team into customer-facing content that you can use to tease your trade show presence. We’ve often recommended these tactics to our clients:

• Email: Send current customers and prospects a short email campaign about the show and invite them to book a meeting with your reps ahead of time. If you send a regular newsletter, include information about the show there as well.
  
  
• Your website: Add a callout to your home page and consider creating a page just for the show itself where people can learn a little more about what you’ll have on display. Include a form to sign up for time with your reps at the show.
  
  
• Organic social media: Post on social platforms to let your audience know you’ll be at the show. Include your booth number, and anything noteworthy about the products you’re showcasing, especially if you’re launching something new. Make sure to use hashtags on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter/X to boost your reach.
  
  
• Digital ads: Ads on social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram (depending where your clients and prospects tend to be) can help get your company’s name and booth number in front of more people. Getting hyperlocal during the show itself by geofencing your ads can be another way to get people at the show already to make a stop at your booth.

Deliver a Memorable Experience

Whether it’s a sleek booth with a large footprint or a more modest physical presence, your booth is only as good as the experience people have inside of it. Your booth needs to entice people walking past it while still being a place your reps can have a conversation with prospects.

Be smart about the content you integrate into your booth. A video that relies on a voiceover to get its message across, for example, might have looked fantastic during production but it isn’t the best piece of content to have up on a big screen on a loud show floor.

The videos we produce for trade shows are specifically designed for their environment. Think abstract animation in a client’s brand colors, or footage of a product in action, a few short words or phrases shown on screen, and not much more than that. Run on a loop, these videos serve as attention-getting eye candy that adds a layer to the overall booth design.

Giving visitors something to do — a tactile experience of some sort — can keep them in your booth longer. But what if your products are huge industrial pieces that are difficult to display? Go digital.

Using a blend of physical objects and digital experiences can help visitors get a more complete picture of your offerings. When one of our clients that makes solar inverters (huge industrial metal boxes, to oversimplify it), needed to show their products, we worked with them to develop a virtual reality experience that let visitors “see” the product inside and out.

Another CID client wanted to give booth visitors the opportunity to test out its new commercial oven, but letting visitors actually cook in the booth wasn’t an option. Instead, we developed a digital game displayed on a screen roughly the size of the oven that users could interact with to get a feel for the real oven’s features.

In both cases, visitors got to experience the products in a way that was fun and memorable.

Seamless Lead Collection and Follow-Up

Scanning your contact’s business cards and automatically storing their contact information is just one way to collect leads quickly and easily at trade shows. You can ask people to input their email address into a form you have ready on a tablet, or even scan their badge to collect contact info. But what if these new contacts want to get in touch with you?

Your business card, enhanced with a QR code that sends people to a landing page specifically about your company at the show. It’s a great way to remind people who you are and what they saw in your booth, even after the show when memories start to become a little hazy.

Use the landing page to thank them for visiting you at the show, and reinforce some key messages and talking points about your company and products. (That video with a voice over we mentioned earlier? Embed it on this page.) It’s also smart to include a short form on the page for lead collection. Just because someone grabbed your business card doesn’t mean they shared their information with you!

Once you do have their information, be sure to get in front of them quickly. A short series of post-show emails will signal to prospects that your sales team is serious and ready to work with them. 

Need an assist getting your trade show marketing sorted out? Talk to CID. We’ve got the in-house teams to handle just about everything you need.