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Making the Most of Trade Shows
Travel costs, booth costs, lower attendance. All reasons not to consider trade shows as a cornerstone of your marketing. What used to be a no-brainer is now one of the most complicated questions facing CEOs — should we attend trade shows, and if so, how many? The following considerations might help you make up your mind.
Do your customers attend trade shows?
Marketing is all about reaching your target audience. It makes zero sense to spend money to talk to your competitors. Think of a show as a trade magazine. The exhibitors, like advertisers, are your competitors; the attendees, like readers, are your customers. When you look down the aisle, will you see more advertisers or readers?
Perhaps your industry is regional, or small, or dominated by a few major customers. These are all factors that make attending a national or international trade show an inefficient use of marketing dollars.
Are you properly prepared? Once you pay exorbitant airline fees to stand in exorbitant display space, the last thing you want to do is demonstrate to your target audience how disorganized and unprofessional you are. You need a professional presentation — whether you own it or rent it. The structure is not as important as the message and the graphics that convey it.
In order of priority:
- Simplify your message. Who are you and what do you offer the industry? Keep it succinct, with clear graphics and diagrams that can be understood from ten feet away.
- Focus on customer requirements. Show applications and customer solutions — how your products and technology can be used to solve real world problems.
- Engage. Demonstrate products where possible. Use photos or 3D representations if actual products are not available.
- Cut down on paper. Limit sales literature distributed at the show to one or two pieces that refer specifically to what is being exhibited. Then, do follow-up mailings to qualified leads after the show (see below).
Can you properly market your show attendance?
You should be able to promote your attendance at the show with print or electronic pre-show mailings. Personally invite key customers to see products in the booth and schedule a distributors’ gathering in the booth the day before the show opens to confirm their participation in customer meetings and to brief them on new products in the booth.
Do you have the capacity to follow-up?
This is where some companies miss out on the rewards of exhibiting. Leads should be qualified daily, with mailings to high-potential prospects by the end of the show week. This ensures that attendees will have the information they requested when they return to their office. Here’s where you send the more expensive marketing brochures and information packets — after you’ve met the person and are reasonably sure that distributing costly printed materials makes good business sense.
If you cannot answer “yes” to these questions, you probably should save your valuable resources and concentrate on product publicity and client sales until your organization can fully support a trade show investment. The real cost of trade shows comes in the multiples — the number of geographic markets you need to support, the number of “vertical” markets in which your products compete, and the number of years it takes to build brand visibility around your target audience. This is one place it pays to do the math.
Alternative Uses of Trade Shows
- Create a presence through print and on-line advertising vehicles, either in conjunction with show attendance or in place of it. The industry is gathered together, with their minds on new products and growth. Some presence is better than no presence. Create a target accounts event in conjunction with a show. Schedule a product or technology presentation in a nearby hotel or business venue. Take advantage of the fact that your high-potential prospects (and customers) will be in one place at the same time. Keep the event social, but informative.
- Schedule a sales/distributor presentation either in your booth if you are exhibiting, or at a nearby venue. Use the show as a locale at which you accomplish important business development for your company.
- Schedule a media event. Invite editors to a social/professional venue where you and your key engineering staff can build relationships with important trade magazines and educate editors on the importance of your technology to your industry. If editors can not make themselves available at a given time, schedule individual editor meetings for technical briefings and product demos.
Final thought: if you are a small company and have a particular need to market a new technology instead of a mature product line, you would be much better off looking for focused technical meetings where the engineering community is looking for innovative approaches to emerging market requirements. These are generally sponsored by industry groups, as opposed to publishing organizations, and are attended by design engineers, manufacturing engineers, and some engineering managers that will form the nucleus of any future product/application audience that you will need in the productization stage of your technology. Because of the relative lower cost of these meetings, you can afford to attend or present at more of them, with the result being substantial exposure across numerous geographies and applications. Preparation and follow-up are simpler, too.
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