Trade Show Marketing
As much as marketing tactics have evolved over the decades, trade shows remain a tentpole of business-to-business marketing strategy. For b2b marketing is complex, with companies needing to convince retailers, dealers, or distributors that buyers want their products. So how can those companies reach the dealers, distributors, and retailers they need to connect with?
Enter Trade Shows
Most trade show attendees are people who make buying decisions. Statista reported in 2018 that roughly 82% of trade show attendees are qualified to make purchase decisions. Those attendees also noted that trade shows are an essential part of the decision-making process.
Marketing Your Trade Show Experience
Three things can make a trade show valuable for your company. First, in-market attendees need to show up and find your booth. Second, you need a strong lead-capture strategy during the show. Finally, have a follow-up procedure in place to make the most of your trade show leads..
Getting the Right Attendees to Your Trade Show Booth
By attending a trade show that’s relevant to your industry, you’re already likely to meet some good, new leads for your business. However, we’ve used great digital marketing tactics to help dozens of companies get more traction from qualified leads at trade shows.
At Momentum, we use digital advertising and SEM strategies to reach and drive leads to trade show booths we promote. Our trade show marketing method uses advertising and post-trade show marketing to accumulate and convert your top trade show leads. This strategy consists of three steps: research, content creation, and follow-up.
Audience Research
To get a sense of who you’re marketing to, we’ll need to get to know your business, brand, products, and services. Our team will dive into the content of your website and any print materials you may provide. Additionally, we’ll talk to your team to learn more about what your business has to offer and why you stand out from the competition.
But that’s just the beginning.
Using keyword research and audience insight tools, we’ll go further into what makes your audience tick. We’ll investigate the competition and compile info that will guide our advertising efforts. This information can be broken down into three main categories that digital marketing platforms use to talk about audiences: demographics, behavioral signals, and affinity categories.
Demographics
Are what you’d expect. Age, gender, income level, location, and other basic statistics about an audience.
Behavioral Signals
Are ways to target people who have visited websites with similar content to yours and your industry.
Affinity Categories
A target interests that may or may not relate to your business directly, but are likely interests among your audience.
Keywords & Search Phrases
Keyword research is another important aspect of the process. Knowing what short and long form keywords and phrases your audience uses help us in the content creation portion of our strategic plan.
Content Creation
With research in tow, we’re ready to create content that gets people to show up!
Digital Advertising
We create ads for platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. These ads need written copy and visual assets like photos, graphics, or videos to improve click-through rates and reduce the cost per click.
These assets may be provided by your company or produced by us. We’re happy to help in whatever way we can!
Landing Pages
Ads are only as effective as the pages they lead to. We create landing pages that fit your ads, your audience, and your goals for the trade show. The landing page copy will likely vary from show to show. For example, the language you’d use for a distributor show is probably different from the copy you’d use to speak to retailers. Additionally, you may have a few different audiences coming to the show for different products. We’ll create ads specific to your different products, services, and audiences and craft landing pages to match.
Not only do these landing pages support your ads, they also provide key information about your booth to your audience.
What’s at Your Booth?
Give attendees a taste of what they can expect when they visit you at the trade show. Create a list of products and services you’ll be showing off. Tease them with some photos or videos. Announce giveaways and special trade show deals that will make stopping by worth their time.
Sales Contacts & Lead Generation
It’s also a good idea to put the contact information of key salespeople at the show on your landing page. This gives attendees a way to reach out and schedule meetings. Additionally, we can add a form for potential attendees who may want more product info. This form can integrate with our CRM tool and give you the power to follow up with leads after the show.
Booth Finder
Did you know you can use longitude and latitude signals to help people find your booth at a show? We can add this information to your landing page so your audience knows exactly where to find you. Send this info to key potential clients before the show to make sure your key connections happen!
Lead Capture & Follow Up
To follow up with trade show leads, you have to have a method of lead capture at the show. Many shows offer ways to scan attendee contact information that you can upload into your CRM later (don’t have a CRM? Let us know). If you’re going into a trade show without a lead capture strategy, please talk to us. Not only can we can give your sales team an effective form solution, we can also provide an incredible, automated marketing follow-up strategy that sorts warm leads into hot ones and gives you data about what products and services your lead list loves.
Want Your Booth
on the Big Screen?
Our partners at Monster Events
can make it happen.
Don’t Wait to Think About
Your Trade Show Strategy
Planning for trade shows can take months. While we can advertise your trade show presence in a flash, you’ll have more options at a higher quality level when we get more time to research your audience and create meaningful content. If you’re interested in our CRM and automated follow-up tools, contact us today. Building out an integrated, automated marketing system takes time, and we want to set your business up for success.