For many B2B companies exhibiting at the industry level global tradeshow events are a must. Making your presence felt at the marketpl...
For many B2B companies exhibiting at the industry level global tradeshow events are a must. Making your presence felt at the marketplace has become more important in todays competitive world. But a lot of companies have started questioning falling ROI and quality of footfalls at their stalls. While tradeshow event organizers care little for exhibitors its is upto exhibitors to figure out how they can turn things around.
While many exhibitors believe that if they exhibit at an event, all the audience they are looking for will come rushing in. Its like saying you are an old established company thats been around so you believe that everybody will come looking for stuff on your website even if its old and outdated. Unfortunately that just doesnt work, and you have to have an event marketing budget in addition to the cost of the event. Even the best producers and directors of blockbuster movies spend a fortune on pre-marketing and promotion of their upcoming movies. So as a Company exhibitor, Training program marketer, Workshop organizer, Product marketer how do you get your target audience to sign up for your next event. To answer this question i have highlighted a few points below.
1. Get an Event marketing budget approved.
Depending on your company budget the first thing you need to do before you embark on exhibiting at that next tradeshow event is to consider an additional marketing budget to promote your participation in the event. You could follow your traditional corporate marketing practices that have been in place, but considering todays digital age one can leverage the power of digital media for a fraction of the exhibition cost which many companies ignore and so do tradeshow event organizers. You cant expect to still get people to come to your show by sending them a fax when they are armed with a smartphone.
2. Use your Company social media channels.
While a lot of companies are aware of this channel of marketing, many have declared it does not work for their business because either they dont have the audience on their social media channels, poor inhouse talent or are simply biased. While for all those who have a sizeable audience across your social media channels and have been able to leverage the power of social media please plan your content marketing strategy with a calendar in place and start atleast 3 to 6 months in advance. Get your employees to become advocates and like, share, join the discussions as this gets the word around your peers and like minded audience. Those with little or no social media presence should get in touch with industry specific marketers.
3. Get your Content marketing strategy in place.
Depending on your companies budget you could do a combination of text (articles, blogposts, whitepaper) and visual content (youtube videos, slideshare presentations). To know more on how to promote your digital content i already did a post recently Click Here to read. One of the best ways to get a lot of relevant audience is to do a demo product launch at your stall and build all your content around that. You could create a preview blog post of the new product, or do a short snippet trailer video. Most of all if you do not have inhouse talent it is best to get industry experts to create great content for you. Use traditional email marketing to reach all your known contacts but do not attempt to spam unknown users which can be very tempting but very often they do not work and you could get your email id blocked.
4. Syndicate your content through third party networks.
This is by far is the most important and highly effective strategy to distribute your content among like minded audience. I would reccomend getting intouch with Linkedin group owners where your target audience hangout and request for sending an announcement to all the group members. When a group owner sends an announcement an instant email is sent to the registered inbox of all group members, the biggest plus point being the contact data is genuine and you are not spamming. A lot of companies spend money to create great content only to host them on their website hoping somebody would read it. At Valve Solutions we would be happy to syndicate your whitepapers, research reports, articles, youtube videos, slideshare presentations, mobile apps, new product launch across our linkedin group if you are looking to target over 8000+ professionals from the Valves industry, Target location 50%USA 20% EU 30% Others. Avail of a limited free trial offer, For more details Click Here
5. Capture leads through an Opt-in form
Send out an announcement once every month with a link to your product launch demo video or whitepaper, articles, slideshare presentations and most important get your visitors to sign up an Opt-in email form to capture their details. You must start this excercise atleast 3 to 6 months in advance depending on the magnitude of the event. Most of all have your users sign a opt-in conatct form and mention on the form that the first 50/100 signups get a free gift at the training venue/workshop/Exhibitors Stall. This way you can get your visitors R.S.V.P.d and excited about the product launch and know who will be visiting you at your stall well in advance. Also closer to the event send them a reminder about their expression of interest to visit your stall at the forthcoming event.
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