5 Critical Strategies to Marketing Your Trade Show Successfully

Have you ever shown up to a Trade Show and noticed that none of your current customers or target customers are present?

Why is that?

Well, about one year ago, I was two years into an Event Marketing position and suddenly became aware of something that most marketers would think was obvious. That revelation was that most marketers who work Trade Shows as part of their marketing strategy don’t effectively market their attendance at these events.

I am going to go through 5 simple tactics you can use to increase awareness and make sure that your target customers are present and excited to see you there.

 

Social Media Posts  

This one is the most straightforward tactic on the entire list but done correctly will be the most cost-effective.

Here are a few essential steps to make this work for you.

• Creating or using great content created by the host of the event. This can include but isn’t limited to flyers, promo videos, and high-quality images. When you have your content put together, it is time to post.
• Post your content on your top social media platforms. You don’t want to waste time where you don’t have a robust and engaging audience.
• Encourage shares on your post with incentives. I will share in more detail a little later.
• As you receive comments and likes, you will get more and more organic reach. To keep the momentum going be sure to reply to EVERY comment on your posts. Yes, every single one. You will be excited at the results of putting in this time.

After taking these steps you should have a decent buzz going on within your immediate social network. Our next topic will be like dumping gasoline on the fire.

Facebook Ads

This can be a gamechanger if you understand how to run Facebook Ads. If you are a beginner at running Facebook Ads, go here and see how to get started.

Facebook ads will be far more beneficial to marketing your business or your marketing career than you think. Though nowhere near the effectiveness of email marketing yet, it's a platform worth exploring if you haven't started already.

The strategy behind this is to expand your awareness and give people a chance to interact with your brand or your event (if you are the running the event) beforehand.

This creates a buzz from people that are brand new to you and your product or service — having a clear CALL TO ACTION centered around sharing or commenting on your ad to receive an incentive or FREE something at the event.

I would recommend creating a video for this ad because video is KING on Facebook. They always prefer showing video content over static images.

This doesn’t have to be a movie production LOL.

You can pull out your cell phone and go LIVE on Facebook talking about the event and incentive or giveaway they can qualify to win if they LIKE or COMMENT on the post.

Be sure to read the article I referenced at the top of this section so that you don’t make some of the mistakes that I did early on.

Encourage Shares (Incentive)  

Shares are going to give you the most significant ORGANIC REACH over any other tactic that you could try. They are going to provide audiences that are far removed from your immediate network but may be perfect for your target market.

To ensure that people share your content, make sure to have incentives for them to do so.

Here are a few ideas:

• Giveaway: Have an enticing giveaway that is valuable to the audience that will do business with you. This takes us back to understanding our target market.
• Have them Share a photo in the comments, and maybe you will highlight them on your page for a day. (Works well for B2B relationships)
• Discounts: You can offer discounts to those that engage with your post. FYI 10% isn’t appealing unless you have a high-ticket item. Stick to something closer to 40% or more.

Whatever you choose to do, make it enticing and something that would excite you if you were looking for a deal from a business you frequent.

This next one is only possible if you have been doing some networking. Hopefully, you have. If not, get up right now and start shaking hands and building relationships with everyone around you.

LOL… Seriously though. Your network is your net worth. No cliché intended.

Influencer Partnership

Influencer Marketing is becoming a prevalent strategy to leverage the influence of others in your industry or even people that are peripherally connected.

People think they must connect with big-name superstars like Drake or Miley Cyrus. This isn’t always the case. A lot of times small business don’t have access to these A list level stars anyway.

Most of the time for small brands you can get away with finding a local influencer

Market research has shown that micro influencers are even more impactful for a brand than a celebrity influencer.

Since they tend to have a deeper connection to the brand and a lot of the times are willing to have a more involved role in the campaign.

Here are some key tips on finding the influencer that will raise the highest awareness.

• Find someone who is closely related to your industry. If they are local and have a decent influence within the community, it will work just as well.
• Make sure the price is right. Most of the time, you can find a local influencer for free that will do a quick video or photo shoot with you.
• Always find a way to make things mutually beneficial. The BEST way is to provide more value for them than they expect. This allows you to have a long-lasting relationship for other campaigns down the road.
• You can have multiple influencers, especially if you are leveraging micro influencers. Just don’t get too broad with the industries or niches that they all come from. It can make your message a little blurry. (Handle this on a case by case basis.)

Relationships are KEY to your success in the Trade Show industry. Make tons of them and learn to nourish them. A great read to hone in on this skill is the book “Go Giver” by John David Mann & Bob Burg. (Just a shameless plug lol)

Instagram Stories (Teaser)

Here is a function of social media that people are leveraging like crazy. I am going to dive into one very effective strategy in using Instagram Stories. It will tie into a couple of the suggestions above.

So, as I said earlier VIDEO is KING with Facebook. Seeing that Facebook owns Instagram, it is very much the same on this platform as well.

These social media channels’ key focus is to keep you on their platforms as much as possible so they can show you ads. Which they are currently being paid per impression for. ($$$$$ hand over fist)

So, video has grown to become the most engaging content on social media. It is known for keeping you clicking and waiting for the next video for hours. As a result, you remain on their platform being fed more Ads.

Instagram stories play to this ideology. They are playing automatically with the ability to go forward and backward and skip whole stories at will.

You should be utilizing these because this is where people are going to engage with you in a more organic way, which is what you want. So be present where your clients are.

Here’s the strategy.

Post multiple story videos and images of the preparation for the event. Even adding in some spoiler or teasers on Deals and Giveaways to create build up for your followers. 

Utilize it to share the video content with your influencers while making sure to tag them and share links to their page as well. This will broaden your reach like we discussed earlier and add more followers to their page. *Go Giver *cough cough.

Create quick story videos with other Trade Show vendors, which also grants you access to an audience more significant than your immediate influence.

Do this up until the day of the event. Start with your lead up content about a month ahead.

Conclusion

Ultimately, this is only a small list of the infinite variety of ideas and strategies your creative brains can come up with.

I  hope that this gave you a kick start into leveraging multiple aspects and channels of marketing to increase the ROI from your Trade Shows. I know they can be expensive for the local small business.

That is why I took on the task of laying out high-level tactics to make sure they are yielding you maximum returns.

I would love to hear from you all on ideas that weren’t listed here in this post and any experiences from utilizing some of these tactics in your marketing strategy for Trade Shows.

If you think it was valuable, be sure to share it with your peers. 

About the Author

Devan is a Digital Marketing Expert and prides himself on producing meaningful results for his clients and having worked for some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the country in the past 5 yrs. He has now founded Simply Social Agency. This is a Marketing Agency based in Memphis Tn.

Devan is known for his analytical ability to take data and create optimal campaigns that yield substantial increases in ROI and brand awareness. Devan can be reached at devan.dillard@simplysocialagency.com.