Ahhh, the wonderful world of trade shows, where executives from across all sectors of the FX industry, from technology vendors and digital Marketing firms, to retail brokerages from all over the world, come together to socialize and promote their businesses in one ecosystem. It’s the heftiest line in your marketing budget and where business is done.
You’ve arrived in the city where the trade show you’ve decided to participate in is taking place, perhaps a day early and in the company of a couple of people from your marketing or sales team. You’ve diligently RSVP’d to all the networking events, you have a fresh-off-the-press stack of business cards, your booth is set up and you feel like you are on your A-game.
After a couple days of intense face-to-face interactions, you go home, sit down with your lead list and discover that you didn’t do as well as you had hoped. Why did your strategy go down the drain?
Well, while your plotting and planning during the days of the event was a great part of your strategy, doing it only during the event is not enough. A successful trade show strategy needs to be in motion weeks before the event even starts and I don’t just mean designing your booth and ordering giveaways. I mean syncing your content strategy with your expo attendance in order to maximize the event’s ROI. Creating infographics, writing articles and producing videos that target event attendees and invite them to visit your booth.
So what type of content can you use to Leverage your trade show strategy?
Videos
According to one study, 57% of retail brands see an increase in order values when consumers have watched just one video that they’ve produced. This is because video has an outstanding ability to demonstrate what your product or service is all about.
When you are at a trade show, you may not have the time to engage each booth visitor in a demonstration of your product features, but a quality video can help you dig deeper, plus it can be shared with trade show attendees prior to the event and with those customers who may not be able to make it to the show.
Infographics
Visual information is much more engaging and convincing than plain text, given that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in our brains than text.
Infographics can help you convey complex ideas in a visual manner so the data is easier to understand. Infographics are a great branding tool and brands that feature infographics as part of their marketing campaign report up to 12% faster growth than those who don’t use them. Infographics have proven to be 30 times more effective than a text article. Using infographics before and during the trade show can help you convey complex messages in a simple, easy to digest manner. You can promote the infographic prior to the event using your digital channels and have a copy printed professionally to either hand out or display in your booth.
Social media
Repeated exposure to your brand results in conversion, so make sure you are exposing event attendees to your company in the weeks and months preceding the event as well as during the event.
You know those trendy hashtags? Every event nowadays has one, so make sure your brand takes part in the conversation. Social media campaigns are a great way to engage with your audience. Consider sponsoring posts aimed at specific interest groups in LinkedIn and Facebook for example in order to be put in your consumers’ minds before, during and after the event.
Blog
Use your company’s blog to provide commentary on the upcoming event or provide relevant educational material to trade show attendees. Make sure the content you put up on your blog is in line with the theme of your booth. Ge your audience interested in your product before the big date so when they arrive at the trade show, visiting your booth is in their to-do list. Guest blogging in relevant industry publications about valuable topics can help you engage your audience. Take the opportunity to invite them to your booth at the upcoming show.
