Trade shows, business events, and exhibitions are great platforms for promoting your products and services. As a business owner, you should view business events as essential to your broader digital marketing strategy and aim to make the most of it.
Here are some useful tips:
Bridge the Gap
The first tip is to bridge the gap between the online and offline worlds. Instead of assuming that you will be turning up at an event and there will be perfect prospects waiting for you, you will want to drive up awareness that you will be at an event through digital marketing.
A great way to start would be your LinkedIn profile, where you can create an ad and find an audience of people who like the respective business expo where you intend to show up. You can create a video to target the interested people and show them exactly which stand your business will be at and what the potential clients can get when they visit your stand.
Ultimately, give them a bit more information about who you are and why people should visit you.
Introduce Incentives
To make the most of the business exhibition, you will want to focus on incentives, including custom can coolers, branded pens, amazing tees, etc. You can also offer other things for your target audience to come to your stand and initiate a conversation with a bit of deep value.
For instance, if you are at an event that will continue for a few days or over the weekend, you know that people will also stay overnight. You can create a Facebook Ad, target a close vicinity, and start targeting ads about your offering at your stand.
Subsequently, suppose there will be people in the vicinity getting your ads. In that case, this strategy is a creative way of cutting through the noise and offering them something highly relevant in their feed that they are going to anyway.
Invest Money on Doing the Talk
During the event, loads of people will walk past your stand, and many of them won’t be aligned with your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) as they will be competitors, suppliers, or people who don’t fit into your business.
So, the thing is that when you are doing a lot of one-to-one, it can become very tiring over a few days. And you don’t get much off the backflip because you haven’t had very meaningful and qualified conversations.
The solution tip is to try to spend money on doing the talk. Talking to people and going somewhere is much more valuable than simply standing at your stand for two days. If the event includes talking to their package, you can pay a bit more as you will be doing a one-to-many rather than a one-to-one.
What to do post-event?
You will have loads of valuable content created during the event, including photos and videos. You can put a few pictures up on LinkedIn. Or, you could post a video podcast about your talk at the event and post it on your social media business profiles.
You can take the content that you created during the podcast, syndicate it, and market it with the content to your entire target audience.
