Here is a question that is asked of us every day, “How do I get people into my booth?” Our account executive, Peter Holman wrote this answer and I felt it deserved mention as we have recently opened our newest department, Media Advertising Placement.
As far as getting people into your booth at the show, there are a couple of angles to take. I think the key to this is to get them interested in your company before they even get to the show. You want your company to be on their “To-Do List”. You want to be a priority – a “must see”.
Pre-show marketing – before anyone even gets on a plane. This needs to be orchestrated well in advance of the show. These efforts are focused on your target market and you’re giving them an incentive to visit your booth where you can qualify them as a prospect and inform them about your products. Example: “Bring this postcard to our booth #C-112 at IMTS and enter our drawing to win an iPad” (or something that’s really hot that everyone’s clamoring for). They don’t need to be present to win.
If you’re doing postcard mailings, remember that you want your key point – the “sizzle” – to be on the same side of the card as the mailing label because there’s a better chance of your intended target seeing and reading it. Think about it for a minute: the mailing label will almost always be face up on the prospect’s desk because that’s how the mail gets sorted. If you put all of the details of your promotion on the other side of the postcard they may never be seen.
- Before the show you’ll also want to pre-assemble literature packets to send out to people who come into your booth and request information. After the show you mail merge the names and addresses of those people into your cover letter, print out the cover letters and the mailing labels and you’re mailing is done and ready to go. You want your info to be the first that they receive after the show ends. There’s nothing worse than getting a catalog three months after you requested it at a show, right? Worse yet is handing out your literature and having it dropped in the hotel wastebasket as too cumbersome to carry home.
- Pre-show marketing – once they’re in town. This is broader and will get you exposure beyond your specific target audience. It will also freak your competitors out because they won’t be able to do anything about it. This is Jeff Linder’s department, as head of our Media Adverting Placement department. Jeff used to do media placement for Paramount Pictures. He knows all angles of getting your message seen and creating an incredible buzz about your company . We can hook you up with airport media at incredibly inexpensive pricing, we can help you create true buzz using Social Media paths such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs, we have an inhouse corporate video production team for in your exhibit and outside advertsing. Everything is possible and at much smaller budgets than you think! https://www.absoluteexhibits.com/Media+Advertising+Placement
- Show-site marketing – this is in your booth or at the show. SIGNAGE!!! Big, bold signage – like a tall tower, a lighted backwall, a video wall. You can consider using inexpensive giveaways with a planned attack. A well done looping video presentation draws attention. Product demonstrations draw crowds. Be sure to utilize people that work inside your company that can answer attendees’ questions … not just the sales people are a must bring to the show.
- Dealer Network: You should also coordinate with your dealers and distributors on your marketing efforts. They should be working to get their clients and prospective clients into your exhibit. Perhaps you can offer their salespeople a nice cash incentive for any sales they make of your equipment to someone that came into your booth at the show. You could put a 90 day or 180 day (after the show) time limit on it and you could stipulate that you must have scanned the badge of someone from the company. That will give your dealers’ sales reps a reason to get on the phone with their customers and push your machines instead of the competition. This program should be rolled out to dealers/distributors at least 30 days prior to the show so they have a chance to work the phones and book appointments. You might want to schedule dealers for specific times in the booth so you don’t wind up overrun with dealers and their clients all at once. Spacing them out allows your company booth staff to allocate their time to help your dealers effectively close sales. If you don’t want to assign shifts, ask the dealers to coordinate their appointments with someone you assign within the company so you can eliminate the likelihood of overcrowding.
