How to Quadruple the Results of Your Tradeshow Marketing

Promotion is a critical leverage point in tradeshow marketing. By applying a modest effort in planning and executing promotional strategies, you can double, triple, even quadruple the results of your investment.

Tradeshow marketers often get so preoccupied with designing and building their booths that they can forget to concentrate on driving qualified traffic. An investment in promotion is critical to your success, because...

• You cannot expect show management to do all of your recruiting for you.
  
  
• Business buyers generally plan their tradeshow time in advance. Research from the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) found that 76% of attendees use pre-show information for this purpose.
  
  
• A fabulous booth is not an end in itself. The end is reached only by attracting qualified traffic.
  
  
• Front-end and back-end promotions extend the impact of the event over a longer period of time and deepen the resulting connections with customers and prospects.

Your Tradeshow Promotions Strategy

A tradeshow marketing plan must include an integrated strategy for communications to support your objectives. The strategic planning process is actually easier than you might think. Let the optimal promotions emerge naturally from your show objectives. Here is an example:

Sample Business Event Promotion Strategic Planning Grid

In this example, if your objective at the tradeshow is sales lead generation, and you will declare success based on the number of qualified leads, then you want to select promotional strategies and pre-show tactics that support them. This table suggests some hypothetical pre-show promotional tactics that might emerge.

Read the Full Article

Ruth P. Stevens consults on B2B marketing and teaches marketing to grad students at Columbia Business School. Reach her at ruth@ruthstevens.com.