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An exhibition is a unique marketing medium. It is the only marketing medium where prospects can comprehensively experience your product through hands-on demonstrations and one-to-one conversations. Combined with the neutrality of the exhibition environment and the fact that prospects pay to visit you, this means exhibitions can be enormously powerful.
Large have developed and implemented exhibition strategies for a variety of clients across a variety of sectors including such factors as pre-show promotion, press packs, graphic panels and pop-ups, multi-media presentations, collateral, data capture and follow up e-mail campaigns
Step 1 – determine objectives
You can achieve an enormous amount at an exhibition - providing you know what it is you want to achieve. Your greatest success will come from a clear understanding of your objectives before you start. Like any marketing exercise, exhibition design is best treated as part of a holistic, integrated marketing strategy. Only once you have established your overall marketing objectives can you consider the role an exhibition might play. Some potential rewards of a successful exhibition are:
- A qualified, up-to-date prospect database
- Potential customers provided with hands-on exposure to your products
- A new product or company introduced to the market
- Media exposure generated for the company, product, service
- Raised brand awareness for your product and company
- Customer feedback about products/services/company
- The opportunity to learn from your competitors
Step 2 - Pre-show promotion
Pre-show promotion is the area most often overlooked but can make the difference between successful and non-successful exhibiting. One of the most powerful tools for pre-show promotion is the visitor registration list, with a well crafted email marketing or direct mail campaign you can invite these people straight to your stand. Organisers also often provide a marketing guide from which you can order complimentary visitor tickets for key customers. The guide will also outline advertising opportunities in the exhibition brochure and other show related media and provide event logos to include in your literature.
Step 3 – Train staff
Staff should be given a thorough overview of the objectives and every evening when the show is over a debriefing meeting should be held with your staff where goals are reviewed. Discuss what approaches worked well and which didn't and what products and services were of most interest. Then ensure that the lessons learned are incorporated in the following days activities. Adjust your goals depending on their performance if you think the goals are too easily achieved raise them.
Step 4 – Break the ice
Make yourself available, stand near the front of the stand, be aware of your body language (don’t fold your arms) and actively engage people in conversation. Your opening statement should be polite, unthreatening and open. General questions can work well as openers, for example "What do you think of the exhibition?" or "What brings you to the show today?" A generic, open question like this gives you the opportunity to agree and then open up dialogue about your products. Give-aways are another great way to break the ice, toys, stickers, t-shirts and headache tablets have worked well for us in the past. Also, get to know the other exhibitors; unless they are direct competition they will refer people from their stand to yours.
Step 5 – Make your stand impossible to escape
It is vital to design your stand to gain maximum attention, to attract the right kind of visitors, to maximise lead generation and to develop a successful follow-up strategy. The ultimate aim being to convert exhibition visitors to clients. Despite effective pre-show promotion there will still be people arriving at the show with no idea that you are exhibiting there. Your challenge is to quickly make your presence known and entice them on to your stand. One of the best ways of doing this is to use promotional staff to trawl the aisles giving out leaflets promoting an on-stand competition. Competitions are great at generating traffic to your stand, but you must make sure that is does not distract people away from the products and services that you are trying to promote on the stand. Prizes must be relevant or little is achieved - except hundreds of unqualified business cards.
Step 6 – Lead generation and follow up
Lead generation is one of the main objectives of any exhibition but it’s easy in the heat of the moment to omit key information. In addition to contact details you should record: the specific products or services that appealed to them, the name of the decision maker (if not them), the industry that they are in, the follow up action they required and the date that action has to be completed on. A good tip is to give potential leads a rating, which should also have been specified by your stand manager, indicating your assessment of the value of the lead, say a grade from A–E, which will enable you to prioritise the follow-up campaign. Unless the prospect has stated otherwise, the sooner you follow up the more likely you are to find that your prospects are still interested, remember your conversation and remember what excited them about your products. Even if you do not close all of the leads keep this data safe, contact them regularly, and invite them back to next year's show. Persistent contact reaps rewards! -
