Tradeshows: Peak exposure produces peak profit
Newer, better strategies
Connect with the best in your industry and absorb the most effective strategies in marketing, sales and business management.
- A time to mingle with long-time industry contacts and make new ones, tradeshows are a must for your sales team. The reason is trite but true; people buy from people. Come together to meet suppliers, discover new products, and network with your industry.
- Loosen your grip on previously held notions. The industry is always changing. Use events as an opportunity to think outside the box and learn something new!
- Your marketing team can take advantage of every exhibitor at an event. It’s an opportunity to understand how your customer is getting marketed to. Everyone undergoes an experience choosing, buying, and using a product or service. What kind of message and branding do your customers get? Tradeshows have the answers and savvy marketers use it to their advantage.
Additional Revenue
Engaged audiences at the right event are more likely to turn engaging topics and networking opportunities into additional revenue opportunities: partnerships, new processes, technologies, and more.
Tips for generating revenue from attending events:
- Register for the right event(s)
- Ensure the event you’re registering for is relevant to your goals. Is the theme related to your catered trades? Are the speakers and sponsors providing talking points that help solve your business needs? Are other business partners or potential ones attending?
- Send the right people
- Ensure that the person representing your organization understands your business goals, struggles, ideologies and is capable of networking with like-minded, or different minded, individuals.
- Take notes and network
- Corporate events are a great way to collect inside details on successful businesses. Look at the speaker list prior to attending and come prepared with specific questions related to your organization. Take advantage of the thought leadership that is on stage and use their knowledge to enhance your business.
- Networking comes in different forms. It takes creativity to devise new methods of reaching your target audience and skill to turn their advice, ideas or contact list into customers. Combine face-to-face meetings, with a happy hour or intimate dinner setting to increase your chances of success.
- After action process
- First, you’ll want to show gratitude for your clients, partners and team.
- Second, organize your notes and action items that you’ve taken away from the event. Strategizing these thoughts creates the foundation for identifying your gaps and how you can implement those processes to support those ideas.
- Finally, leverage your networking contacts. With new strategies in place, you’ll be in position utilize opportunities that help to grow your business.
Customer conversion and retention
Tradeshows are exchanges of information. Don’t let it go to waste. It should inspire new ideas and a creative thinking process to be used for improved conversion and retention.
- Your goal requires finding selling angles baked into keynotes, product presentations, and networking. When the “research” phase is over, take what you learned and implement it to increase customer conversion and retention.
- You want to look at everything your team retained from the event and bridge the gap to your customers. What are your competitors doing right? What are they doing wrong?
- Look for commonalities. Look for hyperbole and outlandish promises. Look to the buzzword speak they use, where things are ambiguous. Look to the good messaging and the bad messaging.
- Tradeshows shouldn’t breed pure imitation. Respect what works, but also stir up ideas you can use to build a sales letter, a landing page, a funnel, maybe even a campaign. If you do this, the benefits of a tradeshow extend beyond the event itself in the form of profit.