15 Tactics To Drive Attendees To Your Trade Show Booth
Trade shows are a key event to help market and promote your brand. To help prevent your booth from being unnoticed, we created a 15-step list on how to drive attendees to your company’s booth. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s start boosting your brand’s awareness at your next trade show!
1. Research and Promotion
To help make your brand’s booth successful, you have to plan ahead and promote yourself to not only the show itself but to news outlets as well. You have to get the news out there to potential clients that your booth will be at the trade show, and it’s worth stopping by. Now, this promotion can be anywhere from social media posts to personal invitations, but every member of your marketing team should be on board.
Before the big event, determine what your goal is. What do you want your brand to get out of the trade show? Most companies just want to get their feet wet in the new industry, but some partake in marketing with industry leaders to get their brand well recognized. Having a clear goal of knowing what you want to get out of the event will help increase your success and decrease your potential for failure.
Promoting your brand doesn’t stop when the trade show ends. You have to have a follow-up plan to your booth attendees in a form of an e-mail campaign or thank-you letters to help continue their commitment to your brand. Plus, this shows that you cared that they stopped by, which will only help benefit you and your company.
2. Offer Knowledge
A top recommended tactic to help generate leads is to offer knowledge for contact details. The most common tools used to gain leads are reports, white papers, and ebooks that are shared among each other.
Plus, people love free information, so what’s the harm in whipping up soft-information to help you generate more potential clients for your company. Even having a simple sign-up sheet with a spokesperson is good enough to help you gather up more leads once the big event is over.
3. Sample Products
Another incredibly popular way of steering attendees to your booth is to give away free samples of your product or services. This way, you can give potential clients a first-hand experience of what they’re buying, and increase your chances of making a sale.
4. Product or Announcement Launch
Trade shows are one of the best places to make a major announcement about your brand or product. This is one of the main reasons attendees come to the event in the first place. Plus, offering to give an insider’s look may be the hook you need to gain leads and increase your brand’s popularity.
5. Be Alert
No one wants to walk up to a booth where representatives are either sitting down or trying to snooze away the event. Instead, stand up and try to engage with the crowd around your booth. However, don’t forget to relax, have fun, and smile. First impressions are everything, and it could be the difference between ignoring your booth or adding one more interest to your growing brand.
6. Competitions
There’s never a better time to have a light-hearted and smart competition than at a trade show. It can help spruce up the energy surrounding your booth and shine a lighter tone towards your company. Plus, there’s no better way to market than offering rewards to your clients.
7. Social Ads
Having your social media manager take over Twitter for the day and live tweet the trade show can seriously benefit your company. Not only does it show that your online presence it attentive, but you could hit a cord on Twitter and help get your company trending online. Plus, social media is a great space to make announcements or updates to your booth.
8. Charity Donations
Introducing charity donations to your booth is a key element to driving attendees to your booth. It shows that your company is self-less and shifts the attitude towards your brand immediately.
9. Keep Your Staff Knowledgeable
The last thing you want to do is to position staff around your booth who know next to nothing about your company or products/service you offer. Even if they know limited information, it’s still not going to generate enough interest to make your booth a big hit. Instead, spend a few weeks teaching your staff the ups and downs of your company, leaving no stone unturned. This will help increase trust among your potential clients and make your company stand out.
10. Answer Questions
A great way to increase attendees to your booth is to freely offer to ask any questions people may have about your company. After all, there’s no point in handing out giant brochures if you can’t answer specific questions about your company. This is also where knowledgeable staff comes into play.
11. Have Videos Ready
If there’s one thing other than photos that can help drive attendees to your booth, it’s videos. Customers love being able to see a company in action, as well as the services or products they offer, in a form of content they can watch. Now, I’m not saying you have to produce a movie, but having a small series of YouTube videos can help drive your booth’s popularity.
12. Buy Ad Time on the Event’s App
Sponsor opportunities are key to driving sales at any event, especially when it comes to mobile apps. With the growing popularity of phone apps, there has never been a better time to get in on the action and invite consumers to get to know your company a little bit more. However, it’s important that you thoroughly plan out your ad placement, since a weak ad could pose a threat to your brand’s public image.
13. Free Wi-Fi
Offering complimentary services are a great way to boost the number of attendees to your booth. Although most trade shows offer some sort of wi-fi connection, you can offer increase hot spots as a free complimentary service when signing up for your product or service. This shows that your company cares about the average consumer, and is technologically advanced for the growing pace of companies in 2017.
14. Tweetups
Providing a tweetup for your booth can be a great way to boost the number of people that visit it. Plus, it’s also an excellent way of strengthening your Twitter profile, in hopes that others will start following it. You can even offer free memorabilia such as company pens in hopes that it will lead to a future client.
15. Driving Leads Through Food
Who doesn’t love looking browsing through the latest innovative brands with a brownie in their hands? That’s right, you can drive interest and popularity, along with leads at your booth with pleasure food. Whether it’s free or for sale, it is a sure fire way to invite people to know more about your company. Especially when offering pleasure food, people will be coming back for more and more, which can lead to gathered interest and potential clients.
