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You Need More Than Luck for Successful Event Marketing

DialogTech

Many St. Patrick’s Day festivities are going on around the city of Chicago this week, from the dyeing of the river green and Celtic performances to neighborhood events and thousands of your Irish friends gathering to watch the parade. There is nothing quite like St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago! However, you need more than the luck o’ the Irish to coordinate these kind of memorable festivities.

In fact, when you’re planning and executing an event for your business, it takes a great deal of time and resources to pull it off. Just like putting on a city parade or dyeing the Chicago River green, it takes time to put together a trade show. Here are four core areas you should focus on when planning a trade show:

1. Trade Show Display

You have selected the conferences and booth location that you feel will generate the most traffic; now it’s time to plan everything else. First, decide what the goals and objectives are for the event. That will help you determine how much space is needed. The size of your booth will dictate the type of display. A standard booth space is 10×10. It gives you just enough space for a 9×10 display, a small counter or a display of products, and a monitor.

2. Designing the Backdrop

A well-thought-out booth can help make for a successful show. When designing the booth backdrop, determine what messaging best suits your business model and target audience. Remember, less is more. Using fewer words and more images to illustrate your message goes much further than placing whole paragraphs on your backdrop. You only have 5 seconds or less to read a billboard when driving down the interstate: the same rule applies to an exhibit backdrop. You only have a few seconds to capture a conference attendee’s attention when they are walking the show floor, so ensure that your backdrop is enticing and eye-catching.

Pro-Tip: Low on Budget?

If you are low on budget, consider designing a booth that is easy for just one or two of your sales representatives to assemble. Freight charges can get expensive since they are based on weight. Designing a lightweight booth with modular pieces will help keep costs down.

3. Logistics

Your logistical needs will be based on the booth design. For example, you may want to run a looping presentation in your booth. You can either ship your own monitor and stand or rent one from the show. I have found it to be cheaper to ship a monitor and stand vs. renting one from show services. If you are using a monitor you will need to coordinate electricity for the booth. Other show services to consider would be Internet, cleaning services, furniture, and lead retrieval device, etc.

4. During-the-Show Event Marketing

Every scanned booth visitor has some level of interest. At the end of the conference, scans and business cards are worth their weight in gold, assuming their contact information was entered correctly during the registration process. Booth staff should be well-versed in answering and recording questions, feedback, and concerns.

Pro-Tip: Phone Leads Are the Missing Piece

Are you tracking phone calls that come as result of exhibiting at a show? If your answer is no, then you’re doing yourself a disservice. If you are only tracking leads collected in the booth via scan, etc. and not inbound phone calls that come after the show, you are missing leads. It’s an easy problem to solve: insert a unique trackable phone-number (each trade show should get their own) onto the collateral—you can even use a unique number for each type of collateral—you hand out at the trade show. When leads call you, you can attribute which trade show or piece of collateral the caller came from based on the phone number used.

As you can see you need more than luck to plan an event. But I hope the above tips help you plan your next trade show with a little more ease.