Tips To Market Your Business At Tradeshows

Customers have the tendency to seek out businesses that are visible, seem familiar and easily available to them. 

Therefore, you need to get your business out there. Traditional advertising and promotions still work to get the name out for a business. But there are also several other ways for promoting and advertising your brand.

One of the ways is to participate in trade shows as it is a highly effective method of advertising your brand.  

Business trade shows as well as other similar exhibitions offer a great opportunity for promoting your business, your products and services as well as your brand. The trade exhibitions offer you a great opportunity to meet and engage with your current as well as potential clients. Keep in mind that people visiting trade shows are truly interested in the products and services displayed there otherwise they won't be attending such an event. Therefore, you should use such shows to get some highly variable sales leads by effectively marketing your business.  

7 Tips for Marketing Your Business at Trade Shows  

Attract People  
You should use various aids such as giveaways, banner stands, contests, literature, prize drawings, banners as well as various other interactive elements such as touch screens to attract people to your booth. It will give you an opportunity to demonstrate your products and services or conduct a survey to get valuable customer information. It's recommended to make your booth look unique and make it fun, engaging and interesting. You should focus on attractive giveaways, informative literature, eye-catching signage as well as sales and marketing messages for your business in order to attract high volume of people to your booth.  

Research  
You do need to plan the display of your products at the trade show but it's important to do your homework before you go there. You first need to find out the trade shows that are best for your particular business niche. To figure out the right trade shows, you need to find out several things such as the number of businesses that buy a booth at the trade show, number of people who attend trade show as well as their demographics by job function and other such things. 

You should also try to get in touch with the businesses who have attended such shows in the past and ask for their opinions and feedback about their experience. Keep in mind that it's not cheap to attend such shows and therefore, you need to do your homework in order to get the best return on your investment.  

Early Registration  
After doing your research to choose the trade shows that can generate maximum ROI, you should try to register as early as possible. Most of the organizers of trade shows allow businesses to easily register online and many organizers offer significant discounts for advanced registrations which means you can save hundreds to thousands of dollars in registration fees.  

Have Goals  
If you don't have specific goals, you are much less likely to succeed. Therefore, you need to set clear goals for yourself as well as your staff at the booth. Prioritize your goals. Have discussions among the staff to find methods to achieve these goals in a manner that allows everyone in the team to work on achieving the most important ones.   

Your goals may be in the form of collecting a particular number of sales leads through a lead qualification survey or a certain number of sales demonstrations or research on a particular competitor and other such things.
 
Advertise  
You should also announce your attendance through direct mail sent to the attendees. You should also tell everyone by posting it on your website, mentioning it on your blog, including the information in the newsletters, through your social media accounts as well as email campaigns and other such things.   

If you are planning to hold a prize drawing or a contest at the trade show, you should also mention that. In other words, you need to get the word out in order to attract as much traffic as possible to your pop up displays.  

Contests  
A great way to get a lot of foot traffic to your booth is a prize drawing or a contest. When you are getting the word out about your booth at the trade show, you may also ask potential visitors to be a part of a prize drawing or a contest by completing a leads qualification survey at your booth. The prize for the contest should be related to the products or services offered by you or a product that has a broader appeal for targeted customers.   

For instance, if your company sells survey research services or a survey software, you may offer the prize of a device that can be used to administer surveys as a tablet PC or an iPad for conducting mobile surveys. You may also give away a copy of the software to the winner so that they can create and administer surveys. Do not forget to get in touch with the contacts once the trade show is over.  

Be Well Prepared  
Make sure you are well prepared with supplies when you go to the trade show. Take extra business cards, giveaways, brochures and important literature after researching the number of attendees to the trade show. While every attendee to the trade show is not likely to visit your booth but you need to make sure that you are not short of materials at your booth. Train your staff to show enthusiasm at the booth.   

Make sure the staff knows about the current as well as new products and services offered by your business, about your company, your competitors, market trends to have an intelligent conversation with prospective clients. You should encourages staff at the booth to engage and interact with visitors, visit booth of your competitors as well as to get the contact information of potential clients with leads qualification survey.