Engaging with your target audience well in advance of a trade show is crucial for a successful event. Building awareness, driving attendance, and encouraging action to visit your exhibit can be achieved through a strategic, multichannel approach. Here are some key options to consider as you build a robust, engaging, and relevant experiential strategy:
 
1. Email Marketing:

• Build a segmented email list and send targeted invitations to your audience.  While this is pretty basic, don’t forget the basics of; the RIGHT list, the RIGHT offer and the RIGHT creative – in that order.
• Create a series of pre-event emails with valuable content, sneak peeks, and exclusive offers.
• Include a clear call-to-action (CTA) directing recipients to register for the event or visit your booth.  I cannot stress this enough – all communications should have a CTA.  Consider, what do I want my audience to do at this stage, and how do I make it easy for them to do it?

 
2. Social Media:

• Leverage social media platforms to create buzz around your participation in the trade show.
• Share teaser content, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and announcements to generate interest.
• Use event-specific hashtags to increase visibility and encourage conversations.
• Run targeted social media ads to reach a broader audience.

 
3. Paid Advertising:

• Utilize online advertising platforms like Google Ads or social media ads to target specific audience segments or needs groups.
• Design visually appealing ads with a clear message and a compelling reason to visit your exhibit.
• Consider retargeting ads for users who have shown interest in your products or services.

 
4. Direct Mail:

• Send personalized, well-designed direct mailers to key prospects and existing clients.
• Include incentives such as exclusive access, discounts, or freebies for those who visit your booth.
• Use direct mail to stand out in a digital world and create a tangible connection.
• For ultra-high importance prospects, consider dimensional direct mail to truly stand out. Personalize the graphics and the offer to pinpoint your message and offer to these VIPs.

 
5. Content Marketing:

• Create valuable, informative content related to your industry or products.
• Share this content through blog posts, whitepapers, and videos to establish your expertise.
• Use content to position your booth as a must-visit destination for attendees seeking information.

 
6. Influencer Marketing:

• Partner with industry influencers to promote your participation in the trade show.
• Influencers can create excitement and credibility around your brand, attracting their followers to your exhibit.

 
7. Event Website and Landing Pages:

• Optimize your trade show profile on the event's official website.
• Create dedicated landing pages on your website with event-specific information, registration details, and a clear value proposition.

 
8. Engagement Campaigns:

• Run online contests, giveaways, or interactive campaigns leading up to the event.
• Encourage participants to share their excitement and use user-generated content to further promote your presence.

 
Remember to track the performance of each channel and adjust your strategy as needed. The goal is to create a cohesive and compelling narrative that motivates your target audience to not only attend the trade show but also make a beeline for your exhibit. 

Want to learn more about creating compelling pre-show experiences and campaigns for your trade show program? Contact Ben Olson at the OLSON experience, LLC at [email protected] or visit www.theolsonexperience.com.

Copyright 2024. the OLSON experience, LLC

It’s important occasionally, and especially post-pandemic, that we take a deeper look at our event programs and challenge the status quo. Just because things have always been done a certain way doesn’t mean that they should continue. Audiences, shows, organizations, tastes, options, competitors, travel budgets, virtual options, internal leadership, and a host of other elements change with time, and that may mean tweaks are needed in your plans. Following are five things to consider challenging in your program.

One: Challenge your Calendar. Look at the shows that are on your annual tradeshow calendar. Are there overlaps with audiences that potentially allow elimination of certain shows? Are there underperforming shows that are trending downwards that may need to be reconsidered moving forward?  Conversely, are there new shows or different shows that should be on your radar? Attending a show because you always have, is never a good enough reason. With costs escalating, and management demanding better ROI ‘s, the shows that you choose to spend your budget on need to perform optimally to provide the desired return.  And if sales insists on attendance (which they have been known to do), be sure to get their commitment, shared with leadership, on their performance and accountability to results.

Two: Challenge your Exhibit Space. Here again, because you’ve always had a certain size space, is it the right size, is it the right footprint, is it the right placement for what you’re looking to accomplish at a particular event? Is a large island booth bringing the returns you need from a square footage standpoint? Are there large areas within your space that are going underutilized? Rightsizing is more important than ever to ensure that you are maximizing the effectiveness of the space, and the efficiencies in your budget to ensure that your costs for the event, space, exhibit, drayage, shipping, and all related expenses are working as hard as they can towards meeting your objectives.

Three: Challenge your Organizer. Many times, we think of show organizer contacts as we think of used car salesmen – out to sell us what they want to sell us.  These reps though, when good relationships are cultivated, can become one of our greatest resources.  They have their finger on the pulse of the industry, your competitors and seen and unseen opportunities within the event.  Utilize these allies to garner inside information on the event that can help inform deeper insight and better decision making on event space, sponsorships, or competitor’s plans, trends, promotions, and other elements.  Checking a box to do the same thing as last year can be a deterrent to growth.  Your rep can help you think outside the box to drive innovation and improvement.

Four: Challenge your Staff.  Do you really need 15 people to work the space? Are they being utilized to their fullest, or is their presence not completely necessary? Even worse, do they not want to be there? Right sizing your staff can give you dollars back from T&E expenses that can be better invested in promotions to drive greater traffic for greater engagement to and at the booth. Also, those people that you are bringing, are they the right people? Are they the staff that are the most engaging and will perform the best in the space? Sometimes junior people are more eager and see the opportunity to be on the show floor more positively. Partnering great junior staff with seasoned staff can help grow stronger teams for the future.

Five: Challenge your Promotion Plan. Where cost deficiencies are found in the other areas, consider taking some of those savings and rolling them into a more robust promotion plan. Pre-show promotions help to drive attendance, awareness, and action. Getting the right people to the right space helps encourage increased effectiveness of your program. Also, look at your existing efforts - are they paying the dividends that you need them to? Is that hospitality event providing any ROI that’s measurable? Or do you scramble for attendance and is it just an opportunity to share a few drinks with a few clients that may be done on a more cost-effective scale? Looking at your plan with a critical eye, and challenging each expense and each element, can help you weed out tactics that aren’t working as well as they could be, and free up dollars to put towards more effective trade show engagements.

Finding the time to undertake these challenges can be, well, challenging in itself. Involve your team and stakeholders in brainstorming sessions that can help weed out the underperforming elements and replace them with up to the minute thinking, strategies and tactics to drive improved results from your program.

Want to learn more about challenging your conventions and improving your efficiency and effectiveness within your trade show program?  Contact Ben Olson at the OLSON experience, LLC at [email protected] or visit www.theolsonexperience.com.
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About Ben Olson:  With over 20 years in creating great experiences that bring brands and audiences successfully together face-to-face and face-to-screen, Ben has helped some of the world’s most iconic brands, in B2B and B2C spaces, engage, enlighten, and evoke action with their target audiences.  With senior leadership experience on both agency and brand sides, Ben has built strategic and creative experiential marketing teams and integrated marketing offerings at such organizations as; Momentum Worldwide, mg/MG Design and GES.  Currently, Ben is Chief Experience Officer at the OLSON experience, LLC, offering experiential and brand strategy assistance to agencies, exhibit houses and directly to brands.  Visit www.theolsonexperience.com to learn more. ​

In the engagement game, even small moves can start to yield big wins. Take into consideration the term “attendee.” It’s a term that we all use and one that is standardized within the industry. But it’s also a term that tends to be rather transactional in attitude, and in nature. It can be a more mass-focused mindset; number of attendees at the show, number of attendee impressions, number of attendee scans, etc.  To many, including some of your event staff, an attendee is basically someone who is present at a conference and may happen to enter your booth. That transaction may simply be a scan, or a brief conversation, and on their way they go.
Consider instead, the connotation of a “guest.” A guest, is someone you may welcome in to your own home, or your corporate home, which your booth is simply an extension of.  Guests have inferences of warmth and welcome. Somewhere in between, there probably is the word visitor, but that’s not my point today. My suggestion today is to begin to think of, and refer to, those people who are entering your space as guests.

As you start that subtle shift between transactional and welcoming, you can begin to coach your staff, or encourage your clients to coach their staff to begin re-thinking that term of attendee and replace with guest. By doing so, you place a greater inferred value on the individual and the all-important experience that you are creating for that person.  Engagement depth should follow as your team builds deeper interactions and develops stronger relationships with those valuable parties.

And regarding that value, if you’ve done your preparation, you should be able to share with your team exactly the value that that each guest represents, both in lifetime value to the organization, and in investment at each particular event.
On the surface, this all may seem like a very small move, but re-thinking your vernacular will help your staff change their attitude and their approach and potentially improve performance at your next show.

Want to learn more about creating great guest experiences and improving your efficiency and effectiveness within your trade show program?  Contact Ben Olson at the OLSON experience, LLC at [email protected] or visit www.theolsonexperience.com.

About Ben Olson:  With over 20 years in creating great experiences that bring brands and audiences successfully together face-to-face and face-to-screen, Ben has helped some of the world’s most iconic brands, in B2B and B2C spaces, engage, enlighten and evoke action with their target audiences.  With senior leadership experience on both agency and brand sides, Ben has built strategic and creative experiential marketing teams and integrated marketing offerings in Director and VP roles at such organizations as; Momentum Worldwide, mg/MG Design and GES.  Currently, Ben is Chief Experience Officer at the OLSON experience, LLC, offering experiential and brand strategy assistance to agencies, exhibit houses and directly to brands.  Visit www.theolsonexperience.com to learn more.
 

As we continue to go back to true face-to-face marketing, it becomes clearer that it will not necessarily be back to business as usual.  The pandemic has taught us many lessons, including that there is a place for virtual events and there isn’t a place for virtual events. Many of us are glad to be back on the show floor, or back to an in-person conference.  It gives us some time to escape the everyday routine and refocus on an area of interest that is relevant to our professional or personal lives. 

There will be, however, those who will be hesitant to return, for one reason or another.  Attendance numbers though, seem to be coming back strong, and the quality of attendees seems to be better than in the past.   As such, it will be even more important for smart exhibitors to up their engagement game at every step of the attendee journey to ensure those right attendees know who you are, get to your exhibit, engage with staff and move further into the sales and relationship funnel. 
  
Start by designing a comprehensive engagement plan for not only your annual campaign, but individual events as well, allowing the ability to find commonalities in product/service offerings, audiences, messages, footprints, content, marketing and technology assets, even stakeholders that may provide budget streamlining, potentially allowing more dollars to be channeled into audience engagement.
 
Employ engaging pre-event touches to drive awareness and attendance to both the in-person event and/or it’s virtual companion.  Provide strong reasons for “why” your audience needs to attend.  As you compete for more share of travel wallet, giving them strong incentives to attend with compelling offers, clear benefits and even using FOMO messaging can help to drive audiences to act.  And don’t just rely on email touches to get your message across. Sure, marketing automation makes email a great centerpiece of a campaign, but sometimes traditional direct mail can create a bigger impression and engage audiences that are harder to reach through digital means.  And of course, social media offers great opportunities for your potential attendees to engage, to build affinity and to act.
 
At-event, look for opportunities with show organizers for effective sponsorship options, especially if your location is less than ideal.  While a majority of attendees pre-plan their exhibit hall visits, it’s still possible to get on their consideration list at the last minute.  Here too, provide a strong “why,” not just your booth number, logo and tagline.  And, as always, put your best engagers at the aisle, whether that is sales or support staff, select the most engaging, most approachable and most fearless staffers as the first line of engagement.  They can always provide a “hand-off” to a more qualified member of staff as the conversation becomes more detailed, but use people to their advantage and your advantage to get, hold and escalate the interest of qualified passersby. 

In future posts, I’ll go more in-depth about some of these suggestions, as well as exploring the full 360 degree spectrum of pre, at and post-event engagement. 
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