Pre-show marketing for trade shows includes many different techniques of how you can attract visitors to your booth. Trade shows can bring results for your business, including lead generation, brand recognition, and cost-effective advertising. However, this is not achieved through hope marketing, where people arrive at a tradeshow and wait for someone to come and visit them at their booth.
Without trade show marketing and pre-show marketing, you won’t walk away with the results you wanted. Therefore, you need to start doing marketing long before the event. Create your marketing plan and how you want to reach your audience. Start with a social media marketing content plan, write all the things you want them to know about your products, company and let them know they can visit you at the tradeshow.
Types of Pre-show Marketing
There are two types of marketing; paid and non-paid. Both are equally important to grow your brand’s awareness and gain more followers, and in the end, create a community around your brand. With organic or non-paid marketing before the show, you want to use many industry-related hashtags, keywords, and strong CTA to let your audience know you are there. People are visual, and with social media such as Instagram or Pinterest you can create valuable content for your followers with appealing, eye-catching graphics or images. Announce your activity planned for the trade show.
Hosting an activity at your trade show booth is important. It gives people an extra reason to stop and chat with you. Canvas bags featuring your logo and booth number are an excellent trade show giveaway because trade show attendees desperately need a place to store all of the collateral they will be collecting. Custom-label bottled water is also a great giveaway. Every person gets thirsty! You can also send out mobile device charging cables with an invitation to charge mobile devices at your booth.
With paid marketing, you can reach a more targeted audience with common interests, demographics, or behaviors. You can also target people who are similar to those who liked your page. With Facebook Pixel, you can easily retarget those who visited your website or a specific page on your website.
Send Newsletter Campaign
Launching an email newsletter campaign is a quick and effective way to market for an upcoming trade show. It also gives you a way to track how much engagement your emails are getting. By looking at click-through rates and open rates, you can get a good idea of how many people are interested in the event.
Depending on who you are targeting with these emails, there is a chance they may not be knowledgeable about the event. Provide them with a summary and information about what they can expect from your company and products if they attend. If you are sending a newsletter to key industry prospects such as importers or distributors, they will be more knowledgeable, but will still benefit from an overview of the products they can review or sample at your booth.
Take the opportunity for the newsletter campaign to write a short paragraph where you invite them to your booth. Make sure to provide your booth number and contact details, so they can easily find you.
Trade show marketing is one of the essential parts of your event, so don’t forget to start early! But, before you get carried away with these pre-trade show marketing strategies, start with your marketing plan, and if you need help in coping with the world of social media and pre-show marketing, we can help. Click here to get in touch with us.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing gives you unlimited possibilities on how to attract visitors to your booth or event. Create a Facebook or Linkedin event and indicate the exhibition name and your booth opening times, so they know when they can find you. You can create a contest or social media giveaway with a unique hashtag for them to enter. The winner will be selected at the booth. Connect with your fellow peers on social media. On LinkedIn, you can find industry experts and leaders, plus new distribution partners you would want to connect with in your niche. You can work with a social media marketer who will understand how to use LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or the newly popular TikTok to engage with people from your niche. Don’t worry if you don’t have the in-house expertise, because we have that covered for you.
Use social media to attract leads, and to start conversations with them. Talk to industry professionals and people attending the event and arrange a time for them to visit your booth. Make the most of this opportunity and get meetings, lunches and evening socials arranged before you get at the show.
Update your website
Your website is like a PR of your company, and you want to create a positive image of your brand. That is the reason to have an updated website with a clear message about your brand, and before the trade show, you should include easy-to-follow directions to your booth for the show. Why not include a form on your website that lets your customers make an appointment to meet you at the show? That will give a clear call to action to your website visitors and those who will attend the trade show.
Invest in high-quality images to showcase your products on the website and your social media profiles. Use eye-catching images that will grab the attention of your audience.
Write a blog post before and after the trade show to tell a story about your brand, products, and team. Before you start writing your blog, you want to do keyword research for SEO gain. Be sure to find the proper keyword density, write attention-grabbing headers, and use appropriate images. Also, make sure the page is SEO optimized in terms of titles, length, linking, etc.
Another great option is to have Multilingual Landing pages so people worldwide can understand your offer and services. Having a multilingual site helps expand your multilingual SEO ranking. Localizing your website into different languages improves your SERP ranking locally across the world. English may still dominate the web, but that doesn’t mean that everyone wants to buy from English speaking websites. A survey by the Common Sense Advisory found that 75% of non-English speaking online shoppers preferred to buy products in their native language. Therefore, if you are looking to create multilingual landing page or website, you can reach out to us and we will make it happen.