How to achieve your trade show goals in 2024?

Trade shows remain an essential tool in the marketing mix among organisations that intend to enhance brand visibility and recognition, attract potential customers, and ultimately drive sales. So, it can be concluded that trade shows are effective and provide a perfect opportunity to achieve business goals in 2024 in case of their proper planning, preparation, and implementation.?

In the sections below, we disentangle several crucial approaches that fall under three categories: pre-show, at-show, and post-show, to ensure that your trade show is successful in the next year.

Identify Your Objectives and Develop a Rationale

The S.M.A.R.T. Goals are a good tentative way to start on the path to attaining trade show success based on your business goals and priorities. As your plan for 2024 shows:

• Develop your reasons for exhibiting – product launches, market development, etc., and link objectives to these.

• Mark certain quotas of leads – quantity and quality of prospects that one wants to engage with.

• Monitor rivals to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your organisation. Understand what has an impact towards your particular industry.

• Collect feedback from attendees of previous events to determine the possible demographic characteristics, preferences, and concerns.

• Read through the reports from the promoter of the previous events you participated in to gauge the amount of foot traffic and leads you can anticipate.

• Pre and post-show, decide on set marketing KPIs to measure to see how much the show helped your brand and sales.

Steps To Optimise Your Trade Show Marketing Plan

A brand immersion and a marketing activation will gravitate high-quality leads to your exhibit.

Pre-Show Promotions

• Also, let everyone know your booth details in advance, starting from emailers, social media PR outreach, etc.

• This pre-show activity should involve conducting contests and quizzes in order to elicit visitor information. Membership can also be popularised by offering discount coupons or free passes to an event.

• During your pre-show presentations and conference calls with your sales team, make sure they are armed with relevant promotional items for the show and your booth.

At-Show Visitor Engagement

• It is recommended to engage your booth staff in terms of your objectives, your ICP, product differentiation, and typical customer challenges.

• Designing an attractive booth whereby there can be some writing displayed that informs of offers or an event. There should be adequate stock of the products and demonstration units.

• Hand out good quality items imprinted with your logo and phone numbers to facilitate the interactions.

Promote Through Product Launches or Demos

Trade shows are perfect for introducing new products or trying to demonstrate current ones to potential customers. Prepare engaging presentations that convey the following:

? The key differentiation and unique selling proposition

? Customer pains/losses that are provided

? As mentioned before, there are several usage scenarios and benefits of the developed system.

Make use of the opportunity to offer live demonstrations, give details of USPs and implement ways of bringing out products to an active audience.

On Training Your Trade Show Staff

Your trade show team will make sure that there is action happening in the booth and that the leads are engaged in meaningful discussions. Invest time in training them on the following:

? Company offerings

? Key talking points

? Lead handling processes

? On Practice: Some questions that should be expected

Ensure that they are equipped with any presentation needs, sales/ marketing materials, promotional items and well-articulated tasks for each one of them.

Capture Leads: Develop a Framework

The main measure of value that trade shows provide is the number and quality of leads that are sold. Ensure you have a system to capture lead details, including:

? Contact information

? Purchasing authority

? Buying timeline

? Position in the flow chart

Such items include lead retrieval mobile applications, scan badges, and pre-printed forms, among others. Educate employees to collect the greatest amount of information connected to each lead possible.

The following are some of the best practices in following up with leads.

The show is complete, so it is important to make sure someone is responsible for the leads and to follow up as soon as possible, preferably at the same time. Ensure you:

• Lead qualification – Leads must be categorised according to sale readiness
• Improve the personal communication and the usage of emails
• This means creating value, not simply offering commercial propositions
• Create further nurture streams or sequences

The focus is to close the high-quality leads generated as a sales pipeline and customers within the next 6-12 months while being consistent without being annoying.

Track Results & Optimise

Document progress and results throughout the planning and implementation phases so they can be adjusted and used to inform subsequent efforts. Quantify elements like:

- The numbers of leads, quality and conversion rates for leads

- Product involvement during launchers or demos

- Booth footfall traffic

- Sales pipeline created

Focus on the constant improvement in the shows that are chosen, promotions, booth design, the management of leads and follow-up actions. And this will ensure that you have enhanced your trade show ROI every year or every time you conduct the trade shows.

Follow-up Game Plan

The varied fact is that over 50% of the leads gathered during trade shows are never contacted back. Ensure that there is a way through which you can get to capture the leads and follow them up later on.

• Utilise lead capture devices such as those that allow you to scan the badges of visitors for immediate data capture for follow-up.

• Organising and routing leads to appropriate salespeople for prompt responses through emails and phone calls.

• Strengthen email marketing that is automated and tailored to the leads.

• Continually engage the audience through blogs, social posts, etc., by using the content that was posted at the trade show.

• Calculate the proportion of leads converted to quotas and sales from shows. If a show does not perform well, adjust the future show budget and goals in line with the current performance.

The Bottom Line

If managed effectively and across pre-show promotion, booth experience, and post-show follow-up, trade shows can provide maximum value to the achievement of your business goals for the year 2024. Always identify your goals, aims and measurable results before you embark on your trade show marketing and ensure that every aspect of the marketing plan is well coordinated.