On the one hand exhibitions offer a recent company formation or small business a powerful marketing platform; ultimately, it is the only time you can talk to prospective clients and demonstrate or comprehensively explain your product or service, when they are already engaged in your brand. One the other hand, exhibitions are extremely expensive and hard to quantify. In today’s post we offer you some practical guidance on how to prepare for an exhibition to ensure you get heard above the noise.
Tip One: Clarify what you want to achieve
Exhibitions offer you the chance to communicate your brand proposition face to face with prospective clients. However, like all marketing activity, you need to establish your objectives, how you plan to achieve them and what you define as a scaleable return on investment.
Exhibitions can potentially offer your company some great opportunities, such as the ones below:
• Comprehensive information about potential clients.
• A chance to get direct customer feedback about your product or service
• Journalist interest and PR exposure
• Increased interest in your brand
• A chance to review the competitions proposition and future plans
Tip Two: Prior Publicity
For many companies the success of an exhibition is completely contingent on the promotional activity they carry out prior to the event.
While one of the fundamental objectives of an exhibition is to attract new customers or clients, they also provide a chance for you to touch base with existing clients and offer you a unique opportunity to market to them. A great way let all of your existing customers know you are exhibiting is an email marketing campaign, a subsidised ticket price or even something a simple as putting in a leaflet with every purchase.
You should also take advantage of any promotion the exhibition organisers are doing or see if you can be a speaker at the event.
Tip 3: Choose your team
As we have previously discussed on this blog, all external communication of your brand should be consistent and visually communicate your brand’s identity and personality, this extends to your presence at an exhibition.
Regardless of whether you choose to ask your team to wear corporate t-shirts or just name badges, they are your brand ambassadors and should be easily identified as such. Each member should be briefed on what you hope the exhibition will achieve for the future of the company and at the end of each day you should conduct a ‘post mortem’ of how you felt the day went and if they felt the initial objectives were met, exceeded or not.