Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.
Best tradeshow marketing tips and case studies. Call 800-654-6946.

Mobile Marketing

The Power of Video at Your Next Tradeshow

This is a guest post by Emma Grace Brown

Are you interested in using video to enhance your trade show booth and attract more attendees? If so, you’re not alone. Increasingly, businesses are recognizing the power of video to engage trade show visitors and drive leads. If you’re considering adding video to your trade show strategy, here are a few things to keep in mind from the Tradeshow Guy Blog.

Video will help you stand out from the competition.

Video is an incredibly effective way to engage and captivate trade show visitors and can help you drive leads and conversions. In a sea of other exhibitors, a well-executed video can help your booth and product or service stand out and capture attention. Video is also an engaging medium that can help you communicate your brand story and message in a powerful way. When used correctly, video can be an incredibly effective tool for getting your message across to potential customers at a trade show.

Videos can communicate your message and tell your brand story.

When it comes to communicating your message and telling your brand story, there are few mediums more engaging than video. The right video content can be instantly memorable, helping to engage viewers and evoke a personal response. Furthermore, videos can provide context that transcends the boundaries of text-based content such as blog posts or articles. They enable you to visually demonstrate the personality of your company and showcase the truly unique aspects of what you have to offer.

Make your video visually enticing when audio isn’t an option.

Making an engaging video without sound can be a challenge. After all, audio is often the most powerful element when it comes to conveying emotion. However, videos without sound can still have an impact if they’re visually enticing. Start by creating a color palette that stands out and sets the mood for your video. Then use movement like pans, zooms, and fades to keep your viewer’s attention.

Don’t be afraid to use unconventional shots either – close-ups of small details or bird’s eye perspectives can be mesmerizing with the right lighting and composition. Animated elements like overlays, transitions, and logos can provide visual interest as well. Finally, build in enough time for post-production to make sure your video looks its best in terms of saturation, contrast balance, and other adjustments.

One way to reduce the cost of your trade show video is by using royalty-free stock footage. This approach can be a great way to save money while still getting high-quality visuals for your video. Check out these royalty-free videos that are priced affordably. When selecting stock footage, be sure to choose clips that are relevant to your product or service. You don’t want your video to feel disjointed or out of place. Also, make sure the quality of the footage is consistent with the overall tone and style of your video.

Drive traffic to your booth with the help of social media.

Social media is a powerful tool for promoting your trade show booth and driving traffic to your exhibit. When used correctly, you can reach a large number of potential customers and generate interest in your products or services. One of the best ways to use social media for trade shows is by creating a dedicated event page on Facebook. This page can be used to promote your exhibit, provide information about the event, and give people a way to connect with you online. You can also use this page as a central hub for all of your other social media activity related to the trade show.

In addition to creating a Facebook event page, be sure to post regularly about the trade show on all of your social media platforms. This will help keep your followers informed and engaged. Use images, videos, and text-based posts to create excitement around the event and drive traffic to your booth. Make sure you’re also using hashtags related to the trade show so that your posts will appear in relevant search results. And don’t forget to respond promptly to any comments or questions from followers.

Are you looking for a way to make your next trade show even more successful? If so, consider using video. This medium can help you connect with potential customers and create an engaging, interactive experience that will leave them wanting more.

Emma Grace Brown lives her life by her rules, and it works! When she’s not snuggling puppies, Emma promotes female empowerment through her website. Her mission is to help those who live with self-doubt to realize they don’t have to mold themselves to conventionality.

Goal-Setting at Tradeshows

It doesn’t take that much to exhibit at a tradeshow. Just rent a booth space, bring an exhibit, a handful of staffers and do your thing.

Uh, what’s your thing, though? That’s the big question. Are you there to increase brand awareness? Show that you have a bigger or cooler exhibit than your main competitor? Take a client out for dinner and drinks?

As George Harrison once sang, “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

It’s better to have a plan. To know what you want. More leads? Sales? Giving away a specific number of samples? Getting more social media followers? Certainly, you want to pick goals that are important to growing your business. But one step beyond that is to not only pick good goals, but to make them concrete goals, such as:

  • We want 150 good leads, 50 of which are new.
  • We want 300 new Instagram followers.
  • We want to hand out 1000 product samples.
  • We want to do 100 in-person demos of our product or service.
  • We want to meet with CEO’s of three major prospects.

Once you delineate those goals, create a plan to get there. Create the roadmap. If you want to meet with specific people, set appointments. If you want to line up new social media followers, make it easy. If you want new leads, have a method for uncovering the right prospects.

Tradeshow marketing can be expensive, but since you are at a place where thousands of prospects are all gathered in the same place, it’s also the ideal setting to generate leads at the lowest cost-per-lead you’ll ever manage.

Create a plan. Follow the plan.

TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, January 4, 2021: Sandy Hammer

Building software to host a virtual event poses a million questions, many of them hoping to address the user experience. And the exhibitor experience. How to keep people engaged, how to keep them from being bored, how to have conversations, how to connect, how to give keynotes. And so on. I recently caught up with Sandy Hammer, co-founder of AllSeated, which has recently launched virtual event software that looks, well, impressive. She and I sat down to talk about it, and to give her a chance to show us a little bit about how it works:

Check out AllSeated.com. And I just noticed that David Adler will be giving a keynote on Thursday, January 7th with AllSeated and the virtual event software exVo. More info here.

This week’s ONE GOOD THING: The Voyager Golden Record (the NASA site) and the package from Ozma Records.

16 Things You Can Do in a Virtual Tradeshow Exhibit

The use of virtual tradeshow exhibits may not be exploding, although my sense is that it is increasing. Some big tradeshows have gone completely virtual for the next year or so, maybe longer, depending on the depth and breadth of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Which leaves exhibitors in a bit of a quandary: what to do about virtual exhibits. Should you invest in one? Should you just wait out the pandemic and hope you can get back to live tradeshows in the next six to twelve months?

And if you are seriously considering a virtual exhibit, it’s important to consider all of the various things you can do in the exhibit. I’ve seen a few virtual exhibits lately, and there is a wide variety in the approach. Some exhibitors have chosen the simple, let’s-keep-the-cost-down approach. Others have tried to throw everything in but the kitchen sink.

As an aside, one exhibit maker I spoke with recently said that a recent client of theirs did a virtual exhibit and found that at the virtual tradeshow, they experienced a 700% increase in leads for a fraction of the cost of appearing at a live show. My eyes opened at that stat, and while it’s impressive, it’s likely not going to be a common experience for every virtual exhibitor. But it does demonstrate that there is a lot of potential in virtual tradeshows if you plan ane execute well.

Having said that, there are a number of ways to get engagement at virtual tradeshows. The first is crucial: make sure that potential visitors know about your virtual tradeshow exhibit so that they are prepared, put it on their calendar, and have expectations.

The second is to build the expectations and prepare for them by putting specific things in your virtual tradeshow booth that visitors want. Things they’ll respond to, interact with, and share with others.

From that starting point, the question remains: what should be in your virtual exhibit? There are many answers, and your company’s specific needs should help frame the answer. Here are a lot of the things, perhaps not all, that could go into your exhibit. Keep in mind that each piece will add to your overall cost, much like a 3D real world exhibit, and that each piece of content, such as videos or white papers or PDF reports, all will take time and money to create. Before finalizing your plan, create a budget based on all of the pieces you think are necessary to make your virtual tradeshow booth a success.

Here are a number of things you can and should consider:

  1. Product Demos
  2. A place to collect visitor’s contact information
  3. Download Center (PDFs, coupons, sales sheets, special reports, etc.)
  4. Archived video
  5. Live stream video
  6. Live chat
  7. Booth tour
  8. Schedule a meeting
  9. Learn about your company
  10. Learn about new products
  11. Give people the ability to share things on social media
  12. Steer people to your social media outlets
  13. Leave an audio or video message

No doubt if you put your mind to it, you can come up with more. What am I missing?

Pandemic SWOT Analysis

You’re familiar with a SWOT Analysis, I presume?

  • Strengths
  • Weaknesses
  • Opportunities
  • Threats

Year ago, I wrote a brief article on doing a tradeshow marketing SWOT Analysis, which would be a bit different from a more general SWOT Analysis.

But now that we’re in a pandemic created by the COVID-19, how would you approach doing a SWOT Analysis and is it worth doing?

Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels

I would argue that while a formal SWOT is probably unnecessary, it’s not a bad idea to at least examine some of the changes the pandemic has wrought, to see what obvious and perhaps significant changes your company is facing.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

How are you positioned in the marketplace? Do you have new products about to launch? How are you perceived by your customers and clientele? Are you doing things to keep relationships going? Are sales strong or flat? Just knowing these and other related things will help you understand your position in the marketplace compared to your competition and compared to how you might have been with no pandemic.

Opportunities:

With no tradeshow marketing coming for at least another quarter or two, can you put the budget towards something else? Is a virtual event worth the investment? Can you do another kind of outreach for a fraction of the cost of exhibiting at a big tradeshow? Take a look at your options and see if there are missed opportunities that you may have overlooked.

Threats:

Are there marketplace threats you sense but perhaps haven’t put your finger on? Are your supplier lines still open and working well, or are there kinks that may signal something worse down the line? Do you have any competitors that are taking this time to move aggressively into an area that you thought you dominated? Threats are often overlooked because, unless you actively think about them and look for them, they can sneak up on you without you knowing until it’s too late.

All in all, doing a brief SWOT check-in may help you understand how the company is doing and give you insight and context in how you’ll handle the rest of the year and move into 2021.

TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, June 1, 2020: Jonathan Tavss

What is the future of tradeshows, events and conferences? While most people in the industry I speak with think things will (mostly) get back to normal at some point, that may still be some time away. Which leaves virtual events as one way of keeping the clock moving forward.

This week’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee offers a chat with Kaleidoko’s Jonathan Tavss, who discusses a recent virtual event he helped facilitate, and what the future of tradeshows and events, combined with a strong digital presence, might look like:

Find Kaleidoko here.

This week’s ONE GOOD THING: Ted Chiang’s collection of short stories entitles Exhalation.

Selling in the Time of No Tradeshows or Events

The social distancing guidelines put forth due to the COVID-19 pandemic has effectively shut off a majority of the economy, like turning off a spigot. It would be easier to line-item the businesses that are open than those that are closed: grocery stores, drive-through coffee shops and some business offices. Ten million in the US have filed for unemployment in the past two weeks.

Ten Million.

The impact of this on the nation, on the world, is unfathomable.

I know many people who are sitting at home most of the day, binging TV shows or reading books or even playing board games or sharing music online. Others are making use of the time to learn a new skill, to tackle that novel, to write music, to create.

Others don’t know what to do.

If you’re still working, whether from home or in the office, and you have to sell to keep things going in the company, what do you do? What approach do you take?

I subscribe to several sales newsletters and thought I’d share a few thoughts. Some came from the newsletters, others from just my own experience. But here we are in a time where it’s difficult to even find someone to talk to.

First, when you call, it makes sense to ask your contact what approach their company is making. Are they putting everything on hold for the time being, awaiting the end of the social distancing and figuring they’ll kick back into action when the pandemic is over? Or are they moving forward with business as usual, as much as they can?

If it’s the former, tell them, that, ‘yeah, it’s a crazy time, I get it,’ and ask if you can send a quick email with your contact information so that when we do get back to normal they can reach back out to you. If it’s the latter, move into your typical sales questions to uncover any needs they may currently have for what you’re offering.

Seems appropriate somehow… (click to play the album!)

Another part of the equation is what you’re selling. If you’re in the restaurant supply business, chances are that your potential buyers are not even open, unless they’re doing take-out or drive-thru only. If you’re selling Personal Protective Equipment for health workers, you probably can’t keep up with the demand. It all depends on the specific products or services you’re selling.

Most people probably fall somewhere in between those two extremes. Which means you’re going to have to find a strategy that keeps at least some business coming in.

With millions stuck at home, that means people are going online to shop, they’re connecting via video meetings (Zoom is being mentioned dozens of times a day in the mainstream press!), telephone and email.

Questions to ask yourself:

  • What shape is the company website it? Does it need upgrading? Can you add new products, new services and new ways for people to connect?
  • Are your social media platforms being updated frequently? With so much time on their hands, everybody is on social media.
  • Can you offer a digital version of your services? Lots of people are taking this time to create online learning classes or other ways of sharing their information.
  • Can you connect with others regularly? Sure! Some people are starting up regular Zoom meetings just to have a face-to-face connection with others outside of their home.

Bottom line: be there for clients and prospects. Don’t stop doing outreach, however that looks for you. Don’t be pushy but if you continue to think you can offer something of value, something that your clients and prospects can really use, keep doing it.

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Tradeshow Guy Blog by Tim Patterson

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