Your Trade Show Booth & Actions Should Align With Your Goals

Participating in a trade show can be a great way to boost business performance, but this is also an investment that must be carefully considered. Trade shows take up a lot of time, effort, and employee resources. If you want your trade show experience to succeed, you must have a clearly designed goal—or goals—and drive everything, from booth design to employees on the trade show floor, working toward that goal. The most common goals for a trade show are:

Entering A New Market

Sometimes, a trade show is how to introduce yourself to a new region where you are expanding your business. Whether you’re opening up a new office or branch in a new state or country, the goal here is to introduce yourself and stand out from the existing competition. Marketing yourself aggressively and competitively should be your goal.

Maintaining Relationships

The best customers are repeat customers, which often requires a little effort to keep that customer relationship going once established. This is especially important for B2B products and services, where contracts can be incredibly lucrative.

If your goal is to reconnect with key partners, this puts more emphasis on communication and may even affect your booth layout, with more private, conference-style spaces for proper meetings.

Looking For New Partnerships

In some cases, the goal of attending a trade show may be to meet up with other professionals and businesses to establish new, critical partnerships, such as if you’re shopping yourself around as a client for marketing. This changes the dynamic considerably when you’re looking for new partners to provide you with products and services. Now prospective partners must prove themselves to you, and you must decide whether to engage them.

If this is your primary goal, marketing your business through your booth may be less essential to your trade show agenda.

Growing Brand Awareness

You may already be established in your industry of focus, but that doesn’t mean you can’t attract new customers. One of the best ways to do this is to specialize and target a specific market. Trade shows are excellent for this because there’s typically a main focus, whether a particular technology, industry, or service.

Tailor your booth and your staff’s promotional approach to the targeted market and ensure that they stay on message relevant to this demographic’s areas of concern.

If you want a more effective trade show experience contact us, and ask us about our exhibition services.