When confronted by that oft tabled question: ‘Why should I exhibit at a trade show?’ I’m always tempted to reply, ‘Why the heck wouldn’t you exhibit at a trade show!’. Because, separate to my decade long experience in SEO and the web, I’ve also been fortunate to have extensive experience with high-level business events, having produced and sold everything from three hall Trade Shows at Darling Harbour to conferences, congresses, product launches, website launches, film festivals and international speaker tours. And, while I will always push people toward spending their marketing dollars on SEO and internet marketing (due it having the broadest reach), when it comes to face to face selling, I can – with my hand on my heart – quite honestly say that trade shows are the single best form of face to face marketing a company can do. Period.

Think this is too bold a claim? Well think again!

Imagine if you will, a world where hundreds or even thousands of potential clients COME TO YOU, and all your sales staff have to do is show up to demonstrate your products and services and gather business cards like manna from heaven. That’s right, let your imagination run rampant for a moment and picture with me this fairytale land of milk and honey. A place where lead generation is so blissfully simple, that it’s harder to not find an interested buyer than it is to actually find one.

Sound too good to be true?  Well it’s not…

Dollar for dollar, trade shows offer the best value for money of any face to face marketing tool available, and help build product and brand awareness that lingers long after the show is over.

When the ‘Big 4’ consultancy firm, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, was commissioned by the Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) in the US to study trade shows, they reported:

• That companies allocate more of their marketing budget to exhibiting in trade shows than any other promotional or marketing tool (save personal selling).
• That ninety-one percent (91%) of senior business decision makers consider trade shows "very useful" sources of purchasing information. 
  
• That trade shows ranked first for purchasing information among the 13 main face to face sales and marketing tools available.
  
• That eighty-five percent (85%) of visitors at trade shows are buyers of one or more products exhibited. 
  
• That closing a sale that begins with a trade show contact is nearly half the cost of closing a sale initiated elsewhere ($550 and 1.4 sales calls compared to $997 and 3.6 sales calls). 
  

Trade shows are designed to let businesses meet potential customers in a friendly, face-to-face environment, over a finite period of time. They work because they allow the whole selling process - attention, persuasion, desire and purchasing – to be compressed into a single activity. And, unlike a ‘Consumer Show’ (where anyone can visit the show by just walking in off the street) trade shows attract only business professionals. So your sales force can feel confident that the person they’re speaking to is in fact a ‘qualified lead’, simply by virtue of their being at the trade show and standing in front of your stand and handing over their business card.

It’s also worth remembering that trade shows are a great ‘leveller’ of companies, both large and small, and that not everybody needs to break the bank with a ‘Bigger than Ben Hur’ exhibition stand to get visitors’ attention. Often something as simple as well designed banners, stand-out company literature and a smiling sales person are all you need to entice the passing crowd to stop at your trade show booth.

And from there of course it’s up to your sales staff to weave their magic!

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While SEO and internet marketing is the most cost effective form of advertising a small business or an SME can do (due to everybody in the 21st century searching for what they want and where they want it, via Google) it cannot make up the entirety of your marketing strategy. As risk must, by necessity, be amortized across a variety of advertising mediums.

What these additional advertising mediums are, will depend on the industry you’re in. For some companies an advert in the local paper might still work. For others, putting fridge magnets into local letterboxes might bring a great return. For other still, TV or radio might be the ticket. But when it comes to face to face marketing, the best return on investment by far can be found by exhibiting at an industry specific trade show.

Visitors to trade shows are qualified business professionals who have taken time out of their busy schedules to come to a venue specifically to review the latest products and services pertinent to their company. Which means that when they’re standing in front of your trade show booth…they’re ALREADY A WARM LEAD.

The challenge of course is how to get them to your trade show booth in the first place…

The trade show sales paradigm can be split into the following four quadrants:

1. Advertising / Marketing.
2. Public Relations.
3. Sales Promotion.
   
4. Personal Selling
   

Note: when done well, the delineation between these four quadrants blurs so as to be practically indistinguishable.

Advertising can best be defined as the non-personal communication of information through paid marketing channels to promote a product or service to a defined audience.

A common advertising and marketing mistake made by companies exhibiting at trade shows is when they try to be ‘all things to all men’ in their pre-show advertising (and thus diffuse their overall message and smother their ‘call to action’). Either that or they indulge in egocentric ‘flag waving’ or branding, in the vain hope that their logo alone will be enough to attract visitors to their stand.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but unless you’re Sony or Apple or Google, etc…your brand alone probably isn’t going to cut it…

To make your exhibiting at a trade show a success, your pre-show advertising and marketing efforts needs to be focused on a SPECIFIC PRODUCT OR SERVICE. So you’ll need to ask yourself what product or service of yours would the people attending THIS PARTICULAR TRADE SHOW be interested in…and why? Because if you can find that sales ‘hot button’ and keep pushing it, again and again and again, in ALL your advertising and marketing leading up to the trade show, your chances of having a constant stream of visitors to your trade show booth will increase exponentially.

Oh, and remember to differentiate between ‘Features’ and ‘Benefits’ in your pre-show advertising, too. Features can be defined as ‘what your products or services do / offer’. Benefits can be defined as ‘WHAT THOSE FEATURES WILL DO FOR THE CUSTOMER. And it’s this latter point that your potential customers are interested in, not the former. This is a very common mistake in below the line advertising, so make sure you avoid it.

Another way to ‘get your message out there’, is to utilize (and exploit, damn it!) your channel partners. You can do this by mailing off the back of their database and sending out Direct Mail (DM) or Direct Response (DR) marketing literature or Electronic Direct Mail (EDMs), in exchange for placing their company logo on all your pre-show advertising, and – if appropriate – giving them some branding or product placement on your trade show stand itself.

You can also run a short-term SEM (pay per click) campaign online to get people to visit your stand. This is a terrific way of tying in your on-line marketing / SEO strategy with your physical presence at a ‘neutral’ venue like a trade show.

And finally, ensure ALL your advertising and marketing in the lead up to the trade show explains:

•          which trade show you’re going to be exhibiting at and why.
•          what products or services you’ll be demonstrating / launching at the trade show.
  
•          the dates and location of the trade show.
  
•          your individual stand number at the trade show (ideally with a map, if space permits).
  

This way you make it EASY for visitors at the trade show to find you.

Public Relations (PR) can best be defined as the practice of managing the flow of information between a company or organization and the general public. PR is used to gain a company positive exposure or ‘spin’ by releasing information that is (theoretically) of public interest, and thus does not require direct payment to a third party for its dissemination.

The vanguard of all PR is the humble press release. These are predominantly used in a ‘scatter-gun’ tactic to carry the desired PR message to media outlets both large and small. When exhibiting at a trade show you’ll need to issue a press release to notify the general public of your involvement at the trade show in question, and also to give them a reason why they should care, along with a call to action. This latter point is important as its this that will prompt the magazine or website in question to actually post your press release in its entirety (lazy journalism 101!) or else to quote from your press release in a story about your involvement in the show.

When it comes to companies exhibiting at trade shows however, PR usually comes in the form of “free” editorial coverage or comments in newspapers or trade magazines and web-sites, offered in exchange for adverts purchased in the publication in question.  (Thus proving the old adage that nothing in life is ever truly free...). And, while ‘advertorial’ is rightfully deemed to be a ‘dirty word’ by journalists and marketing managers alike…it is nonetheless a necessary evil to get your message out there. So suck it up and factor this “free” PR into you advertising budget.

Occasionally, if a company is large enough, or their PR agency well enough connected, it is possible to gain PR through radio and television stations. Though usually a company will need to be releasing a hot new product at the trade show to gain this type of attention, as it usually falls on the shoulders of the trade show organizer to rustle up the mainstream media.  (For example when digital television was officially launched in Australia at one of my trade shows in 2000, and I had Senator Alston, the Minister for Technology and the Arts cutting the ribbon and officially opening the event, I had a suitably powerful ‘hook’ to get channels 7, 9, 10, ABC and SBS to turn up in force and cover the show for their main news bulletins – and the news showed long queues of people waiting to come in, before I allowed Senator Alston to cut the ribbon to ‘open’ the trade show).

Sales promotions are defined as short term activities that attract attention to a particular product or service over a finite period of time.

Sales promotions usually run in conjunction with an advertising and marketing campaign, and – where a trade show is concerned - usually combine special offers or giveaways only available at the specific trade show in question. These promotions are offered to create a sense of urgency in the mind of the prospective buyer, such as “Lease this photocopier from our stand today and you’ll get an on-site warrantee worth $1,500 thrown in for the first 12 months of your contract…free!”, etc.

Trade shows offer a particularly vibrant environment for sales promotion, due to the ‘hands on’ nature of the selling experience and limited time-span of the event.

Personal selling is the activities your staff engage in while manning your trade show booth, and is quite possibly the single most important element of the entire trade show paradigm (well, along with post show follow-up…but that’s a discussion for another article!).

To truly appreciate how important personal selling is in the grand scheme of things, you need to ‘walk the floor of a trade show’ and OBSERVE the sales dynamic in action.

I have to say that walking the floor of a trade show I’ve produced is my favorite part of the entire event, because whenever I stand there looking at the throngs of people and the rows upon rows of exhibitors, I’m always overwhelmed by the genuine feeling of pride that comes from my having headed up a team that created something from nothing. Because a dynamic, bustling trade show really is a beautiful thing to behold. So, if you’ve never taken the time to walk around a trade show yourself, I’d advise you to do it ASAP, because it’s there, at the ‘coal face’ of the event, that companies capitalize on their investment…or flush their money down the toilet.

It never ceases to amaze me how much money companies invest in trade shows via advertising / marketing, public relations and sales promotion…only to blow it all by staffing their booth with sales people who – not to put too fine a point on it – don’t want to be there!

Many sales people are good at their job, when their job involves calling on a client and doing a ‘sales presentation’, etc. But that doesn’t in any way mean they’re a natural ‘people person’. Which is exactly what you need to be when manning a trade show booth.

Trade shows are a ‘sales neutral’ environment, where traditional ‘hard sell’ techniques only serve to scare prospective customers away. Trade shows are a venue where ‘always be closing’ needs to be replaced in the sales person’s mind with, ‘always be listening’. Perhaps Dale Carnegie put it best when he said, ‘You have one mouth and two ears, use them in proportion’. Because never has that truism been more relevant than to a person manning a trade show booth. And, while all companies love to sell on the trade show floor, the vast majority of sales they make will come during their post show follow-up, long after the trade show is over. Therefore the sales person’s raison detre while manning their booth is not to close sales (unless that opportunity is there to be taken, of course), but to smile, listen, ask questions, gather contact information, get the prospect excited about the products and services on offer…and establish a personal rapport so they or a colleague can call on them at a later date to close the deal. Because trust me, there is nothing more likely to make visitors walk away from your trade show stand than if your sales staff go all ‘Tom Hopkins’ on them. Which is why populating your trade show booth with knowledgeable sales staff who are genuinely friendly, have a great smile and are easy to get along with, will gain you far more business in the long run, than staffing it with hardcore ‘closers’.

Because unless they have a ‘personality’ in their bag of tricks along with a 101 ‘test closes’…you’ll be best served by keeping them in reserve for the post show follow-up…where the fun really begins!

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While nothing can match the reach of SEO for helping people find your business and services, there are other marketing techniques your company should explore from time to time as well. Especially if your product or service is something that benefits from a ‘hands on’ sales approach.

Exhibiting in Trade Shows is one such ‘hands on’ marketing technique I highly recommend as it is an exceptional way to significantly increase business and grow your company’s market share. But, even seasoned marketing managers and event producers are often blindsided by Trade Show budget blow-outs after ‘signing on the dotted line’.

In this article I’ll help shine a light on the many hidden costs associated with exhibiting at a Trade Show, to ensure your budget doesn’t keep rising like a deckchair on the Titanic!

There are dozens of ways to spend money when exhibiting at a Trade Show - maybe hundreds - but the first cheque you’re going to have to cut is to the Trade Show organizer. This cheque will cover one of two things:

1. Real estate in the Trade Show hall.
   
2. Sponsorship at the Trade Show and / or at any associated conferences.
   

Trade Show organizers rent out real estate at their events by the ‘square meter’ (or in the US, by the ‘square foot’). This real estate comes in two distinct varieties:

• ‘Space Only’ (where you pay for empty floor space and build your stand from scratch)
  
• ‘Shell Scheme’ (where you pay for floor space that comes with carpet, fascia, power point, name-board and prefabricated walls). 

‘Space Only’ is by far the best option for companies with a budget, as you start with an empty patch of floor, and can built a suitably impressive (and unique) stand from scratch, to ‘wow’ the great unwashed as they pass on by.

‘Shell Scheme’ is a significantly cheaper option however, but when going with this, be aware that your stand will look practically identical to hundreds of other stands around you (so grabbing the attention of people walking by is that much harder).

In this article I’ll assume that you’ve decided to go with the ‘Space Only’ option (and are going to build your stand from scratch), and are going to be an exhibitor only, rather than an exhibitor and a sponsor.

So, the next cost you’ll be hit with after forking out the deposit (a third to a half of the total cost is normal) to the organizer for your floor space, is the actual cost of designing, building and fitting out your Trade Show stand. (Note: you’ll want to split these into multiple individual lines in your Trade Show budget, but for ease of explanation here I’ll bundle them together, as there’s a large amount of budgetary crossover).

Be warned though, the cost of designing, building and fitting out your stand can easily double or triple the cost of the actual floor space itself. Yes, you read that correctly! The cost of designing, building and fitting out your Trade Show stand can easily DOUBLE or TRIPLE the cost of the actual floor space itself.

The reason this part of your show budget has the propensity to become a financial black hole, is because it includes such disparate elements as: the design and manufacture of all signage and marketing literature, the design and manufacture of the physical stand itself (including walls, carpeting, displays, et al), labour, (including installation and dismantling of your stand), utilities, furniture rental, freight, transportation, shipping, drayage, third party forcing, storage, insurance, audiovisual, photography, phone, internet and security (to name just a few!).

The final line in your Trade Show budget can best be labelled (broadly) as ‘Sales and Marketing Expenses’.  These can realistically be understood to fall under three basic headers:

1. Attracting visitors to your stand at the Trade Show. Think: Marketing, Advertising and PR activities.
   
2. Standing out from the crowd while actually being at the Trade Show. Think: sales staff, promotional staff, etc.
3. Following up the leads gathered at the Trade Show to ensure adequate post show R.O.I. (Think: sales 101…calling back the people who’ve demonstrated an interest in your product or service!)

These three elements (which of course in a full budget are split into dozens of individual line items) include, but are not limited to, through-the-line pre-show advertising, pre-show telemarketing, face to face sales calls to promote your presence at the Trade Show, on-site promotions, gimmicks and giveaways, staffing your stand with trained sales professionals, on-site entertainment, post show promotions and post show sales follow up.

Other ‘Miscellaneous Costs’ to take into account include: staff travel, hotel accommodations, meals, out-of-pocket expenses and an entertainment budget to wine and dine VIP clients (an often overlooked but excellent way to ‘stand out from the crowd’ and close the deals before the Trade Show is finished).

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