Avoid These 6 Tragic Trade Show Mistakes
Trade shows are huge opportunities for brands, but many trade show appearances unfortunately fall flat. At the end of the event, the company packs up their booth and barely hears a peep afterwards from all the supposed contacts they made. Looking at their social media profiles, there’s hardly any trace of attending the trade show at all.
What went wrong? Lots of things could be the cause. While they are all about fun and the pride of representing your brand, trade shows are deceptively complex when it comes to planning to make the most impact. You can’t just set up a booth and expect to earn success. Instead, you have to actively watch out for the following mistakes and make sure that your trade show booth design and company representatives are doing everything they can to avoid them.
1. Failing to Set Concrete Goals
This mistake plagues all marketing efforts, and it can definitely sink the efforts of a trade show appearance. Without having a goal in mind, your team’s focus will be scattered and erratic. The excitement of the trade show can easily send their energy into a million different places. By the end of the weekend, they will be exhausted, but likely have little to show for it.
Instead of making it your goal to open a cool-looking booth and just be a part of the trade show experience, your team needs to actively pursue a concrete target number for an important marketing metric. Maybe you want your dazzling booth demo to earn you hundreds of social media mentions? Maybe you want to expand your email newsletter subscriber list? Maybe you want to make important contacts, or just get through to that one special company you feel would be a critical ally?
So, before you design your booth and start filling out your schedule for the event, take a second to contemplate your goals, and then take deliberate steps to meet them. You could even hire an events management company to take care of the trade show for you! Visit https://fgs.ninja/ to learn more about this.
2. Not Preparing Your Reps
Company representatives who attend trade shows are ambassadors for your brand. They should therefore be able to evangelize your solution and your brand values in specific, meaningful ways. They should also be able to answer questions about your solution, your current market involvement, and any future goals your company is willing to disclose.
Make sure all reps attending the trade show can answer questions like these while representing your brand in a flattering light.
3. Not Being Specific About What Your Company Actually Does On Your Booth
A common problem in trade shows is that we often leave booths or presentations wondering, “what the heck does that company even do?”
The issue lies in leaning too heavily on marketing buzzwords and “inspirational” thought leadership. While using a shared vocabulary is fine, your trade show booth design and your demo script should contain several clear, concise and visible mentions of your exact solution or the exact pain point your product can cure.
Give attendees the elevator pitch. Set their expectations and give them grounding context, then add on all the floweriness to enhance it, not the other way around.
4. Not Staying Engaged Every Day
The enthusiasm of the first day of a trade show quickly tempers on the second day. Fight this urge to wind down. Attendees often miss the first day or only sign up to attend one day out of many. Reps should therefore treat every day like it is a chance to make a new first impression because that could very well be the case every time.
5. Not Following Up With Contacts
Every contact you made should go into a spreadsheet or a CRM for later use. Make sure to prioritize your most promising qualified leads and send them a “Thank you!” email for stopping by. Try to add people from your list to your social media followers. Write down notes to brief sales reps who want to follow up on contacts.
Activities like these are some of the only ways translate trade show appearances into actual business.
6. Not Making Your Trade Show Booth Design Stand Out
You don’t have to splurge to make a splash at a trade show, just have a bit of vision. In a sea of “me, too!” imitators, having a unique, creative design can help differentiate your brand from others.
Make sure your booth can stand out like this by getting a trade show booth design company to lend their design expertise and building experience to your next trade show appearance. You can get some trade show booth design inspiration by looking at our gallery of past appearances.
