As an industry professional, it goes without saying that your trade show exhibition stand becomes the mouth piece of your company. Without being boring and conventional, there’s a multitude of tips and tricks to help you have the Midas touch in a room full of exhibitors. The hack lies in capitalising on the power of social media in a time where fast-paced daily lives depend on digital communication (that is just as fast-paced). What better way is there to ensure a successful trade show exhibition than to use social media and data solutions to captivate and retain your audience?

We, at the Social Effect, have put together a go-to guide that will leave trade show exhibitors relieved and ready to take on any exhibition in no time.

1) Trade show exhibitors, do your research!

First things first. Before your exhibition, it’s key to completely understand your target audience. Through preparation and research, trade show exhibitors can ensure that their audience will be impressed and swayed to engage with their company. Traditional research involves long hours of focus groups and stacks of repetitive paper work. We Market Events cuts through the slack by offering a service that will engage with your audience, while understanding as well as gaining key information from them using social media communities. Social media communities create a touch point to directly communicate with your intended audience on social media.

 

2) Alert your intended audience

Once the research is done and dusted, it’s time to let your audience know about your exhibition. This message should be sent through the platforms your audience uses. In most cases, this would be through one of their social media accounts or by sending them an email. This can be done in one simple process called Outbound Social Sharing.

 

3) Create and maintain relationships

Now that your audience is aware of the exhibition you can start ear-marking influential attendees. This can be done through Account Based Social Advertising. This allows you, the exhibitor, to specifically craft a message intended for…let’s say John Hackworth at IBM accounts. Account-based marketing is an alternative strategy for trade show exhibitors that uses personalised campaigns designed to interest each individual.

 

4) Don’t lose the focus

From this point on it looks like you’re on a roll but don’t forget why you started. The goal is to have a successful exhibition that captivates and retains your audience. Even while you’re showing at the exhibition, use this as an opportunity to give live updates via social media. Engage with clients face to face at your exhibition stand and introduce them to your social media platforms, encourage likes, shares and even run a competition to create another channel of communication between yourself company and your audience.

 

5) Evaluate and report

Staying true ‘til the very end. The last hack is the final push of work before closing the curtains on the exhibition. This includes gathering data before, during and after the exhibition. This data will then be used to evaluate and gather feedback that may be used by the company going forward. Although there are a variety of traditional data capturing styles – the social effect just keeps topping the list with its trendy methods.

We hope that these five tips have you geared and ready for your big day. Want more tips & tricks for trade show exhibitors? We’d love to hear from you, get in touch. Happy Exhibiting!