As a marketing leader, event manager, or executive at an enterprise company, how do you create high impact in your trade show marketing for multiple divisions, massive exhibits, and a high volume of shows?
It would be easy to focus only on exhibit design, because great exhibits create tangible and visible marketing impact. However, enterprise exhibitors require a much broader list of elements to dominate across their entire program.
Success requires a skilled, unified team, several key processes, a commitment to continuous improvement, and more. Read on to discover 13 elements (and yes, including design considerations) to build a high-impact trade show marketing program for your enterprise company.
1. Exhibit at Shows with Proven ROI
You have over 10,000 trade shows to choose from in North America, and thousands more in Europe, Asia, and the rest of the world. Just as not every customer is equal, not every show is equal. Seek out shows with higher concentrations of attendees similar to your best buyer profiles. Then, keep track of the sales revenue gained from leads at each show, compared to the cost to exhibit at each show. Expand your presence in the shows with high ROI, and shrink or eliminate the shows with poor ROI.
To do this requires a deep understanding of what your best customers look like in terms of industries, job titles, geographies, and needs.
Plus, you need complete lead management and access to sales data, which are easier with a web-based CRM. If you have the data to do this now, congratulations, you are ahead of the game. If not yet, make it your top project, as this arguably will have the single greatest effect on your trade show marketing impact.
2. Sales, Marketing, and Top Management Alignment
Our enterprise clients who stand out usually also have strong trust and cooperation among their sales, marketing, and executive teams. They agree upon the high value of trade shows in building their brand, filling their pipeline, and bonding with their clients and partners. So, they work together to set goals, create effective strategies, staff their exhibits, and follow up on leads.
What does that higher level of cooperation get you? Greater results and smoother shows. For example, one of our clients recently started their biggest USA show with their conference rooms already completed booked for Account Executive appointments with clients and key prospects.
3. Dedicated Trade Show Manager(s)
When your exhibiting program is at the enterprise scale, you need one or more people dedicated to only managing your trade show program, not just partial hours of a marketing employee. When we see an enterprise exhibitor not performing up to their potential, it’s sometimes because they handed off their trade show program to a rookie or digital marketer who has no experience knowing how to create success in the physical, rules-heavy, face-to-face world of trade shows.
Your ideal enterprise-level trade show manager knows how to manage complex trade show logistics, what is a realistic timeline depending on the booth size, which vendors they can trust, and more of the myriad details that make trade shows a unique marketing medium. They have strong organizational and communication skills. And yes, also strong marketing skills, as they work hand-in-hand with your marcom and events team. (One of our enterprise client’s trade show manager and marketing director are so in tune, they finish each other’s sentences). They may not decide what your brand message is, but they understand how to translate your brand into exhibits, engagement activities, and pre-show and at-show promotions.
Most of all, they have both ownership and ultimate accountability for your trade show program’s success, so they will maintain focus on getting the most out of this sizable portion of your company’s marketing investment. So give your trade shows their own captain.
4. Present a Consistent Brand Across Divisions
Presenting a consistent brand image across divisions is less confusing to your customers, who often buy from more than one division of an enterprise company. Otherwise, having too much brand variety across divisions can lead to confusion in the minds of customers. That consistency includes international exhibiting – we are getting more requests from our enterprise clients to match the look of their
European exhibit, or they ask us to design their exhibit here that will be built in Europe. Plus, exhibiting with a consistent brand across divisions allows you to share exhibit properties, which considerably lowers costs for exhibit purchase and storage.
5. A Flexible Library of Compatible Exhibit Components
Because of the sheer number of shows and variety of booth sizes, enterprise exhibitors don’t have just one large island exhibit. The best realize that their exhibit configuration needs change from industry to industry, depending on their goals, market position, and attendee style. Therefore, they maintain a library of similarly branded but different shaped exhibit components. That way, they can combine the components that will best fit the marketing goals of each specific show on their schedule.
Need big branding? Use the hanging signs and big towers. Need private meetings? Add in conference rooms. Need more demo spaces? Add more kiosks and workstations. Need more casual VIP relationship building? Provide higher end seating and open area meeting spaces. All with company branding, look and feel.
6. Excellence Across All Booth Sizes
Enterprise exhibitors have some of the largest exhibits at their industry shows, and those landmark exhibits have to be positive representations of their brand. But those high-profile exhibitions are not their only game in town. Enterprise exhibitors also have dozens, even hundreds of exhibits in small island and inline spaces. Each of these shows represents ample opportunities to build brands, generate sales leads, and strengthen key relationships. Those smaller shows can often generate higher ROI than the big industry shows in Las Vegas, Chicago, or Orlando.
Make the most of each tier level of trade shows, by applying time, creativity, and resources to your smaller shows, too.
Ensure you have excellent staffers, traffic-building promotions, engaging activities (that can be repeated at many shows), and consistent lead capture and follow up. Some enterprise exhibitors even create a separate team to manage the large number of smaller events, no matter what division of the company they are for.
7. Speed-Bump Free Lead Management
Your potentially high trade show impact will be restrained if too many of the great conversations you have in your exhibit don’t quickly end up as prioritized concise stories in the hands of your appropriate sales reps. You can’t depend on booth visitors to follow up with you after the show, as they’ve talked to 20 other exhibitors, and have been away from their desk for days. Enterprise exhibitors can also face the extra hurdle of siloed divisional databases.
Work to have all obstacles cleared, across all your shows. Have a consistent system of qualifying leads, recording what they want, and getting that info into the hands of accountable sales reps right away. The bonus? This will also make measurement easier, to monitor each show’s ROI going forward.
8. Motivated, Trained, Curated Booth Staffers
There’s a famous trade show statistic from CEIR that 85% of what attendees remember after visiting your booth depends on your booth staffers. Selecting, training, and managing this army of booth staffers is a monumental task in itself. So much time is required just to manage their travel.
To boost your impact, invest more time in the selecting and training process. Select staffers who want to be there, will stay focused on taking leads, and who understand your target market, especially at vertical market trade shows. Train your staff to warmly start conversations, find out what problems your attendees need solving that you can solve, concisely present how you solve their problems better than others, and then capture the data needed for effective sales follow up.
You’ll get more and better qualified leads, which will fill your pipeline, drive greater sales revenue and increase your trade show return on investment. Plus, your high-performance booth staff team will impress your clients and prospects, building your brand.
9. Advance Planning in Partnership with Your Exhibit House
Our most effective enterprise clients accept our invitations for planning meetings many months before their major shows. And continue to aggressively keep meeting to refine and approve their direction. That means we have more time to iterate creative ideas, and avoid extra costs from late fees.
We recently won a new customer because their former exhibit house set up their largest USA exhibit of the year facing the wrong direction. That same client was surprised when we had their exhibit completely set up two days before the show opened. While there are no guarantees, we understand the trade show world is awash in details.
So we make the point of checking everything (including how the exhibit is oriented on the show floor) repeatedly, and we overcommunicate timelines and deadlines with our clients. When you actively plan to avoid potential problems, they are less likely to arrive.
10. Communicating a Clear, Relevant Advantage
You can’t make an impact if you don’t capture your potential buyers’ attention. To create high impact marketing, enterprise exhibitors clearly communicate how they are the best solution to their clients’ important problems. They use compelling language, relevant stats, and emotional appeals. They know what matters to their customers, and prove they can make their lives better. Their exhibit graphics quickly tell their story with concise text, numbers, graphs, and images.
Their in-booth activities reinforce their advantage in an experiential and memorable way. Their booth staffers are trained to prove the validity of these claims, to convert interest into action, so attendees go home seeing the exhibitor as their clear choice.
11. Tailored Engagement Activities
You won’t get high-impact trade show marketing relying on static displays that just sit there. Energize your exhibit by taking advantage of the face-to-face nature of trade shows. Strive to interactivity into your exhibits so attendees stop and stay longer. Engaging activities such as revealing product demos, tech-infused interactives, educational and experiential presentations, fun games, and welcoming hospitality. However, what works great at one of your shows may not work at others, because of demographic differences amongst your enterprise exhibitor show schedule.
Therefore, experiment to develop a range of engagement activities that appeal to business leaders, technical doers, line managers, digital natives, or whatever key, yet different groups attend your shows. You want activities that are not just interesting, but interesting to your buyers.
12. Integrating Trade Shows with Your Other Marketing
The best trade show programs do not sit by themselves as one lonely silo of your marketing efforts. Instead, they use trade shows as a focal point for brand building and advancing the sales cycle. Enterprise exhibitors get more from trade shows with targeted emails, direct mail, and industry magazine ads that invite attendees to in-booth meetings and to see what’s new. They prominently list their upcoming events on their website.
They publish press releases about new products they’re introducing at key shows. They post shares on their social media accounts, with photos and videos, before, during, and after major shows. Most of all, they use the live aspect of trade shows to animate brand messages shared in their other marketing mediums.
13. Continuous Improvement
The best enterprise exhibitors start planning their next big industry show immediately after the current show closes. And they don’t stop. They ask booth staffers and company stakeholders what worked and didn’t work at the show. They ask company leaders on the emerging marketing challenges they want to overcome. They experiment with new activities, promotions, staffers, and shows, always seeking feedback and ideas, always evolving, measuring and improving.
While celebrating their successes, they are never completely satisfied. They are innately curious, and thrive within your company that provides them with a safe environment to take calculated risks, rather than scare them into thinking that any new idea that doesn’t pan out will be met with a pink slip.
We Understand the Needs of Enterprise Exhibitors
Trade show marketing is challenging for all brands, but especially for enterprise exhibitors. The scope and complexity of their companies, product lines, and markets increases the need for expertise, speed, reliability, and communication.
Holt Experiential proudly serves enterprise exhibitors who justifiable expect great design, insightful strategy, effective problem-solving, trustworthy consistency, and a can-do attitude.
Contact Holt Experiential for a partner who will help you enhance your high-impact trade show marketing program for your enterprise company.