Trade shows are about how many peoples you can see if a very short amount of time. You have 4 – 8 seconds for your booth design to grab people attention and make them stop to speak with you. So how do you bring people to your booth?
Traffic Starts Before the Show
Bringing traffic to your booth starts with your pre-show marketing. Emails, social media, and direct mailers are all great ways to drive up interest.
A great way that a company did this was that they sent everyone a dollar and if you brought that dollar by their booth to match it with the serial number, you then got $100. Another time, I was sent a chemical test strip, if it turned a certain color you won a prize and were entered into the grand prize.
For the larger shows, work on finding your target market. You can set up appointments ahead of time, or offer a giveaway that will draw in that target market.
Traffic In Your Booth
First thing to do in your booth is smile and look at the passing crowd. Do not spend money on your booth and then sit behind a table and look at your phone or laptop. I ban phones and any computers not being used for demos in my booths. I also remove chairs. You can read about that here.
One of my favorite designs is a business that could do small batch runs for bottling and they put up a big banner in their booth that stated the exact run size they could do. This was a huge show, after they left, they had contracts to run for the next two months with leads that would book them out of the year. They had their larger competitors sending people to them and they sent larger orders to their competitors – ensuring the customer received the service that they needed.
Tying your booth design, major offerings, and marketing together, will bring people to your booth.
People are here to engage, so you need to show your willingness to be engaged.
The second part of engaging is knowing when someone is not a good fit for your company and how to move them on so you can talk to those who are a good fit. This needs to be done with tact and each person will require different approaches. Practice makes perfect with this.
You cannot speak with everyone at a trade show – and you don’t want to. Bring the right people to your booth and drive the ROI of your trade shows through the roof.