Preshow Marketing for Trade Shows
Posted By DJ Heckes on February 3, 2010
Determine how trade shows can strengthen your present marketing strategy. Do you want to: Increase existing products and/or services in existing markets? Introduce new products and/or services into existing markets? Introduce existing products and/or services into new markets? Introduce new products and/or services into new markets? Once all of this has been determined, you are on the right road to a successful trade show.
Introduce New Products
Trade shows are successful vehicles for introducing new products and provide the opportunity to pre-sell products. In addition, trade shows allow a company to feature a premiere product or unveil seasonal offerings to consumers or distributors.
Make Contact with Distributors
If you do not sell directly to the public, invite distributors to the show and unveil a new product line for the distributors to best represent you. What a great way to gain exposure in a short amount of time and feature offerings.
Build Relationships
Trade shows build the way for future relationships. At the show, you may see current customers, sales representatives, distributors, or members of the media. Current customers will be happy to see your company exhibiting and may introduce you to someone who could do business with you. If the product being displayed or demonstrated is interesting enough, it may catch the attention of a reporter who wants to do an article about the product and your company, especially if there is something new to offer that is original and unique in today’s marketplace.
Generation of a Mass Amount of Leads
The average salesperson makes customer field visits to 2.7 prospects per day. Based on five days per week fifty weeks per year that equals 675 face-to-face meetings. Compare this to an example of twenty-five hundred attendees visiting the booth space at a show, divided by two trade show days, totaling thirteen show hours, and that equals 192 prospects per hour or 3.20 prospects per minute. The ability to visit with this many prospective customers per day seems unreal in a normal meeting environment, but the trade show atmosphere allows exhibiting companies to use their competitive edge in a hyper competitive environment to make this time valuable in lead generation. No other type of advertising has prospects pay money and takes time out of their busy days to listen to sales pitches.
Cost of Closing a Sale is Cheaper
CEIR found in a more recent study, “The Cost Effectiveness of Exhibition Participation,” that the average cost to identify a prospect and close a sale while exhibiting in trade shows, is $2,188.40. That’s about 42 percent less than the $3,102.10 average cost to get and close a sale when not using trade shows as a means for exhibiting and demonstrating products and services. The results also indicate that leads generated at trade shows are often of greater quality than those generated by the use of other methods.
You may be asking why so much less? Not only are trade shows a great place to meet and talk with a large number of qualified prospective customers in a short amount of time, but they also are a great venue for quickly advancing the sales cycle. When prospective customers walk a show, they tend to be more qualified buyers because they actually paid their own way to come see all the product choices at the show. The booth staffers are able to ask qualifying questions and present only what matters to the attendees. Moreover, booth staffers have a well-branded trade show exhibit to back up their presentations, complete with visual aids to tell a story with more impact.
Therefore, leads from trade shows do not need as much follow-up to close, keeping overall sales costs down even after the trade show ends. Keep this compelling value of trade shows in mind as you evaluate the marketing choices. Visit www.ceir.org for more statistical information. Another study performed by Meetings and Conventions (M&C ) in their June 2009 News line edition that stated trade shows are an even more cost-effective forum to identify leads and close sales than CEIR had reported. M&C discovered a calculation error that inflated the reported cost of identifying prospects and closing sales at trade shows by 5.4 percent and noted that “the results stay in the two-to-three ratio that CEIR has been publishing.” (www.mcmag.com)
Level the Playing Field
Trade shows help level the playing field for smaller firms, since booth space is generally inexpensive ($13 per square foot on average, with the typical small booth covering one hundred square feet), and even small companies can usually afford attractive displays. In past years, trade shows were based on the larger companies exhibiting. Smaller companies exhibiting felt intimidated or overwhelmed beside such large companies. In today’s market, this is no longer true because smaller companies are on the rise and can exhibit with as much of an impact as the larger companies. Larger businesses have been cutting back on costs and trade shows are seeing a decline in the purchase of larger exhibiting spaces, which has leveled the playing field for generating leads.