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Content to Create Before Your Next Trade Show

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One of the key drivers of trade show marketing is content. Moreover, the ways in which your business leverages content before a trade show have a significant effect on the traction your business generates during the event. Additionally, they greatly influence your returns on investment. But what kind of content should your business create before your next trade show?

Develop Your Pre-Trade Show Content Strategy

Your content marketing strategy before a trade show should consist of three different types of content. These are types of content that:

  • Inform
  • Convince
  • Remind

What Kind of Content Best Informs Stakeholders?

If you are participating in a trade show, the first objective of your content creation should be to inform stakeholders about the event itself and the presence of your business at the trade show. The following content prototypes can enable you to inform your audience:

Landing Page on the Website

Trade shows are integral to onsite marketing. Moreover, with the influx of technology, there are opportunities to galvanize onsite and online marketing like never before. The synergies from doing so enable businesses participating in trade shows to convert the traffic into the website to traffic at the trade show and vice versa.

Therefore, create a landing page on your business’s website. On it, create informative content that catches visitors’ attention.

LinkedIn Posts

As trade show marketers, your main concern is to inform people who have a direct or indirect interest in your business. These are the people who might be interested in attending the trade show if informed on time.

So make sure that your marketing team knocks on all doors on LinkedIn. A great professional networking platform, LinkedIn can enable your business to reach out to a relevant target audience ahead of the trade show.

Another benefit of publishing content pertaining to the trade show on the LinkedIn platform is that its API allows it to integrate email and contact details of stakeholders from your Microsoft 360 cloud suite. This will enable you to maximize content usage and followup.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is probably one of the most important drivers of content marketing strategy for a trade show. It is personal, it gets delivered straight to the person concerned, and it can be accessed across a plethora of physical devices.

Therefore, leverage the expertise and experience of your email marketing team. Charge them with drafting email content for the trade show that is catchy, informative, and shares important details. For example, emails should state the location, date, and timings of the trade show.

Additionally, emails should note the number of attendees and exhibitors and the kind of audience that is expected at the event. Take special care to ensure that the email gets delivered into readers’ inboxes and not their spam folders.

A Visitor Form

Another easy way to create content to inform people about a trade show and to know if they are interested in attending the event is to create a visitor form for your website. Include a plug-in that directly captures their information from their LinkedIn profiles if they show interest.

Allowing people to auto-populate the visitor form will allow your marketing team to capture leads for the event and create a more predictable participation experience.

What Kind of Content Best Convinces Stakeholders?

The second step in the conversation with stakeholders ahead of your next trade show is to convince them to visit the trade show. As such, the content has to sound convincing to stakeholders you are engaging with.

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Some of the most effective forms of content that convinces are:

PowerPoint Presentations

Create effective videos using PowerPoint presentations to share your story. Keep content insightful and load it with data points.

For example, how does your offering reduce the turnaround time of an end-to-end cycle? Does your offering reduce costs? If yes, then to what extent is it more economically efficient?

Product Videos

Create product videos ahead of the trade show. For example, if your business offers SaaS products, IoT, AI, or automobiles, it makes good sense to share product videos before the trade show and even at the trade show booth.

Remember that your visitors will feel more confident about purchasing your offering once they can visualize how it works. Therefore, a graphical simulation or a product video enables your target audience to understand how your offering works and how it is different from what your competitors offer.

Trade Show Display Rental

During the trade show, first impressions matter.

On the trade show floor, when you are surrounded by a sea of relevant players from your industry, how will you convince visitors to pay attention to your business offerings?

This is where a professionally designed and customized trade show display rental assumes immense importance. So make sure to choose a unique design that reflects the positioning of your business.

To this end, engage with your trade show booth builders so you will end up with colors that match those in your brand logo and any signage you plan to use in your trade show display rental.

Case Studies

Yet another content form that can be useful in convincing stakeholders to visit your booth are case studies.

Therefore, reflect on the industry verticals have you worked with. Also consider the size and scale of customers you have partnered with.

Create case studies based on these past experiences to share how your business meets customer challenges and offers relevant solutions.

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Video case studies can be especially compelling, convincing visitors to your booth of the effectiveness of your offerings. They can dramatize the experience and expertise your business has in offering solutions to your customers’ business pain points. Additionally, they can humanize the team that engages with customers to create those solutions.

Therefore, compile and share case studies with trade show visitors to gain a competitive edge.

What Kind of Content Best Reminds Stakeholders?

The last cog in the wheel of your conversation with stakeholders ahead of your next trade show is to remind them of the date, venue, and precise location of your trade show rental booth.

Some of the effective content forms that go a long way in reminding stakeholders of the upcoming event are:

Social Media Content

Don’t forget to create catchy social media content to remind your target audience of the details of the trade show. Create both organic and sponsored content with relevant hash tags on the social media platform that best suits your business and your target audience.

Calendar Invitations

Make sure your trade show marketing team sends out calendar invitations on office application suites like Google or Microsoft 360. This can be easily done for B2B marketing. For B2C trade show marketing, an SMS campaign or a Whatsapp campaign can provide good returns on investment.

Whichever method you choose, keep the content concise and crisp. A simple poster image of your business participating in the trade show will probably do the job.

Image Search

Yet another way to boost your target audience’s memory is by doing an image search.

Share images from past editions of the trade show. Images of your brand ambassador or those of opinion leaders can enable your visitors to remember the event based on its importance.

Further, your trade show marketing team can try uploading images of your past association with the trade show using the Google search console. Upload images of your past attendance at the trade show on Google or Bing maps so that it is easier for them to search for the precise location well ahead of the trade show.

Newsletters

Be it in hard copy format or an e-mail based newsletter, create content to remind people of your participation at the trade show days ahead of it. Reserve this tactic for the last stage of the campaign so recipients take note of the reminder.

Content Is the Driver of Your Trade Show Success

Finally, remember that a trade show is about communication with your target audience. Creating great content ahead of the event will allow you to better connect with trade show visitors, creating opportunities for better engagement and more sales.