Yes, we’re all talking about the return to in-person trade shows. People are so ready to get back to face-to-face interaction! Am I crazy… I kinda love trade shows! So, I thought I’d share a few proven tactics for driving traffic to your booth and supercharging your NAB Show.
The face-to-face aspect of in-person trade shows is so important, and your company likely invests in a trade show booth to get out there and get noticed. It’s the best way to grow know-like-trust. If you’re in the media and entertainment business, the NAB Show offers you a great opportunity to boost brand visibility and give prospects the chance to see and even try your products. But the greatest benefit of the in-person trade show is that you can meet and talk with people who influence and make buying decisions for their business.
You can only meet with these decision-makers if they come to your booth! That’s why it’s critical that you focus on driving traffic to your site. You want a healthy stream of booth visitors, and you also want to ensure that they are the right visitors. The best way I’ve found to bring the right people to a booth at the NAB Show is to run a pre-show campaign targeting those customers and prospects most likely to be interested in meeting — or possibly even working out a deal.
Don’t wait until you’re in Vegas and all set up at the convention center! Start guiding visitors to your booth well before the show gets underway. Determine what you feel would be a reasonable number of meetings, and start getting them booked!
Get on the phone, send an email, reach out via LinkedIn, and through the NAB Show platform. Your goal is to get a commitment of some sort. Ideally, you set up an actual meeting date, time, and topic. But it can also be effective just to confirm that a prospect will drop by your booth while at the show. Capture interest by targeting your customers’ most common pain points and illustrating how your product or service solves them. Can you save them time or money? Ask for a just few minutes of their time so that you can show them how!
If you start building out a meeting schedule in advance, you’ll be able to maximize your booth investment even if traffic isn’t quite at pre-pandemic levels quite yet. The upheaval and uncertainty of the past year is bound to have an effect on the show. But when you do this work in advance, you can go into the show with much greater confidence that you’ll have meaningful and productive interactions with booth visitors.
Steps to take:
- ✅ Create your hot list, your dream list. Make a list of the top 25 or 100 people you’d love to see at your event. You know who I mean – if you these were the only people you saw at the show you’d consider it a raging success, you’d be thrilled. Now call them and invite them. Book an appointment with them at the show if you can. Old school, I know. But it works!
- ✅ WIIFM! What do they want or need? When you send your promo emails (automated or not) tell them what they will get when they come see you at the show. No need to talk too much about yourself. What’s the benefit to them? That’s the focus! (WIIFM! = “what’s in it for me”)
- ✅ Give something fun and useful to everyone who books a meeting with you in advance of the show – a tool, a free report, a diagram, a gift card for a cuppa coffee…
- ✅ Do you have an appointment booking system in place that lets your prospect book a time, get SMS reminders, and helps them know what to expect in advance of your meeting?
- ✅ Is your NAB Amplify listing filled out and are you using your guest pass code? When someone uses your code you get their contact info and can start a conversation with them. No-brainer.
- ✅ Lookalike and Custom audiences can be magical. Have you tried this one yet? Take your customer list (.csv file) and upload it into Facebook or LinkedIn. Spend $5 or $20+ on running an ad, boosted post, or sponsored content to that Custom audience. And if you want to take it a step further, tell Facebook or LinkedIn to find other people who are similar, a Lookalike audience, and run your ad to them. (I did one of these this afternoon, in fact. If you need more info on how-to, let me know, OK?)
These are proven ways to drive traffic to your booth and supercharge your NAB Show. If you’d like to talk tactics further, feel free to get in touch! Also, you can check out the exact system we use today with companies like yours. I LOVE helping businesses get the most out of every trade show, and I’m so excited we’ll be seeing one another in person again.
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