Abridged with the author’s permission from Sway Engine blog.
Your booth location doesn’t matter. I repeat: It does not matter. If your company pays a premium to be closer to the entrance of a trade show floor, stop right now.
You could be in the farthest back corner of the floor, and still generate traffic to your booth using content marketing strategies.
Giveaways at trade shows are nothing new. The basic idea of content marketing in a trade show context is this: Give away well-written, well-researched information that your ideal customers must have, and they will actively seek your booth.
For the strategy to work, however, there are four key areas to address:
- Who are your ideal prospects and what information do they need?
- Does your content product align with customer needs and still have something to do you’re your company?
- Is the quality of the content top-notch?
- Did you market your giveaway to attendees before, during, and after the trade show?
Ideal Prospects and Their Needs
You want decision makers to stop by your booth, whether they’re presidents, owners, CEOs, directors, managers, purchasers, etc. What information could you give away that they need?
Don’t overthink this part of the process. Start by looking at the expertise within your own company. Do you have access to specialized or proprietary knowledge? Any sort of internal research or customer survey results that you can share?
For example, a manufacturer I knew conducted research on a developing market. The purpose of this research was internal, to decide whether they should get into the market. They decided not to get into the market, but at a trade show they shared the results of their research with distributor attendees. That attracted owners and CEOs interested in business trends, and gave the manufacturer an opportunity to start a relationship with them.
Aligning Prospect Needs, the Content Product, and Your Company
It might be true that your prospects need high-level business information. You might promise to give away free subscriptions to Harvard Business Review to every CEO that stops by your booth. That would probably drive quite a bit of traffic to your booth, but would probably not qualify your prospects. The more targeted the content to your prospective customers, the more qualified they’ll be.
Only Quality Content Will Do
Nothing unravels a content marketing strategy quicker than low-quality content. Developing quality content doesn’t have to be costly, but someone in your organization has to recognize the difference between doing it right and doing it cheaply. If the information in your content giveaway is old, readily available elsewhere or poorly researched and written, then you’ve undermined your own strategy.
Don’t Expect to Be Found Without Marketing
Don’t leave the amount of your booth traffic up to luck. If you have something valuable to give away, particularly if it’s research or proprietary data, then attendees will make the time to come by your booth, but first they have to know about it. Advertising in pre-show emails, direct mail, and onsite publications will alert attendees to your content giveaway. If you have your own solid list of prospects, then market to them as well. That hard-to-reach prospect may be unwilling to give up his or her time to your salesperson during the regular workweek, but at a trade show they will actively seek you out if they have something valuable to gain.
Keep marketing immediately after the tradeshow ends. Even if prospects on your lists didn’t come by the booth or to the show at all, let them know what they missed. Offer to send the information to them if they’re still interested.
Andy Brown is the principal of Sway Engine, a content marketing and communications firm.
