By Nana Rodaki, Senior Account Director

If you’re investing in a trade show, it’s important that you don’t walk into the event expecting customers to come to you — your best guarantee of success is to have a packed meeting schedule well in advance. Here are our top 5 tips for driving the highest ROI.

1) Create a clear brand narrative
This feeds into all the points below. Delivering a consistent, powerful message across all your channels is massively important. Having your ‘voices’ in harmony also helps amplify your impact at key shows. Major trade shows create a lot of noise, often with several competitors saying similar things. Getting your messaging right is essential to stand out from the crowd.

2) Lead generation and development
Major events are great opportunities to meet new prospects and grow your sales funnel. But prospects aren’t just going to wander up to your booth. It’s important to do a lot of the leg work beforehand so that you can pre-book meetings with new leads.

Lead generation and development of your sales funnel is something that you’ll be working on 24/7. Communications should directly empower sales and can play a key role in  supporting account-based marketing (ABM) activity.

You can read more about Platform’s approach to lead generation in our report, “5 Steps to Lead Generation in Tech.”

3) Use analyst relations to your (business) advantage
There’s a great opportunity to influence the industry conversation by taking a strategic approach to analyst relations (AR). The leading analysts in your field are talking to your customers every day and are increasingly providing consultancy to help them define their tech buying strategies. By building strong relationships with analysts, they are more likely to talk about you to customers, write about you in their reports (which are read by your customers), and provide independent and trusted recommendations of your technology to customers. Find out more about how to build a successful AR program in our report, “Why analyst relations is pivotal to business success.”

4) Influence the influencers
A social influencing program is a powerful  way to connect your in-house experts and sales leaders with their specific target prospects.  Company social media channels are vital but the truth is that people buy from people. Are your key executives using social media to build authentic, targeted engagement that will help to progress sales and business partnerships?

5) Have a post-show plan
A good event plan will leave you with plenty of tools to support sales after the show. You should have plenty of content ready to help your sales teams reach out to prospects to continue conversations beyond the show floor. Every show is different, of course, but there are often activities like awards, presentations, video interviews, and more that will provide you with a plethora of marketing materials. Topics from industry conversations at a show should help drive great thought leadership for the months ahead.

Platform has been delivering success for tech vendors at industry events and tradeshows, including CES, ISE, Mobile World Congress, BSC Expo, NAB Show, Museums & Heritage Show, The Media Production & Technology Show, Brighton Music Conference, London Tech Week, and IBC for well over thirty years. Our knowledge and connections, breadth of experience, and ability to execute mean we deliver great results. 

But don’t take my word for it. We’re proud to have supported Net Insight at several major events: 

“Platform is a fantastic comms partner. The team delivers brilliant top-tier coverage and thought leadership that helps us stand out and boost sales. Their event and social media support have made a huge difference to our sales engagement. I’m a very happy client and look forward to achieving even more amazing results together.”

Mari Fogelberg

Marketing Communications Manager, Net Insight

Drop us a note here if you’d like to chat about how to maximize ROI at your events.