Despite the fact that trade show displays marketing strategy has a high cost of lead generation and qualification, when it is carried out appropriately, it has showed outstanding resilience in promotional activities. It has proved to be a great opportunity for meeting face-to-face with business partners and clients, something that lacks in internet promotional activities. In order to make your trade show a success, there are things that need to be observed by the trade show promotional team, which help in engaging, qualifying and disengaging the prospects.
The main goal for a trade show is to meet and qualify as many leads as possible, which can later be converted into sales. What this means is that the promotional team should focus on capturing as many leads as they can. The engagement time needs to be minimal and something close to 5 minutes may be regarded as an appropriate time that needs to be allocated for each engagement.
By waiting to convert leads after a trade fair helps in maximizing the number of booth visitors who are able to be qualified. It also helps to slowly nurture the lead prospects that have longer sales cycle time. The quality of leads that is generated from trade show displays continues to be one of the strongest and ranks among the most qualified.
When using trade show signage, you need not fill your booth with words. This is because, a trade fair booth is more of a billboard rather than a datasheet meaning that the booth should provide a selling environment. You should not wait for the visitors in your booth to stop by and start reading your signage as it is the role of the sales team to approach the visitors and to put across the message and product features.
A more aggressive face-to-face engagement is required to help qualify the leads. Moreover, the trade show signage should not be put below the table height as it may not be noticed or easily seen by visitors. The literature graphics as well as the booth appearance should match the look and message of your company website.
In addition, when on the trade show floor, the promotional team should not focus heavily on giving out the literature to unqualified leads since most of the literature that is collected from the shows never make its way to homes or offices. The trade show displays team can focus on obtaining emails and contacts of the prospects and promise that the literature will be send to them and therefore, they do not have to carry it.
One of the reasons why it is recommended not to close a sale with the qualified leads right on the trade show floor is that in general, trade shows convert only about 1-5% of the total number of visitors of a trade show booth. Attempting to close the sales during the show time can limit the team from qualifying a large number of visitors.
There is also need to use marketing automation strategies to help in nurturing the prospects to become sales. There are software programs, which can be used to generate tailored emails for those customers interested in your products and services but they are not able to make a buying decision right away at the trade show displays.
Using the software programs ensures that sales persons are readily involved when a lead is nurtured to a ready-to-buy status. This helps reduce the time which is wasted chasing after leads that are in the early stages of the sales cycle thus improving efficiency in lead qualification and conversion.
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