Top 3 Trade Show Follow-Up Tips
Trade shows are one of the most powerful marketing tools in some industries. With space rental, booth, travel expenses adding up quickly, you however need to make sure you do everything you can to maximize your ROI: Even if you had the best display and collected hundreds of leads, not having a solid follow-up strategy will result in your expo effort and investment going down the drain.
With years of experience creating custom exhibits at major conferences all over the US, we know what has made our customers successful so here are 3 essential trade show follow-up tips.
- SIGN THEM UP TO YOUR MAILING LIST
When attendees enter their contact info to learn more about your products or services, they give you the agreement to follow up with them. This means you can add them to your mailing list without the risk of spamming them. Despite the importance of social media, mailing lists remain the most effective professional mean of communication. Not only can you send newsletters to your prospects but you can add them to a follow-up sequence that automatically showcases your offerings and offers answers to their most common questions – for this to work, your messages should be useful, not sales pitches. Another good mailing list option is that you can segment your leads by product line or trade show.
2. SALES TEAM REACHING OUT
Once your mailing list effort has been set in motion, it’s time to have your sales team reaching out which they can do through emails and phone calls. It is important for emails to be very personal so that they don’t look like they are part of an autoresponder series or generic newsletter. Once again, the communication should focus on answering questions rather than just pitching.
3. SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT
Use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and more to connect with with prospects through social media. This means looking them up, following them and engaging them with likes and comments. Just like with a mailing list, you should have a good content strategy and, the good news is that you can make this easy by repurposing the same content used in your newsletters, responders and vice versa.
Follow these 3 tips and you are guaranteed to turn leads into customers. However, make sure you planned your follow-up communication thoroughly way before the trade show so that everything can start swiftly as soon as you get back.
