Small Business Builder: Trade Show Tips, Pt. I
Aug. 8 -- Booths and tables at trade shows, conventions, and other events offer great opportunities for networking, scoping out the competition, and showing off your high-dollar display panels.
In the bustle of making travel arrangements, printing fliers, gathering pretty pictures for the backdrop, and buying a new power suit for yourself, it's easy to lose sight of why you're going in the first place — to make sales and win new customers … not just any customers, but the kind you'll want to keep.
The trade-show success cycle has 12 parts: planning, preparing, making advance contact, staffing, setting up, attracting people to your display, making a good impression, engaging them once they show up, making friends, making sales, cleaning up, and following up.
(The suggestions given below apply chiefly to trade shows; the principles apply, on a smaller scale, to less elaborate events, such as local half-day meetings.)
Power Up With a Master Plan
"If you have a good plan, everything else falls into place." That's one of the things people always say and nobody believes, but it's true. Make one all-purpose "master plan" (you'll modify it with experience) and one event-specific plan, which will fill in the blanks on your master plan.
Plan backward from the event. A partial schedule for a May 3 regional conference might look like this:
May 1 — Final briefing.
April 23 — Send out second pre-event letter.
April 9 — Send out first pre-event letter.
April 1 — Develop mailing list of attendees you want to contact in advance.
March 1 — Brief your company's representatives.
Feb. 15 — Check supplies and equipment; arrange for necessary repairs, reprints, preparation of new materials.
Jan. 15 — Establish strategy, arrange for design and production of new brochures, giveaways, and other materials.
Jan. 1 — Start planning your strategy; brainstorm ideas for creating traffic; plan for ancillary marketing.
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