B-to-B Events

How to bring your brand message to life at a trade show? Let us count the ways. There’s signage and graphics, high-tech experiences and theatre presentations, press events and cocktail parties, to name a few. But trade shows can also be a forum to release a brand’s more creative side. Like Lenovo did this year at CES when it hired Hollywood stuntmen to ride through Las Vegas on top of taxis and limos. Or Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, which turned rubber duckies and conga lines into business-generating engagement tools.

If you want to have a meaningful engagement with attendees in your booth, the first thing you have to do, after you get them there, is to encourage them to stick around. After all, your booth is an ideal touch point for cementing face-to-face relationships and providing hands-on information about your product or service. But you’re competing with hundreds of other exhibitors for the attendees’ time and attention.

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The days of in-booth demos and glassy-eyed product presentations are quickly going the way of the fax machine. In their place are trade show programs that are heavy on pre-show promotion, in-booth technology and laser-focused lead qualification strategies. Maybe the biggest shift changing the face of the trade show landscape is the consumer-generated experience. No longer are your prospects and customers content to merely pass by and act as receptacles of information.

A trade show typically is a launch pad for new products. Attendees troll the show floor seeking the latest and greatest, and exhibitors gladly oblige with displays, interactive exhibits and eye-catching graphics that tout their products’ features and benefits. But a trade show also can be a platform to unveil a marketing campaign that will endure long after the booth is packed up and the attendees go back home. The campaign may live on in the form of a contest, a website or a social community that continues to engage the target audience.