How can you ensure your investments pay off?
>In this article, we’ll highlight 5 tips to add to your tradeshow strategy that will help generate a return on your tradeshow calendar investment.
Topics
- Know Who’s Attending.
- Market Your Logistics Company Tradeshow Attendance.
- Measure Your Engagement.
- Follow Up With Leads ASAP.
- Conduct An Event Post-Mortem.
1. Know Who’s Attending
This might seem an obvious one—you’re attending a seafood show, for example, so the attendees are all in the seafood industry. But there’s a Part B to the title: And customize your strategy accordingly
If you’ve added a seafood show to your event calendar, it’s likely because you have products and services suited to prospects in that industry. Spend some time understanding the problems these prospects are experiencing and customize your booth, materials, and pitches to demonstrate your solutions for those problems. It’s not enough to state “we store seafood.” All your attending peers also store seafood.
Determine what you do that solves a typical problem for seafood companies and promote that.
But it’s not only qualified prospects in attendance. There will be prospects where you’re just not a fit. Prospects in a rush. Your peers. And vendors where YOU are the target audience. Determine how to address these various groups in a way that will keep your attending business development team available for the high-probability discussions.
2. Market Your Logistics Company Tradeshow Attendance
Another obvious one, but often overlooked because companies run out of time.
Even with time, too many companies just post a message on social channels about attending with the note “Contact me if you’d like to meet”, and that’s it. Unfortunately, very few people will respond to that.
In Tip 1, you repositioned some of your products and services as solutions to common industry problems. Speak to those solutions on an event landing page on your website and include a meeting request form. Include the name of the show and show dates, your booth number, position on the floor, and some contact info.
- Promote your appearance at the show on your social media channels and LinkedIn.
- Include a reason why prospects might want to meet with you and a link to your landing page.
- Use a variant of that social content as a blog post.
- Email current users of your relevant products and services to communicate to them about your show appearance.
- Be sure to offer an ability for prospects and customers to connect if they’re not attending the show.
These mentions offer a greater opportunity for new and current customers to see you’ll be at the show, prebook a meeting that fits with their calendar, and swing by to see you.
3. Measure Your Engagement
Don’t rely on your BD (Business Development) team to enter the details of every business card they collect—that simply won’t happen. Invest in a lead-scanning app connected to your CRM or create a simple landing page with a lead form on it. Your BD team can quickly scan or type in the contact info plus other important news related to the lead. Your CRM will group the leads together and track progress through to opportunities and wins or loses, plus those leads that are stuck on the fence become lead lists for your future promotions.
There, you’ve just solved your two main problems with events: you’ve increased the number of leads captured and you’ll get a marketing campaign ROI!
4. Follow Up With Leads ASAP
Until the prospect purchases from you, it’s your BD team’s job to engage them and guide them through a customer journey as part of their sales efforts. Ensure the BD team has time set aside to follow up—leads degrade by the hour!
Content BD uses needs to be attention-grabbing and interesting—and cause the prospect to take action. Leverage the AIDA model to develop materials and information to use throughout the customer journey.
The AIDA model reflects the stages prospects move through during their decision-making process:
A: Attention—information aimed at this first stage should be attention-grabbing to make the prospect aware of your brand or service. You need great marketing ideas for your logistics company.
I: Interest—information here focuses on the unique benefits of your brand or service when compared to others.
D: Desire—here the goal is to further the preference for your solutions—to try to create a need.
A: Action—the prospect demonstrates buying intent by submitting a form, making a call, or otherwise engaging with you.
5. Conduct an Event Post-Mortem
Continue to improve your event participation and performance by bringing the team back together to discuss:
- What worked?
- Were there any problems with your approach?
- What could be improved?
- What went well and needs to remain in place?
- What was unnecessary and can be dropped?
Logistics Trade Show Solutions
The heavy lift here is the development of content that’s timely and relevant. It can be a large volume of work to complete in a short period of time, but with the right support, it’s achievable.
From booth design and development to content creation and communication strategy, Ocean 5 Strategies is here to help you.
Ocean 5 Strategies is a Logistics Marketing Agency
Ocean 5 Strategies has worked with some very large logistics companies on website redevelopment, SEO, messaging, content and campaign management, sales collateral development, and trade shows.
- We have the experience, expertise, skills, and resources to help logistics businesses like yours meet their sales growth objectives and new client acquisition goals. We can even help with recruitment marketing.
- We offer a full library of resources to help you and your team hone their skills. We think you will welcome our expert insight. We have lots of articles available to guide you on best practices. Ocean 5 Strategies offers insight into Inbound Marketing Best Practices, SEO for Business, and even How to Build Successful Email Campaigns.
- If your resources are already stretched—and you don’t have the bandwidth to become an expert in every facet of marketing—it may be more productive to leverage our fractional support.
Read more about our logistics practice here.
What Does a Typical Engagement Look Like?
We know logistics and the support we offer is comprehensive, including:
- Messaging workshops to align who you are and what you do with what your customers are looking for
- Tactical campaign execution, including messaging, content development, landing page creation, ROI measurement
- Marketing strategy development, including conference and event planning, campaign management, content, and collateral development.
If your main hook is the availability of capacity and great customer service, you’re not standing out. Let us help you refine how you communicate about your company’s capabilities to move you beyond the capacity price wars.
What would be the first step?
We want to support you, and if you believe our support will be beneficial, then let’s connect.
