How to Attract The Media To Your Stand At Trade Shows

The main objective of exhibiting your business at trade shows is capturing leads to acquiring new business and brand awareness. However, attracting the media to your stand is certainly the best way to achieve such objective, but how do you achieve this?

Prepare Media Kit

To get the media to talk about your products, the first thing to do is to provide them with valuable contents. Unless your company is very famous or your news incredibly powerful, journalists won’t spend time searching for information and material to talk about you. You must provide them with everything, make it easy for them.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

What should my Media Kit contain?

A good Media Kit contains the following information:

  • Company introduction
  • Company factsheet (figures, facts, graphs – key elements about your business that make it worth talking about)
  • Company timeline (your historic, major dates and milestones)
  • Major products / services / innovations introduction
  • Bio of the founder / CEO / key employees
  • High-resolution Photos and Logos (a good article always comes with a photo, if you don’t provide it, you risk losing control over your content or losing the article altogether)

The strategy is to always provide something very short to give a quick overview with links to find out, make it easy to grasp your documents within seconds, don’t lose your reader in pages of text.

Build your story

Most companies have no story to tell, hence no PR coverage.

Unless you have some incredible innovation to share or an internationally famous brand, why would people talk about you?

You need to have a story that will captivate your audience.

The story can be about your company and what it stands for or about your CEO or founder on his own journey or unique personality.

VISITOR INFORMATION

Make use of PR (Press Release)

Write a Press Release announcing that you will be exhibiting at the show. Make it bold. Use your story as the backbone of your release and add some suspense into it. Talk about innovation, announcement, exclusive information, etc.

If your press release is boring, don’t even bother publishing it. It would have no impact and would only waste your time. Write something worth reading that makes people (and media) want to come pay you a visit.

Once written, publish your PR and relay it through your own networks (website, Social Media, blog, newsletter, etc.), send it to journalists within your network and invite your partners to help you spread it.

Prepare Question & Answer Forms

You did everything right and some journalists stop by your booth, well done!

Then what?

They start talking to your staff. Your team members have been trained for capturing leads and educating visitors, but do they have a clue on how to handle media? Most probably not.

You will certainly ask them to direct journalists to you, but what if you’re not here or the journalist has no time to wait?

Prepare a Q&A sheet for internal purpose. This sheet should contain the top 10 questions you expect journalists to ask about your business and the “correct” answers your staff should be giving.

Use this document to standardize your numbers (you don’t want a person to claim a number and another one say something different) and make sure everyone is on the same page. Distribute this Q&A document and tell your team to read it and memorize it carefully

YOU ARE READY FOR THE TRADESHOW

HIGHLIGHTS OF TOSSE2018

Related Post

Feb 12

How Likely Are You to Buy from Yourself – Thinking Like The Customer

Marketing your business has evolved over time. Apart from the traditional methods of marketing, one way to get a proper marketing strategy is by getting into the mind of the consumer. Let us do a little exercise to help do this.

Everyone is familiar with role-playing games. Let’s do a little role play now: You are the customer and you want to purchase an item or service from your franchise. Be completely honest, will you be willing to sanction the purchase? There are a few parameters you can use to evaluate this. Ask yourself the following questions:

Secure Your Space At Africa’s Biggest Education Tradeshow & Conference

  • How easily did I find the product?
  • How does the product compare with other competitors in the market?
  • Is there any benefit from further patronage?
  • How good is the customer service?
  • Does the product keep up with recent technological trends?

 

The idea of this exercise is to make you understand exactly what the thought process of the consumers is. This will give you a basis to work with a  better strategy.

Reverse-Engineer Your Findings To Your Benefit

After going through the process of getting into the consumer’s mindset, you most likely would find areas where improvements or adjustments can be made. You would find that you would be able to understand your customers better. This will help you to be able to tailor your correspondence to them in the future.

Showcase Your Products & Services at TOSSE 2020

If you can see yourself on the same level as your customers you can better drive customer loyalty and develop the trust that is so important these days and it humanizes your company and enhances your marketing capability. In the end, you will be able to anticipate your customer’s needs because you are thinking just like them. It will put you in the best spot to market with confidence. How likely are you to buy from yourself?

Feb 08

4 Core Principles of Customer Relations That Fuel Business Growth

Companies in all industries and all of sizes understand that customers are perhaps their most valuable asset. Improving the overall customer experience is vital for continued success and survival of their business.

APPLY FOR A STAND AT TOSSE 2019

Customer relation is a way business relates to its customers, clients and patrons. Some business organizations hire people specifically to manage how the company interacts and communicates with people. The goal is to retain existing customers and to gain new ones by providing the best customer relations and clients’ services.

There are some core principles to relationship management that any company can and should follow:

Communication: Listening is just as important as telling. Think about how often you actually speak with your customers. Focus on less financial-driven communication (whether it’s E-mail, phone or face-to-face interaction) if you make your customers feel involved, they feel as though they actually have a stake in your company, and feel like you care about more than just trying to make sales.

TOSSE 2019 EXHIBITOR INFORMATION

Rewards: Every company should initiate and make provision for reward programs. It is a very simple form of saying “Thank you” and particularly it is a viable and measurable marketing tool that big companies and small businesses can use to retain their customers and grow their business.

Be flexible: Be quick and attentive to customer’s complaints: The objective of customer relation is typically to interact with the customers in order to answer questions, resolve support issues, establish credibility and nurture relationships.

REGISTER TO ATTEND TOSSE 2019

Here are strategies that Improve Customers Relations and building customer’s loyalty, from simply opening up communications channels to implementing elaborate point systems that reward loyalty enhanced customer communications.

Be prepared to meet and interact with lot of customers at TOSSE 2019.

SPONSORSHIP/PARTNERSHIP

  • Providing customer feedback forms
  • Asking about customer needs in general when customer calls with problems
  • Training call-center staff to handle disputes
  • Encouraging a service culture throughout the organization.
Exhibitions stands at TOSSE
May 30

5 Steps to attract more customers to your exhibitions booth

It is said that to be outstanding, one must do things differently. This is a trait in any business/organization that is currently dominating the market, especially when it comes to exhibitions.

Perhaps, your business or organization has been exhibiting at events and have not seen the desired results on your investment there. Then it is time for a change.

As organisers of the biggest trade show in Africa with over 7000 attendees, we have listed 5 steps to help your business/organization attract more potential customers to your booth at exhibitions.

Exhibitions at TOSSE

If you want to get a good return on your investment, then you must be able to separate yourself from the crowd of other exhibitors at the event by attracting the majority of the traffic to your booth. Below are the steps to help you achieve that.

Steps to help you attract customers to your exhibition booth

  1. Create a buzz factor: One feedback every marketing executive would like to hear from customers at exhibitions is that they saw their stand and patronized them at the event. One way to maximize this is to create a social media buzz even before the exhibition day. Use your social media pages to tell your audience that you will be part of a particular exhibition and begin to warm your prospects up by showing them irresistible offers and packages you have prepared for them at the exhibitions. This way, you have aroused their interest, and they will be on the lookout for your exhibition booth at the event.
  2. Use mini-influencers: You may wonder what this means? This is basically getting your best customers or people around you with a strong following both online and offline to promote your presence at the exhibition. Remember, this is a 5-step list and they are to be followed semantically. You will be getting a customer or good friend to post something like this: “(name of product/service) has helped me develop myself in so many ways. They will be at (exhibition name), make sure you check out their stand at the exhibition”. Remember, nothing travels faster than word of mouth whether online or offline. With these testimonials, you are beginning to build the interest in your booth.
  3. Pre-event Follow-up: Before a tradeshow starts, usually, there would be a buzz weeks before and depending on the magnitude of the exhibition, people may have been posting their attendance confirmations online or offline, and this is another goldmine where you can trap leads from. One easy way to do that is to simply follow the hashtag on social media e.g #TOSSE2022, and see all the posts of people who have signaled their interest, and begin to filter them to see those that fit your customer description. Then send them personal invites and materials to educate them about your products to show that you want to see them in your booth at the exhibition.
  4. Get inbound traffic: Note that we are talking about doing things differently to attract potential customers to your booth. One of the traditional things done at exhibitions is that exhibitors get one of their staff to distribute their flyers or brochures to the attendees. This still works, but there is something better, which is using challenges, contests, giveaways, mystery games and other ideas that naturally calls people attention. People love freebies, and these kinds of things, hence increasing the amount of leads you are getting into your booth and that also increases your chances of converting them while they are inside.
  5. Post-event Follow-up: Remember, you are trying to get them to make a decision and it may not necessarily be at the exhibition, so you must follow them all through the decision making process. Get their social media handles and thoroughly check up on them to see how your products and services can help them, lookout for their needs, celebrate them on their special days and build a relationship afterwards, and you will have some become lifetime customers of your business/organization.

These are 5 steps which when followed will bring a vast amount of traffic who are potential leads that can become your customers. It may sound like a lot of work, but if you want to make sales and achieve your goals as an exhibitor, you must be ready to do this.

Don’t forget to also check out our article on how to improve your Brand presence at exhibitions.