TOSSE 2019 – THE BUSINESS NETWORKING THAT WORKS

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.

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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.

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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

We may continue to dispute the true power of social media as a professional marketing tool, but there is little doubt that it remains an incredibly effective way of driving your business forward. This applies to all aspects of business promotion, including offline marketing methods such as attending trade shows and exhibitions, as social media can help to drive consumers to your event and create a buzz around your entire brand.

With this in mind, how can you harness the full power of social media to create a memorable and productive trade show? Consider the following: –

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Prepare Thoroughly and Access Social Media Prior to the Event

Preparation is crucial if you are to successfully utilise social media at a trade show, primarily because it enables you to promote your event and create interest around your brand. By sharing updates and information through an integrated online profile including sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, you can alert your audience well advance of the exhibition in question. When using Twitter, you should also remember to include your official brand name a unique hashtag for the event in every communication.

Focus on the Quality rather than Quantity of your Posts

During the show, it is often tempting to subject your followers to a barrage of updates and tweets. This can easily disorientate the customer, however, while also increasing the risk of issuing bland content that is poorly structured or grammatically incorrect. To avoid this, you should focus on creating quality updates rather than producing them in high volume, using creative and engaging content that seeks to drive traffic at specific times of the day.

Post Pictures and Videos While Embracing Multimedia Resources

If you have invested heavily in creative banners and colourful display panels for your trade show, it is crucial to utilise these through audio-visual media and images. These eye-catching design elements can be extremely effective in enticing potential customers, especially if they are shared in real-time through a number of visual social media sites. By sharing this media across high traffic sites such as Pinterest and YouTube, it is possible to narrate a theme throughout the day and enable your customers to share in an interactive trade show experience.

With this in mind, the content of your videos and imagery is also important, so be sure to capture different elements of the day to convey a genuine experience to customers.

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