In the United States in 2023, there are 6,970 planned trade shows.

These trade shows can be a great place to market your business, but you’ll also want to generate leads.

However, this can be challenging when there are so many other booths at the show. Keep reading to discover some lead generation tactics that can make your trade show attendance a success.

1. Do Pre-Event Work

Once you know that you’re going to be at one of the trade shows, you need to do some work before the event. There will be hundreds of booths, and you want to excite people to plan to visit yours.

You’ll need to utilize your sales and marketing teams, but you also need to start analyzing your target customer. For example, what industries does your business sell to? Do you have a certain size of company that you sell to?

Having a target audience can really help you focus on the people you want to draw to your booth. It can also help you build a deeper relationship and deliver a great experience to the people who come to your booth.

You may even want to make an effort to plan events or dinners to invite prospects or booth attendees to visit your events. This will give you a chance to talk to these potential customers on a more intimate basis.

2. Find the Right Staff

Next, you need to find the right staff who can help run your trade show display and bring in business leads. You’ll want to find people who have worked at trade shows before.

However, if you don’t have anyone who has the experience, you should try and find some people who are enthusiastic about it. People who have sales experience can also be useful.

You should also make sure that the staff can communicate and are energetic and excited to go for the right reasons. You’ll also want to send people who can work together as a team and will actually get along.

You should typically send positive people or people who know how to talk to a lot of people and convince them to give your business a chance.

However, you should also ensure that the people who are at your booth know all about your company and its products and services. It can help to have a debriefing meeting before the staff goes to the trade show.

3. Know How to Work the Booth

Once you’ve selected people who will make your booth a success, you will need to come up with a strategy for working the booth.

To capture leads, you’ll need to know how to differentiate between who is a prospect or not. To do this, you can create a process.

For example, when someone comes up to your booth, you’ll want to make sure that you greet them. Then ask them to scan their badge or check into your booth.

You may want to have questions to figure out who they are and what business they are from. If the candidate is a good prospect, show the service or product to the prospect.

If you can, it can help to get them to commit to some type of follow-up communication. This might be receiving an email after the trade show or signing up for a sales call.

4. Offer Something Special

If you want to generate a lot of leads, consider offering something special. You can do this by offering prizes, but you want to choose something that will actually draw attention and convince people to enter.

Most people will have TVs or different tech gadgets. However, you could generate interest by giving away prices that are linked to your services or products.

5. Use Promo Materials

At a trade show, you’ll likely see all kinds of promotional materials, but how many people actually read or look at these?

if you’re going to use promotional materials, you might want to consider handing out something that will stand out. For example, you could hand out a trinket or something that is representative of your products or services.

Whatever you hand out, make sure that it has your branding and information that the prospects can use to learn more about your business.

6. Ask Good Questions

There will be all kinds of booths at the trade show, so how can you get people to stop and look at yours?

You need to come up with a question that they’ll likely answer and be drawn in to learn more. For example, you can find some pain points that your product can help with and then turn that into a question that the trade booth members can ask people.

7. Have a Multi-Touch Campaign

After the campaign, you’ll want to nurture these different leads with a multi-touch campaign.

These can be very effective, but your sales and marketing team will have to work together. You might want to use a combination of different tactics, like:

  • Phone calls
  • Social ads
  • Paid ads
  • Whitepapers
  • Blog posts
  • Newsletters

These efforts can remind prospects about your company and carry them through the funnel to where they will want to purchase something from your company.

Discover More Lead Generation Tactics

These are only a few lead generation tactics that can help you at a trade show, but these won’t work unless you have a good trade show booth.

It can be challenging to design a trade show booth that will stand out, but we’re here to help you out.

If you’re going to a trade show soon, check out our trade exhibits! We offer affordable trade show displays

Gene Friedman
Live Chat Software