Pillar Section 4: Trade Show Event Selection
Trade Show Event Selection
We’ve touched on event selection in talking about how to inform your trade show strategy plan with buyer personas, but let’s take a moment to dive deeper into trade show event selection strategy.
Now that you’ve got your buyer personas and an array of offers that will prompt your ideal customers to self-identify, it’s time to select the best events to reach them as part of your annual trade show strategy plan.
At MEET, we most often see companies making trade show and event participation decisions abstractly as opposed to making a good effort to survey the market of available shows. And then, when it comes time to make a selection, they fail to identify a process that is reliable, repeatable, and has future value in guiding ongoing event selection decisions.
The Five Steps
Check out this post on the five most common challenges companies face when identifying the best trade show selection process.
The best trade show selection process is one that maximizes ROI. It focuses you on the right fish, places you in the right body of water, with the precisely the right bait to catch the exact fish you set out to catch. And because you have employed a strategy, the quality and volume of the prospects that your event participation generates will continuously improve.
At MEET, our goal is to help companies eliminate the guesswork in achieving their best trade show selection process. We help international B2B growth companies effectively exhibit at trade shows, a process which starts with determining which shows will deliver the best ROI.
Our first step in designing a trade show selection process for our clients is to consider the maturity of the company. For companies that are ready for the national market, we embark on a series of steps to explore national and global events. For earlier stage companies, we recommend a strategy that is more focused on local or regional opportunities.
Next, MEET moves through a five-step process to determine the best trade show selection process for our clients. Included in these steps is a tool for measuring the value of each trade show event opportunity using a numeric rating system.
To learn more about these five steps, check out this post.
For more information on how MEET can help you determine the best mix of local, regional and national events, or to learn more about our event assessment tool, reach out to us today.
Resisting the Lazy Susan Approach
The most important pitfall to avoid when selecting a trade show to attend is what we refer to as the “Lazy Susan Approach”—taking what is served up in front of you and simply waiting for the next offer to come around.
Ultimately, you want to put each opportunity into multidimensional context, specifically how you will optimize connecting with your buyer persona, and how this opportunity relates to others in terms of location, size, timeframe, cost, and potential. Developing an annual trade show strategy will help to ensure that each investment of time and resources feeds your prospect pipeline.
Click here to download the full report: How to Maximize ROI with a Trade Show Strategy Plan
About
MEET (meetroi.com) helps international B2B growth companies soft land and scale in the U.S. through trade shows and in-person events. MEET’s processes help its clients ramp-up sales quickly and maintain a steady stream of high-quality prospects going forward. Contact Bill Kenney for a free, no-obligation consultation bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.