Personalizing your trade show business strategy means designing and producing an offer that meets the unique, individual requirements of your target buyer persona.Basically, it is a trade show management for which, you must know who your ideal customer is, what keeps them up at night, and what it is they desperately need a solution for.

In our recent post: Selling at Trade Shows: How to Discover your Ideal Customer, we talked about the steps that both B2B and B2C companies take to uncover the variety of attributes that make up their target market. The next step is determining how to use these attributes to develop buyer personas.

What is a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. In essence, it is a personality that you can use to evolve your trade show business strategy, communications and marketing around so that when you are in front of the right audience, they are immediately drawn to your offer.

Assembling a Buyer Persona

Once you have identified your ideal customers (again, check out our most recent post on how to go about this), it’s time to assemble your buyer persona. By “assemble” we mean catalogue and create the archetype that will inform your trade show business strategy. To ensure accuracy, while retaining your ideal customer, we recommend setting up brief interviews.

Whether it’s via Skype, phone or in-person meeting, ask your ideal customer a variety of questions such as:
• Why do you buy this product/service?
• Why do you buy it from us?
• What was your world like before you bought this product from us?
• What challenges does our product or service alleviated for you?
• And what changed since you bought our product?
• How could product better serve you?
• Are there additional opportunities to improve?
• What other challenges do you face in this area?

Next, you want to use this interview data to drill down on the demographics, goals, preferences, interests of your ideal buyer, and inefficiencies that challenge them. In the B2B world, personal information may include compensation, and past work history. The role they play within the company both in terms of responsibilities and reporting structure will improve your ability to craft an offer that will appeal to them and speak directly to their unique needs. In the B2C world, your buyer persona will focus more on the customer’s frustrations and motivations, honing in on how she defines convenience and ease.

The more knowledge acquired, i.e. the tighter your buyer persona, the more effective your trade show business strategy will be.

Whether your ideal customers are young working mothers with children or small and mid-market manufacturing companies that have recently gone through a product recall, engaging in the process of personalizing your trade show business strategy requires a concerted effort to drill down on the personal goals and challenges faced by individuals in your target market who have critical need and make buying decisions. These target customers will inevitably shift over time as both your company matures and the market changes.

Keeping a pulse on your ideal customers and using this data to constantly refresh your trade show business strategy with new buyer personas will ensure that each event you invest in will be time and money well spent.

About

MEET (meetroi.com) helps B2B growth companies and pavilion hosts effectively leverage at 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 at MEET today for a free trade show participation assessment bill@meetroi.com or +1 (860) 573-4821.