And they’ll invest a considerable amount of money, time and effort doing it.

Stands will be designed and built, walls covered in messaging, videos produced, hospitality booked, and teams flown in from around the world. Then, four days later, the stands will come down and everyone will go home.

Which begs the question – why do we so often plan exhibitions as events rather than campaigns?
Your exhibition strategy shouldn’t start with the stand

For many B2B businesses, exhibitions are one of the biggest investments in the marketing calendar. Yet much of the planning revolves around what happens inside a few square metres of exhibition space for three or four days.

The stand absolutely matters. But the marketing shouldn’t begin when the doors open – or end when they close.

Being there isn’t the objective

Exhibiting at a trade show isn’t an objective in itself. Neither is attracting as many people as possible to your stand.

Whether you’re there to strengthen customer relationships, introduce a new technology or reach new prospects, be clear about what you want the investment to achieve. That should shape who you’re trying to reach, what you want them to remember and what you do before, during and after the event.

It’s easy to lose sight of that once attention turns to floorplans, graphics, screens and logistics.

But those are execution decisions. The exhibition strategy comes first.

Before: start telling the story

By the time the doors open, some of the most valuable work should already have happened.

Thousands of exhibitors will be competing for attention at an event like ADIPEC. Simply being there doesn’t guarantee the people you want to meet will find you – or even know they should be looking for you.

So the weeks leading up to an exhibition shouldn’t just be about announcing your stand number. They are an opportunity to start building familiarity with the people you want to reach. To give them a reason to seek you out. And, where appropriate, to start conversations and arrange meetings before anyone sets foot in the exhibition hall.

That doesn’t mean bombarding your audience with increasingly urgent reminders that you’ll be on Stand 1234.

Think about what you can say that’s genuinely useful or interesting to the people attending. If you’re launching something new, start telling that story before the event. If there’s an industry issue everyone will be discussing, contribute something worthwhile to the conversation. If you have customers, experts or senior leaders attending, give people a reason to hear from them.

The aim isn’t simply to tell people where you’ll be, but to make sure some of the right people already know why they might want to find you.

During: make it easy to understand why you’re there

It’s tempting to make your stand work as hard as possible by squeezing every product, every capability and every market into the messaging.

But the more you try to say, the harder it becomes for someone walking past to understand why they should stop. An exhibition stand isn’t a brochure with walls. Most visitors will give you seconds, not minutes, to make sense of what they’re seeing.

So go back to the objective you started with. What do you want the right person to notice? What do you want them to understand? And, if they remember only one thing about you after a day spent walking past hundreds of other exhibitors, what should it be?

The story you’ve started telling before the event should carry through to the stand, so there’s a clear thread from the marketing visitors see beforehand to the conversations they have with your team.

After: don’t let your investment leave with your visitors

When the doors close, the temptation is to treat the exhibition as done.

The stand comes down, everyone flies home, a few photographs are posted on LinkedIn, and leads are passed to sales. Then attention moves on to the next thing. But by this point, months of investment have built something worth holding onto. People have met you, seen your brand and heard your story. Some have shown an interest in what you do. Some may not be ready to buy, but they now know who you are.

Don’t waste that familiarity. You need to follow up, and not just by sending the same “Great to meet you at ADIPEC” email to everyone whose badge was scanned.

What people talked about, what interested them and what they’re likely to need next should shape the follow-up. Some may warrant an immediate sales conversation. Others might benefit from a relevant case study, technical insight or invitation to continue a discussion. Many simply need a reason to keep encountering your business in the months ahead. The event can keep working in other ways too. The questions customers asked, the conversations your team had and the issues that dominated the show can all tell you something about what your market cares about.

And interviews, presentations, demonstrations or expert commentary created around the event don’t need to disappear with the stand.

You’ve invested heavily to get people’s attention – the weeks and months afterwards are your opportunity to make that attention worth something.

Think campaign, not event

When planning your next exhibition, don’t start with how you’re going to fill the stand. Start with what you want the whole investment to achieve.

Don’t just plan an event. Plan a campaign.

Thinking about your next exhibition?

Let’s talk about how we can help you make more of it >