Tech brands posting their meeting links on LinkedIn saying “We will be there at booth 46K2-242B! Book a time with us."
2 questions come to my mind:
- Who is gonna remember your booth number honestly?
- Why would I book a meeting with you if I can just pop by the stand whenever I want?
I did post this kind of post before but I stopped because:
- I got 2-3 random mtg booked with people I did not actually want to meet
- It was just a last-minute move revealing my lack of creativity
- I was contributing to the content pollution on people’s LinkedIn feed
Instead, I started promoting the actual ticketing event platform link. I simply assumed that my network or my company's network were not coming.
Then I started thinking that the event was a collective effort and everyone had to contribute.
CEO/Founder/C-level Team
- Announce that you will be on stage. Founder and C-levels are the PR people of the company. That’s their job to find or buy a seat on stage and become "thought leader"
- Organise an internal meeting with all the people coming to the tradeshow and exchange about the topics that will be discussed on stage by other panellists. You cannot imagine the number of tech people (Sales) with absolutely no knowledge about the industry and cannot hold a 5 minutes conversation.
Account Management Team
- You should be there too and especially invite a few happy customers so they can have friendly chat, gossip a bit and introduce them to some prospects coming to the stand.
Partnership Team
- Find local consultants that you work with to come to a stand. Tell them that you want to introduce them to a few customers and prospects...
- Take the most relevant topics that will be discussed on stage and ask consultant and agency partners to write some guest blog articles to share before the event.
Sales team
- Most of the qualified pre-booked meetings happened via a random email/zoom/chat conversation where you say something like: “Oh by the way, are you coming to ITB?”.
- Don't ask the marketing team to do a mass email for you. It's 2023, you should have your segmented lists on your CRM that you are nurturing with content using email sequencing.
- Create small meet-ups with your decision markers at the event or after the event.
- Get your affiliate's custom URL on a business card with a QR code. You don’t want your lead to end up as inbound later after the show.
- Make sure you have business cards
- Make sure the marketing team has order a badge scanner
Marketing team
As a marketer, these trade-shows are quite a pain. It’s approved last minute, organising the stand equipment is a nightmare, the budget to make a super cool stand is always ridiculously low and tracking the ROI is super difficult. But there are few things that work really well:
- I also stopped doing segmented email campaigns just to announce that we will be there with a sad CTA “book a meeting”. Instead, we were announcing something special that will happen at the stand. What is "special"? Well, doing product demos is not special. "Special" is being relevant, entertainment and interesting.
- Pay for sponsored packages to the event organise so you can have your logo mentioned on their badges, backdrops and newsletters.
- Get your camera to shoot some spontaneous interviews or some fun reels
- Lead the post event summary 2 weeks after and the second one 5 months later.
- Create a newspaper with all the company thoughts on the topics that will be discussed on stage for the attendees to take home with them
I know it was short but contact me if you need more.
PS: Give a lot of kudos to your event teams!
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