Secrets of a great trade show

It's the first year in more than a decade that I'm not gearing up for the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona.  In my last role, this was one of biggest trade shows of the year and one of my single largest marketing expenditures.

With the perspective of hindsight, and the new luxury of being a disinterested observer, I can ponder: How did we get best value for money? In a nutshell, it's about building a package of content and interaction so that the face-to-face shows are merely the climax in a relationship with a long prologue and an equally lengthy denouement.  With an end result, of course, of sales.

Here are the three biggest priorities to make that happen.

ONE:  Consistent, great content.  Start with a theme and build out from it.  Last year, we began with the future of the office.  Teaser articles, surveys and blogs in the buildup.  A major new white paper and a variety of presentations at the shows, all mapping back to our paper.  We blogged and tweeted live from the shows.  In our white paper, we'd introduced the idea that all executives would need to take on five new roles to survive in the digital age.  Our show follow-up was a self-diagnostic quiz so they could rate how well they perform those roles now.  We continued the topic on our corporate blogs and social media, and armed sales people with content and discussion guides to carry on the conversation in the more intimate setting of their client meetings.  Once upon a time, we'd do a single white paper and a single show.  Now, people realise a package of great content can keep a story going for six months or more.  Which justifies that anchoring trade show investment.

TWO:  Trained staff.  Provide in-depth briefings, complete with messaging and clear descriptions of their role, to everyone who's even mildly involved.  Gather the booth team together at the start of every show to reinforce what you need them to do, and to build their enthusiasm.  Give private coaching to any exec with a speaking role.  But it's not just the people on the ground.  We tipped off our network of bloggers on how to link to our show topics.  We briefed the sales people who weren't there on what the people coming by the booths would have seen, and helped them understand how to build on what their customers would have experienced.  For a good white paper to capture customer interest, the sales links and product/service pushes need to be subtle.  Sales often doesn't have time for subtlety.  I've learned that you need to be very specific pointing out just how they can move from discussing Topic A to selling Product B.

THREE:  Follow up.  Uniting both elements above, you need to combine salient follow-up material with a sales force trained to use it.  Trade show appearances open a door and build goodwill for a short period of time.  If you don't get in there and take the next step, the benefit fades quickly.

I concentrated on one set of shows and did them every year, which gave me the opportunity to turn what I did into a well-honed machine.  But remember, it's a machine that depends entirely on the content at its heart.