I have done expos and other shows and it is one of my favorite aspects of the business. In fact, I wouldn't mind doing it for a living if I could.
It takes a lot of planning and work to do it right but if you really think ahead you can really make your company stand out at an expo.
Here are a few tips I learned from doing them over the years.
1. Create a banner and other booth dressings. It isn't as expensive as you might think if you are creative and you can reuse them for other events. I ordered a 1.5' x 4' vinyl banner from a local sign shop with my company logo and it comes in quite handy for other things besides expos. Some shows will provide table skirts and other dressings but others won't, so you will want to have something handy to use just in case, preferably in your company colors.
2. Prepare a lot of marketing collateral. This includes business cards, flyers, promotional swag, etc. The purpose of an expo is to market yourself, so do it. There are a lot of different types of marketing collateral and you can even provide some very slickly produced material without having to create it yourself or even spending a dime.
For those who listen to The Force Field, you know I am big on vendor reseller or partner programs. This is one area where a partner program comes in handy. If you sell computer products and services as well as do break/fix work, you can promote those products at your booth. Many partner programs offer free or very cheap marketing collateral such as posters, brochures, flyers, product cards, white papers, etc. for their products. Usually all you have to do is log into their partner site and order them. Some of them send free banners, mouse mats and presentation CDs with demos and videos that you can display at the show. Many of these items are co-brandable, which means you can print or stamp your company contact info on them.
Some of the vendors I partner with even send free trial software CDs to give away.
Speaking of free, People love free stuff, even if it's something as simple as a bowl of mints or other candy. Put out some free stuff and that will bring them to the table. Once you have them there, you can pitch your services. However, you have to get them there first. The more enticements you have to attract them, the better.
Conduct a free drawing. Place a fishbowl on the table (without the fish) with a note to place their business card or contact info in it to win a prize. Provide a prize that has some real value that will make it worth their while to give you their info. Hint: sometimes you can give away a prize without it costing you anything out of pocket, such as a free diagnostics or optimization. You can sometimes also contact one of your vendors and request them to send you one of their products for the giveaway in exchange for promotional consideration. Be creative. That's part of the fun. The caveat: if you advertise the drawing, you must follow through and give away the prize.
The giveaway is one of the oldest and still most effective ways to get leads. It does several things: 1. it gets attention, 2. it promotes goodwill, 3. people give you their contact information, providing you with an instant, 100% valid list of live leads.
Give away free program CDs with your company info printed on them. Use free, open source programs that are legal to copy and distribute. Put some open source games, utilities or applications on them. Examples include OpenOffice.org, Firefox, The GIMP, etc. Include a marketing presentation or other materials about your business and put that on the CD as well. Print CD labels with your company logo, phone number, e-mail, URL and other contact info on it. If you have a CD printer so much the better.
This is something you can make and keep it around whenever you need something to give away. CDs are cheap and you only have to burn as many as you think you need. They also typically hang around someone's PC a lot longer than a business card.
I have a lot of other tips and suggestions for doing an expo but it is lunch time and this post is already too long. What I could do is take this post and expand it into a future article for theforcefield.net. Come to think of it, this would be an excellent topic for an episode of the show.
Hope that helps.
Rick
So True, So True!
It took a bit of hassling and going around the so called parter support team though.
