• Consider your organisation’s objectives for the next 3–5 years and identify what role (if any) trade shows play in reaching the right audience to achieve those aims.
• Be honest about how ready your business is with the product/service you’re looking to sell and the capacity at which you can produce it. You don’t want to create more problems for yourself by over-promising to potential new customers.
• Review your customers’ readiness to buy your product and consider what else you might to do to help them realise they have a problem to which your product/service is the answer.
• If you know you have some gaps in the finer details of your product launch but are keen to exhibit to build momentum, make sure you have refined the answers for all the tricky questions visitors might ask about when and how they can get their hands on it.
• Review your whole marketing plan in the context of how trade shows maximise the other tactics you’re using and make sure you have alignment across the core objectives, messaging and actions. Trade shows rarely work in isolation and are most powerful when all the different levers work together to promote each other.
• Be honest about the amount of time, money and resource you’ll need to execute a trade show brilliantly from the start and where you don’t have enough of any consider how you can find more internally or get the external expertise you’ll need.
• Listen to your gut – if you’re not feeling butterflies, either from excitement or anxiety, think about passing the project management onto someone else. Trade shows are tough enough without feeling as though every decision, every form and every day on the show floor is a chore – it will show in every aspect you deliver if your heart’s not really in it!
With this book still firmly in your grasp, even though it may be with some nervous tension, over the following three chapters your exhibition journey truly begins, and we are here for you all the way. As mentioned in the introduction, although we have presented it as Planning, Implementation and Evaluation, it’s not a directly linear process and there are some elements in Evaluation that you’ll need to consider as part of your Planning. So, our advice, if you can, is to get to the end of the book before you start on your journey and everything will make more sense!
Follow your dreams, let them guide you. Who knows where they may take you.
—Nico J. Genes, Magnetic Reverie
PART II
P.I.E.
CHAPTER 3
PLANNING
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
—Abraham Lincoln
If you’ve decided having read the first two chapters that trade shows have a strategic role to play in meeting your organisation’s objectives, you’re probably eager to just get on the trade show floor and start talking to all those great new contacts. Hang fire though, great results from trade shows don’t happen by accident and the more you can put into the planning and preparation for your events, the more you are likely to get out. Just as Abraham Lincoln knew the most effective way of chopping his tree down was to invest the time to get his tools right, the more time you can dedicate to getting all your trade show tools in shape, the more likely you are to attract the right kind of visitors to your stand, and actually recognise them when they arrive.
Why visitors visit
Before we get too deeply into, and too excited by, your own planning, we want to challenge you to flip your thinking into your customer’s world for a moment – the more you can ground everything you do in solving your customer’s problem, the more likely you are to have a meaningful conversation with them. Visitors aren’t going to engage in a conversation with you because you like your product or service, or to do you a favour – they’ll keep talking because you’ve listened and identified their needs and are showing how you can help solve them. However, here’s the science bit that shows from research the reasons why visitors attend trade shows in priority order:
• Exposure to new products and services
• To get more information on a specific product or service
• To reinforce or confirm existing buying decision
• To buy something
• To keep up to date on industry trends and innovations
• To make more industry contacts
(GraphiColor Exhibits, 2017)
When to start planning
It’s never too early to start thinking about how you will exhibit at a show, even if you don’t even have a trade show in mind yet. If you’re a first-time exhibitor and wondering whether trade shows are the right strategy for you, take the time to imagine what your trade show stand might look like, the sorts of conversations you would want to have, the type of potential and existing customers you might want to meet there and the outcomes you would want to achieve. This initial thinking will help contribute to a clear, strategic plan for your event, that informs a number of decisions you will make as you move through the planning process. Keep that vision and those conversations in your mind, write them down to keep yourself grounded in the reasons why you’re investing all the time and money that will be needed to deliver brilliantly. If you’re a seasoned exhibitor and you’re wanting to generate more effective results from your events, think about the previous events you’ve delivered. What worked, and didn’t for you? Which elements do you recognise you’re weaker in? The more you can pinpoint the reasons why your trade shows aren’t working as hard for you as they could be, the better chance you have of being able to understand how you can execute them more effectively next time.
To put a more specific timescale on when to start planning, ideally give yourself 12 months ahead of the show dates to plan effectively. This might sound like a luxury, especially if you’re a business owner with responsibility for every aspect of operations, or if your role as trade show project manager is just one element of a hybrid responsibility. The word we use here is ‘ideally’ and 12 months is a fantastic lead time if you have it. If you don’t, whatever the length of time before your show, you can still plan and improve your outcomes. Even if it’s only two weeks until your event, you can still take the ideas in this chapter and put them to good use to enable you to deliver a more impactful and effective show. In fact, we’ve run Exhibitor Bootcamps on the morning of a show opening and exhibitors have told us they still learnt something that changed what they did during the day that impacted positively on their results. In short, start as early as you possibly can but never think it’s too late to start either.
3.1 SMART objective setting
We so often hear that exhibitors have no way of evaluating trade shows and therefore they can earn the perception of being a money pit with no measurable return on investment. It’s certainly true that trade shows can be harder and longer-term to evaluate than the effectiveness of other tactics such as pay-per-click via social media, discount promotions or television advertising. However, harder and longer-term does not mean impossible, it just means it requires more effective planning up-front to ensure that you’re clear about what you are trying to measure.