It’s common and understandable for marketing and sales teams exhibiting at healthcare tradeshows to have a touch of “tunnel vision.” They often see their booth and the materials in it as the primary (or exclusive) focus of their time at the event—and for good reason. Much time, effort, and expense have gone into creating an experience that will attract and engage attendees.
However, there typically is much more a tradeshow team can do beyond their booth to gather valuable market “intel,” connect with current and potential customers, grow brand awareness, and more. In fact, even seasoned sales and marketing pros with extensive tradeshow experience tend to be surprised at how the relative importance of the tradeshow booth experience and beyond-the-booth activations shifts when they step back to look at the entire tradeshow ecosystem and formulate a plan for maximizing the benefits of exhibiting.
At Slate360, we focus on maximizing the ways a company’s tradeshow team can interact with highly targeted customers in the three to five days of the show.
Leveraging a High-Touch, Omnichannel Tradeshow Strategy
Companies commonly overlook or downplay the value of interactions away from their tradeshow booth. “We’ll do those things if we have enough time and resources,” the thinking goes, “But we need to focus on our booth.” That reasoning can be sound, particularly if the tradeshow team is only considering one or a few other touchpoints.
However, when a company develops a plan that leverages many or all of the possible activities at a tradeshow to connect with highly targeted prospects, they experience a sum-is-greater-than-the-parts scenario. An attendee who sees evidence of an organization (its booth, people, branding, etc.) throughout the tradeshow floor and beyond tends to feel compelled to learn more.
Results and Recon
Maximizing your return from a tradeshow starts with carefully thinking about what you want to accomplish. What’s the best-case scenario? What do you want to be able to report to internal stakeholders? Generating leads—even lots of leads—should never be considered the ultimate accomplishment. You want to be able to provide details like:
- We met 3 potential business partners at one of the networking events and scheduled follow-up calls with them.
- As a platinum-level sponsor, our branding was prominently displayed at several key locations around the show venue.
- We were on a panel with other industry leaders and contributed to a discussion on the current state of our market.
- Our “What’s Next” presentation got a standing ovation.
- A local TV station interviewed us about the potential impact of our new product.
Now, that was a successful tradeshow!
However, achieving those types of results requires that you do some reconnaissance. You’ve got to identify and understand the impact of every possible touchpoint and interaction, large or small, with attendees. Everything you do has to be purposeful and impactful and move you toward your tradeshow goals.
Warming Up Your Audience
A well-documented psychological phenomenon called the familiarity effect can make a world of difference in the results of a tradeshow appearance. Simply stated, this cognitive bias means people favor things they’re familiar with.
Consequently, it’s essential to connect with show attendees before the event. It’s best to execute a thorough outreach campaign, with emails, digital ads, etc. However, even a simple postcard sent to attendees before a show can help establish some familiarity and get them to let their guard down a bit with you.
Nothing is sweeter music to a tradeshow team’s ears than hearing an attendee walking by the booth say, “Oh, hey… you’re the company that does…” Get on someone’s agenda—even as a note scribbled in the margin of a printed agenda—and you’ve got your foot firmly in the door with them.
Whether you receive an attendee list by virtue of being an exhibitor or have to pay extra for that information, you must get access to and fully leverage it.
Insights From an Agency Absorbing the Big Picture
One of the many benefits of working with an experienced event marketing agency like Slate360 is our big-picture perspective on events. For tradeshow teams, attention to detail before an event is paramount. Booth collateral shipping, flights, ground transportation, lodging, and overall agenda planning can take up a lot of your mental bandwidth.
Balancing Detail with Strategic Oversight
Attention to detail is important to us, too, but we also have the latitude to step back and see the complex mosaic of a busy tradeshow. Symposiums, poster sessions, product theaters, networking sessions, branded merch… We identify and rank every opportunity, looking at them both individually and for their value as part of a comprehensive tradeshow strategy. Then, we look at how different touchpoints can support one another—like advertising in your booth today that you’ll be at tomorrow’s networking event.
We also consider how to get the most out of every asset a company has at a show. Could they use a banner stand from their booth to create some brand awareness at a networking event? You don’t want to miss out on any opportunity to connect with attendees.
Onsite Support for Unexpected Opportunities
We also help clients assess and address their need for hired staffing resources to supplement their own staff if necessary. This might be data capture specialists or brand ambassadors, for example. Plus, we can provide training programs for booth staff who are new to tradeshows to ensure they understand the content being presented, the different features of the booth experience, how best to engage with visitors, etc.
Our assistance in these areas is only possible because we understand everything from your company’s mission to your reason for exhibiting at a particular tradeshow. That knowledge also empowers us to help ensure you’re clearly and consistently communicating your mission everywhere—in your pre-show outreach, throughout your booth, when participating on panels or advisory boards, in your post-show thank you email, etc.
Thinking Outside the Booth
Having a wealth of experience to draw from helps an agency like ours come up with some very creative ways to engage with people and build brand awareness.
That might be partnering with the show association and exhibitor to build out a successful philanthropic initiative or providing video production suites for capturing footage from KOLs and key stakeholders. Or it might mean supporting advisory boards or creating environments off the showfloor for networking events.
Whatever a client’s goals are for a tradeshow, we are experts in helping them leverage multiple mediums to deliver content and exchange ideas.
The Attendee Experience: It Starts at the Carousel
The most successful events for healthcare exhibitors are the ones where the onsite experience starts at the baggage carousel—both figuratively and, potentially literally, with some advertising there!
From the moment an attendee arrives in the host city, they should be continually and consistently reminded about why connecting with your company is essential and the many ways they can do that.
For companies exhibiting at tradeshows, “all in” is truly the best approach for maximizing that investment. And the best way to go all in is to collaborate with an award-winning experiential marketing company like Slate360.