Utilising digital marketing to promote your tradeshow booth

We’ve spoken a lot before about creating an effective tradeshow display to optimise your booth’s performance on the day, whether the event is indoors or outdoors. Beyond designing your tradeshow booth, you need to consider what marketing efforts you should be undertaking in the lead-up to the event.

Executing a marketing campaign in the months ahead of your tradeshow attendance can increase foot traffic to your booth, increase your sales and brand awareness, improve your ROI and the quality of your leads.

The tradeshow itself will be marketing the event, so no need to go booking print, radio or TV advertising. There are just two main markets to target:

1. Your audience

If you have a direct line of contact with someone, it is likely that they are one of your people. Whether they are a current or past customer, stakeholder, or e-news subscriber, it is an absolute must to maintain your relationship with them by keeping them up-to-date on your goings-on.

It doesn’t matter if you communicate by electronic direct mail (EDM), snail mail or over the phone, these direct channels are where you should announce your tradeshow attendance. Do this at least one month before the event to give yourself plenty of time to build interest by consistently releasing new details or plans for the event.

Utilising digital marketing to promote your tradeshow booth

2. The tradeshow audience

Now that you’ve let your audience know that you’ll be at the tradeshow, you need to let everyone know you’ll be at the tradeshow and there are a couple of ways to do this.

Share, share, share! Use your social media channels to share your tradeshow updates and don’t forget to @mention and #hashtag all relevant parties. This will give plenty of opportunity for cross-promotion and land your content into the newsfeeds of the tradeshow host’s audience, your competitors’ audience or anyone else that may be looking for it.

Target. Try your hand at Google AdWords to target the keywords relating to your tradeshow. Executed correctly, you will be inviting tradeshow attendees to your website when they go looking for news, updates or general information on the tradeshow.

Looking for more tradeshow tips? Explore our blog for our top tricks and project profiles for inspiration.