We went to Venturefest East Midlands 2015, last week! We’re sharing a series of blog posts with advice on how you can prepare for going to an exhibition with your company.
Getting Results
It’s important that if you’re paying to attend an event and sell to people, that you get some results. Even if you don’t sell anything there and then, it is important to remember to collect information from the people you speak to over the course of the day.
It can be difficult to decide how you’re going to collect contact details as you don’t want to seem invasive. The key is to be creative and decide how you can collect contacts through people interacting with you out of choice, without you having to ask for them.
Collecting Contacts
How will you be collecting the details of potential clients? It wouldn’t be a good idea to give everyone a paper survey, or write down all the details onto paper. You could think about having a mobile device, such as a tablet, with you on the day of the exhibition. A mobile device is ideal as it is portable, and easy to pass between people, and will be able to store the information. It will also be easy to transfer the information you gather over to other devices.
You could even use different methods of collecting details of leads, for example, collecting business cards in a container. This way you’re getting important information without having to ask for it or get them to fill out any forms.
If you decide to use one of the methods mentioned in previous posts in this series, such as using the need of potential clients to draw attention of yourself, or giving away a ‘goodie bag’, you could get people to essentially ‘sign up’ for your freebies. Ask if they are interested in what you’ve got to offer, and have them sign up to the mailing list in order to receive it. The concept is the same when you want to get a voucher for a website, but you can’t have access to it until you enter your email address — they’ll send the voucher code via email, and you sign up to their mailing list at the same time.
Follow-Up
It’s important to collect the information that will be beneficial to your business and its strategies. Make a list of Twitter names, email addresses, any other vital details, and use them after the event to send a ‘thank you’ to those who visited your stand. This can help boost the memory of your business, meaning that they won’t forget about you after the event, and they’ll appreciate the gesture.
It doesn’t matter what your plans are for their details, it is vital that you follow up any leads you get after the event. It shows them that you care, which is good for your image, making sure that you’re approachable and that they can get in touch with you at any time. Offer to answer any questions, and you could even include a link to an exclusive ‘show offer’ for one of your services or products.
This is the last in the series of blog posts for ‘Planning for your First Exhibition’, if you missed any of them, you can find the other posts here.