Have you ever been to a trade show exhibit hall where a few vendors have a ton of visitors and the rest are struggling to pull people in? That’s the kind of difference an effective trade show marketing plan can have. You can generate buzz and have people scheduled to meet with you at your booth or you can host group presentations and pre-book the audience. In this blog post, we will walk you through a comprehensive tradeshow marketing plan example that will help you promote your presence and generate buzz before, during, and after the event. We’ll also dive into the power of incentives and incentive-based marketing, showing you how they can help you increase booth traffic, set appointments, and ultimately increase awareness of your business. We’ll even introduce you to our incentive-based marketing program that lets you give away unlimited amazing travel gifts – at almost no cost to you. So, get ready to take your tradeshow marketing efforts to the next level and stand out from the crowd!

Tradeshow Marketing Plan:

Objective: To increase booth traffic and generate leads for the sponsor by incentivizing attendees to pre-book meetings and visit the booth.

Target Audience: Trade show attendees interested in the sponsor’s products or services.

Strategy: Use Incentives To Generate Booth Traffic, Leads and Ultimately Sales

Pre-Tradeshow Promotion: Focus on lead generation and appointment booking. Send out email invitations to the target audience with a personalized message and information about the event and the incentive program. Encourage them to pre-book meetings with the sponsor representatives the incentive of a $200 hotel and travel savings card.

Leverage social media like LinkedIn to post teasers of why someone should come to your booth at the trade show. These should be business and benefit driven posts with a mention of an incentive in a call to action. Pages you create for sharing to social media should all have a lead capture form and promote the incentives you are offering for pre-booking meetings or theatre presentation times.

Put together an effective PR campaign with press releases, media, bloggers, influencers, and industry analyst interviews well ahead of your trade show. Define the most compelling messages you want to convey. Come up with multiple topics and incorporate your compelling messages into these different stories. Coordinate with your product teams so you can highlight the latest features or offerings. Involve sales team leadership to make sure everyone is on board with the messaging. You can even use the incentives mentioned below to motivate your sales team to promote the tradeshow events to their contacts by awarding one or more of the complimentary hotel stays to your team.

At The Tradeshow Promotion: During the show, attendees who visit the sponsor’s booth and mention the offer can receive a $100 hotel and travel savings card. Sponsor representatives will also offer attendees the opportunity to register for a hotel/resort stay in one of 7 incredible destinations.

Another at-show promotion is to have daily drawings for domestic travel to locations like Orlando, Las Vegas, or one of the many U.S. destinations available. Then hold a big drawing later in the trade show (probably not the last day because turnout is likely to be lower, go with the day before the last day). This drawing would feature a very nice international destination like Cancun, Phuket, Bali, Puerto Vallarta, Dubai, Rome or one of the many resorts and destinations available.

Gamification: Increase your lead generation efforts by incentivizing attendees to bring a friend to your booth to get extra entries in the daily drawing for the hotel/resort stay. Additional entries can be earned by sharing the promotion on social media. Another option is to offer hotel savings cards or dining certificates to people who complete the actions you would like.

Daily Drawing: Host a daily drawing for the hotel/resort stay in one of the hundreds of incredible destinations. The number of daily registrations could be limited to keep people coming back day after day. Leverage scarcity wherever you can by limiting the availability of the rewards so people feel the pressure to act quickly before they are gone or all the registration spaces are full.

Measurement: Track the number of pre-booked meetings, booth visitors, and daily drawing entries to measure the success of the promotion.

Budget: It’s less than you might think with our incentive marketing program, see below.

Booth Design: The booth design should be on-brand for your business. While you are giving away great travel incentives, these vacations are not the product so stick to your branding. Make sure to include space for meeting away from the main traffic areas. Include product demonstration stations and collateral stands if possible. If you plan on hosting a lot of people in your booth, include a theatre area where the crowd can comfortably focus on your presenter – and incentivize people to attend at specific times when you are doing the presentations. Include large monitors with eye-catching motion graphics to draw attention to your booth.

Lead Capture: Many conferences provide lead capture technology. Be sure you have someone designated to support the lead capture system on your team. Test the system before the conference starts and train everyone on your team on how to use the system. Lead rating systems within the lead capture can be a double-edged sword – for one, rating leads can be a great way to sort out the tire kickers from the interested prospects but the down side is that requiring a rating can slow the lead capture process. If it is available, make a neutral rating the default, that way your team can choose to upgrade or downgrade the lead.

After The Tradeshow: Use an email automation system to set up a series of follow up emails. Many organizations use a marketing automation platform that incorporates email, social media, CRM, SMS and other technologies into one tool. If you use one of these tools, create a specific automation for your tradeshows. Segment your audience by those who attended pre-booked meetings, walk-ins, no-shows, lead ratings, and recipients of each incentive type, along with segmentation around your product offerings.

Retarget all of the leads generated at the event with messages relevant to how they interacted with your business at the event. In your follow ups don’t be afraid to ask for a meeting or whatever the next step in your sales process is. When you give someone great gifts like these travel offers, the rule of reciprocity kicks in and most people will feel like it is the right thing to do something for you in return.

Reach out to your big winners and ask them to share their travel experience with a shout out to your business. You can also create a page on your website that is optimized for social media sharing so that when they share the page, the title of the post reads something like “Thanks [your company] for the amazing trip I won at [tradeshow]”. When people click on the page link they are brought to your website and this page that talks about your business and products, highlights from the industry event. As a bonus method of lead generation, add a strong call to action on that page that invites the viewer to book a meeting with your company to be entered in a drawing for a complimentary resort stay in one of the hundreds of destinations available, or book a meeting and get a $200 hotel savings card and be entered into the drawing. There are many ways to use the incentives.

With this incentivize-based marketing plan, you will be able to increase booth traffic and generate leads by offering attractive incentives to attendees. The gamification aspect of the promotion will encourage attendees to bring their friends and share your promotion on social media, creating even more buzz around your brand.

If you’re interested in trying out travel incentives for your own marketing efforts, we encourage you to register for a free trial account.

With a free trial account, you’ll have access to a range of travel incentives, including hotel stays, hotel and entertainment discount vouchers, dining vouchers and more. These incentives can be used to incentivize leads and drive conversions, just like the promotion outlined in this article.

To get started, simply sign up for a free trial account. From there, you can explore the available incentives and start planning your own promotions.

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to try out this effective and affordable marketing strategy for yourself. Register for a free trial account today and see how travel incentives can help take your business to the next level!