Why Trade Shows Are Essential for Your Business

Social media has taken the corporate world by storm. Its popularity and ubiquity among consumers around the world has led businesses to think that marketing on social media is sufficient for them. But this is not true. Businesses need to embrace other marketing channels as well to build a strong brand reputation and create brand awareness.

Social media marketing has not yet replaced face-to-face marketing. Trade shows offer an invaluable opportunity for businesses to showcase and demonstrate their products and services. However, trade shows are a considerable marketing investment. Costs include space rental, design, and construction of the trade show displays. This usually makes tradies skeptical of trade show participation.

But trade shows are worth attending because they draw large crowds and can boost your business if you implement the right strategies. Having a remarkable trade show booth is one of them.

Trade show marketing can be a rewarding experience for tradies and offer various other benefits such as:

  1. Strengthening Your Brand
  2. Strengthening your brand will get you noticed and getting noticed is the first step in getting customers.

    Branding is a huge aspect of business success, especially for tradies as their business depends highly on trust and reputation. Exhibiting at a trade show is a wonderful way to tell your audience that you are a reliable and a trustworthy tradie. Trustworthiness will bring loyalty; meaning your booth visitors are highly likely to call on you for service when in need.

    A trade show display will help create awareness about your service. If you get it right, you can even get people talking about your business on social media, and get them to refer their friends and family to you as well.

  3. Attracting New Customers
  4. Trade shows are a great opportunity to drastically improve your customer base, provided your strategies are in place. Hundreds of people attend trade shows to learn more about the products or services of their interest on display. So trade shows give you a great opportunity to turn these interests into sales leads.

    You interact with the visitors face to face, which gives you the chance to build a relationship with them. Sharing your social media details will allow them to keep in touch with you post the event.

    Trade shows give exposure to your brand and people will contact you back through social channels. A good trade show display can thus get people talking about your service in the industry and in the social sphere, thereby bringing you more customers and increasing your sales.

  5. Reaching out to Your Existing Clientele
  6. Trade shows are a great marketing tactic to generate new prospects, but you will get more mileage from the event if you reach out to your existing contacts. The easiest way to make money at a trade show is to sell to your existing customers. Tradies need to reach out to their existing customers with an effective and balanced strategy prior to a trade show. You should entice your customers to attend the event by letting them know what they would be able to learn if they visited your booth.

    Trade shows give you a chance to demonstrate your talent and knowledge. Talking about the latest tools and technology that you use and demonstrating your expertise will win you their trust.

  7. Getting Feedback
  8. How often do tradies attend trade shows with the intent to learn more about their customer base? To get the best ROI from the event, a tradie needs to collect feedback from his customers and find the areas that need improvement.

    Trade shows are a great place to introduce new products or services. It is important for a tradie to know people’s reaction to this new product. Customer feedback will help tradies determine what is important to their customers, thus ensuring their product or service meets customer expectations.

    Customer feedback at trade shows also gives insight into lost customers to determine why they are no longer buying from you. Trade shows, thus, offer a great opportunity for learning.

  9. Assessing Market Competition
  10. Assessing competitors at all stages is highly essential for any business and usually companies spend large amounts of dollars to buy SaaS to keep a tab on their competitors.

    Trade shows are a great way to gather market intelligence. Especially industry-specific trade shows because they attract rival businesses. Observing their booths and examining their tools, technology and products, you can obtain a better understanding of their position in the market and how to compete against them in a better way. Tradies rarely find such opportunity to assess competitors and hence must make maximum use of it.

  11. Networking with Other Industry Professionals
  12. Networking is a great and easy way to find new prospects and vendors for your business. Quite often, different businesses that all belong to the same industry will participate in a trade show so the networking possibilities are huge.

    Engaging with non-competing exhibitors at a trade show will build a relationship with them and present you with opportunities that will ultimately drive improvements to the bottom line of your business.

    Effective networking during trade shows can thus help tradies build business relationships that later turn into “referral machines”. Trade shows will help develop your persona in the minds of other prominent industry figures, who are then more likely to refer you to their visitors, customers, and followers.

Trade shows are a valuable marketing tool for tradies. So take the leap and reap the many rewards they offer!

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