Recognizing the Differences Between B2B and B2C Trade Show Marketing
Businesses work hard to streamline the buying process, and when marketing to the B2B sector, you need to understand that the B2B purchase is based more on logic, whereas a consumer’s purchase is an emotional purchase. The sales cycle for the business-to-business market is a bit longer and more expensive. The transaction involves more decision makers and better-trained salespeople who can demonstrate the features of your product.
Pre-show strategy and planning
You want to make sure you are attracting and engaging with the right audience at your trade show booth. A pre-show strategy plan will help streamline the process and create an engaging and interactive booth that will keep potential buyers at your booth longer.
Decide how the booth itself should look in order to gain attention from attendees. Do you need to have a simple table display with a single popup banner, or will everyone else be showcasing full exhibit displays equipped with TV and couches? Besides bringing marketing collateral that will differentiate you from your competitors, think about bringing along swag or giveaway items that will help gather names and emails for your sales database.
Make sure you have access to the attendee list and begin to evaluate and identify a target list of buyers that your organization wants to connect with at the tradeshow. Begin pre-show reach out to schedule 1:1 coffee meetups or a potential dinner for VIP clients. The more connections you can make before the trade show the stronger interactions your team will have on the floor of the trade show.
A pre-show strategy plan will bring together your pre-show marketing, engagement during the tradeshow, and post-show interactions as it will keep you top of mind with the audience as you stand out amongst the others in the crowd.
Creating Marketing Materials That Focus on the logic of the product
Understand Your Target Market
One of the best ways to increase your trade show ROI is to make time to build target profiles to determine the best way to present product features to organizational buyers.
Focus on understanding how the buyers operate within the confines of their corporate systems. Find out what is important to them. Find out what their role is within the company. Consider how they will use your product or service.
Create In-Depth Marketing Materials
Provide the buyer with marketing materials complete with logical arguments, financial data and case studies. Be clear that your customers save time, money and resources.
Marketing material complete with logic, financial benefits, and sound data will reassure the buyer that they have made the right choice and selected the right product. You will save time and money by avoiding “buyers remorse.”
Customer-Focused Benefits
Marketing material should be crafted with the target audience in mind. Customer pain points have been addressed, and it’s clear why the target buyer needs you.
The marketing material is informative and clearly outlines the benefits of using your products/services. The features that are important to the buyer are clear. Your differentiators should be defined and will help you stand apart from your competitors
Easy To Understand & Distribute
Sales collateral should flow smoothly, be easy to understand, have a friendly tone, and be persuasive. This is the right type of marketing material your sales team will be excited to share.
Pre-show marketing assets include newsletters, advertising copy, website copy, and sales letters. At the show be ready to share brochures and postcards. After the show, send out lead nurturing emails that convert.
Feed Their Thirst For Knowledge
As you formulate your sales message, make sure to concentrate on constructing a narrative about what your product or services can do to improve their business.
Have the team prepared to share fundamental points about how your products or services save them time, money and resources. Your most effective marketing message is about what the return on investment they should expect with their purchase.
The Perfect Take Away
Whether your trade show goals are to promote a new service/product or prospect generation, you will need to create marketing material that attendees will want to take away.
Avoid heavy messaging about the brand. Your team’s elevator pitch and marketing material should focus on the features of your products or services and be ready to answer any customer service questions.
Trade Show Staffing Strategies
Without dynamic, well-trained booth representatives, your pre-show marketing, well-designed exhibit, and high-impact giveaways can be wasted. Provide enough staffing resources to represent your brand and engage with prospects adequately. Here is your opportunity to prove that your company is customer service focused.
Understand The Customer’s Point of View
Connect with your internal customer service team before the show and list the top 10 issues that clients may have with the brand. Be ready to answer these questions at the show. Not only does the number of staff count here, but the quality matters most. You want to have at least one product/customer service superstar there to answer product and technical questions.
Post Show Debrief & Re-engagement
Organize a debrief meeting with your team after the trade show. Share trade show notes regarding what worked well and discuss opportunities for improvement. Were you satisfied with your booth location and traffic numbers? Did your marketing messaging resonate with attendees? These notes will be helpful when determining what to change as you begin planning for the next trade show.
The First 48-Hours
Post-show follow-up is crucial. Upload all leads into your customer relationship management (CRM) system and begin to distribute to your sales team within the first 48-Hours. Your team will devise a timeline complete with full details of their planned outreach efforts. Hot leads should expect a personal phone call to establish and strengthen rapport. For all qualified leads, you can run a remarketing campaign via email or social media ads to remind them of the context of your connection. Continue to nurture your leads, measure the results and document your goals, marketing collateral, communication and results from start to finish.
“Exhibit marketing is the most cost-effective means of reaching customers and prospects; it reduces the buying cycle; it allows you to reach hidden buyers. Most important, though, is that it can reduce the cost of a sale by as much as 75%.”
Logical Connections At The Show!
Lynn Tangorra – Associate Producer
There are plenty of touch points to consider when planning how to inject the logical justification into the pre-purchase life cycle. Content marketing can be infused with proof statements that position your brand as the right choice to satisfy the buyers’ needs.
As you begin to apply the above practices into your marketing strategy, make sure to continue to focus on three best practices that will also help you improve your B2B trade show ROI.
Define Your Goals: Can include lead generation targets, improving brand awareness or achieving sales targets.
Have A Clear Strategy: Aligning each strategic step with your selected goals is essential. Sales training, collateral and brand messaging should support your goals.
Measure & Track: Trade shows generate lots of leads. You need to be able to quickly analyze this new list, and promptly separate quality leads from the pack.
Work with us to get the most out of your B2B trade show.
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