Promotional events are a great way of gaining marketing exposure for your business. Many industries hold expo type events that businesses of all sizes can take part in.
You can use this type of event to attract attention in your brand or raise awareness of a new product or range that you’re bringing to the market.
This type of event is a great chance to interact face-to-face with your would-be customers and gauge their impression of your products and services. You’ll get the opportunity to learn about any reservations that consumers may have, and it’s a great chance to actually listen to the people whose opinions matter most to your business.
But how do you go about project managing your entry into a promotional event?
Here’s how you can set up your brand’s stand and get the exposure that you need.
Set The Scene
People need to be able to see you. There may be hundreds or thousands of people milling around in a major promotional event, your stand needs to make an impression.
Use your branding throughout. Make sure and create bespoke signage and banners in your brand colours and really do everything that you can to create a simple, striking impression.
You may need to lay out products on tables, think about getting branded covers. Check out the ultimate guide for custom table covers to find out how you can do this.
Lights and sound can bring people over to your area, but make sure that you don’t overdo it so that it is an uncomfortable experience for the event’s visitors.
Use Outgoing Communicators
You’ll need the right people working on your stand. With potentially hundreds or thousands of people to engage with, you’ll need a confident and outgoing speaker who is able to clearly get their point across in an engaging way.
The team that you have on your stand will need to be able to work together to help deal with the crowd.
If their delivering presentations, make sure that these are rehearsed fully beforehand.
Identify Your Demographic
Who are you targeting through your promotional activities? Make sure that you have a clear idea of who your customer is. But, also, be sure that you don’t overlook people who don’t fit in this demographic either. Some people may surprise you, while others may be looking for a gift for someone else.
Understand The Problem And Provide The Answer
When selling a new product, service, or concept, you’ll need to understand the problem that you’re solving.
Get your team that is working the event to really bed in their understanding of the specific issue that your product or service addresses. Get them to think about it from every angle. Then, work out how you can pitch your product or service as the solution.
Be firm and resolute in the fact that your brand has the answer and this will come across to your potential customers.
Know Your Business
If you’re selling your products and your brand to a room full of complete strangers, you’ll need to be confident. Whoever is working on your stand needs to be able to answer questions as quickly as possible.
By answering questions with confidence and providing all of the right information about your brand and your products, you’ll be giving confidence in your brand to the attendees. This may help to turn them into customers.
Show Don’t Tell
One of the biggest failures that many people have when promoting a product is that they spend a long time explaining it instead of showing what it does. If a product creates an immediate visual understanding with viewers, make sure that you show the product rather than explaining it.
Giveaways
There may be dozens if not hundreds of other businesses trying to attract the attention of the crowds at a major promotional event. By the time someone has walked around four-or-five stands, they’ll probably have pushed the first couple of stands out of their memories.
Don’t let your potential customers forget about you.
Give something away to anyone that is visiting your stand. You’ll need to create a lasting memory and one way that you can do that is through branded free gifts or samples of your products.
Think about the way that these free items are presented. Make sure that it is professional and eye-catching.
Build Relationships
Marketing and promotional events are an opportunity to build relationships with people. Be sure that you give them the tools that they need to get back in touch with you in the future.
Create flyers with your branding on and instructions on how they can find you on social media. Alternatively, find ways of getting them to follow your social media profiles on the spot.
One novel example might be to set up a branded selfie-booth where users are encouraged to post photos using it. Use branded hashtags, and encourage the users to follow your page as they post. As long as the experience is a fun one, you’ll find that people will engage with it.
You may also want to have an email signup form to let customers know about future promotions and product news. If you can get people to provide your details, you could create a strong mailing list off the back of the event.
Follow Up
If you’ve engaged with any would-be customers in the event and have got their contact details, get in touch with them a few days later.
Dropping that email that says it was nice to meet them, reminding them of the core message of the event, and pointing them to additional products that might interest them is a good way of re-engaging and nurturing your leads.
Similarly, where you’ve found concerns about your products, use the opportunity following the event to try and address these where possible. Is it a problem for the product developers, or is it more about changing the way that you communicate it in the future.
