Trade shows are essential for a business’ marketing strategy, so it’s important to make the most out of these events. Here are four tips on how to increase your return on investment:

Engage with attendees.
Making sure you staff engages with trade show attendees is essential. All staff members should be actively monitoring the floors and approaching any visitors that walk into your custom exhibit. For example, to help staff focus on interacting with guests, Gilbert provides clients with an expert to oversee a trade show booth’s physical elements. This allows our clients to put all their focus on attendees without having to worry about the actual exhibit.

Be prepared with a strategy to qualify attendees as leads.
Not all trade show attendees will be interested in buying your product or service. You want to devote more time to those who will likely buy from you. Help out your trade show staff by developing a process for identifying the value of prospects beforehand and training your staff.

Marchon at Vision Expo East

Make sure your booth design draws attendees to you.
This is crucial because your trade show booth is an embodiment of you. Just like your website, your custom trade show booth is a silent sales rep. Your event staff will be working hard to engage prospects and convert them into qualified leads, so you need to make sure your booth works for you. You want it to draw people to your brand on its own so that you can focus on educating, selling, and eliciting contact information.

Input lead information into a customer relationship database at the show.
Capturing leads is why you’re there, and if you don’t obtain any contact information, you won’t be able to follow up with prospects after the show. This leads your ROI to drop significantly. The easiest way to capture contact information is to input it into a database as you take it from attendees. Give floor staff mobile devices and instruct them to enter contact information on the spot. This guarantees you’ll have what you need to follow up.

These tips are an excellent way for you to take full advantage of a trade show while you’re there and maybe get some great leads out of it, too!