Exhibitions – Coventry & Warwickshire’s Chamber of Commerce Business & Trade Expo

Last Friday we attended an exhibition at Coventry & Warwickshire’s Chamber of Commerce Business & Trade Expo held at The Ricoh Arena.

We exhibited alongside 150 local businesses from a wide range of sectors including engineering and manufacturing, financial services, professional services and leisure and tourism and many more.

It was an excellent event and a great way of meeting new contacts. I’d encourage anyone to consider exhibiting at these types of events for the following reasons:

• They have a low cost per lead. My calculations for this show are £5 per prospect spoken to
• They enable you to have a meaningful personal discussion with potential customers about their needs and how you can help to meet these. Just think how much time and effort are involved in trying to get to this sort of discussion through other types of marketing!
• They are a great way of receiving market intelligence about how well your services meet the actual requirements of potential customers

Top Tips from our experience….

• If you’re going to exhibit please invest in a well designed display (we can help with this!). Don’t be tempted to clutter the display with lots of detail about your services as no-one uses exhibition displays in this way to gather information. Your display is there to attract the attention of a prospect to your services, so it needs to be high on visual content and low on text!
• Don’t judge prospects by their appearance (or a book by its cover!). We all carry around stereotypes of what our type of ideal customers should look like (and in my experience this is usually wrong)
• Obvious perhaps – but make sure that all your staff are well briefed on the products/services you offer. Getting face to face with a potential customer is a great opportunity and can be ruined by lack of product knowledge
• Don’t expect to come away with a bagful of orders on the day. A few potential customers will have a specific, urgent need but most are attending to gather information for the future.

• With that in mind make sure you collect contact information from all prospects as the most important part of the event will be…..

• FOLLOW UP – it’s vital to stay in touch with a friendly post-event email and then to include potential prospects in ongoing marketing to keep both the contact going and also to keep them up to date with the latest news on your products and services

These are my observations from having exhibited at many shows over the years. I hope they are of some help…..