How to Create The Best Trade Show Customer Experience

There is nothing worse than attending a trade show and walking away feeling like it wasn't a valuable way to spend your time. The goal of a trade show is to get people interested in your product or service, not send them scurrying from your booth like they couldn't get away fast enough. When you fail to provide a good customer experience, you might as well have stayed home. Creating the best trade show experience takes thought and planning. Here are five tips to help you get started.

1. Make Registration Simple
2. Provide a Mobile Event App
3. Strategically Plan Your Booth
4. Provide Booth and Product Content
5. Stay Connected After the Show   

What We Hate About Trade Shows

We have to start with the elephant in the room. If we don't know what not to do, how can we figure out what to do? Let's face it, as customers, we all have things that turn us off at trade shows. Here are some of the top things we hate about trade shows:

• Not being able to quickly navigate the floor
• Overbearing or pushy salespeople
• The salesperson you can't get away from
• Having the same conversation at every booth
• Being ignored
• Free samples that aren't free
• Lack of follow up

Put yourself in your own shoes and plan your trade show like you will be the customer. Now let's talk about how you can create the best trade show experience so you can begin to build connections with potential customers

Make Registration Simple

When prospective attendees are presented with a painless registration process, it sets the stage for the whole event. Create a tastefully designed landing page with a registration form requiring attendees to provide minimal information. No one likes to fill out lengthy forms. Be sure to require enough information—like an email address—so you can contact them later with further details about the event. This is a good time to request more information they can submit at their convenience. 

Provide a Mobile Event App

We've all come to expect an app for everything in our digitally connected world. Trade show customers expect:

• Venue details
• Vendor details
• Maps to navigate the show floor
• The ability to build agendas and register for seminars
• The functionality to view on-demand seminars

This makes navigating the event for attendees less stressful. 

Strategically Plan Your Booth 

You can design and build your booth yourself, but it's a good idea to leave that to the professionals. They know what works and what doesn't, and it will look professional. Keep the print copy concise and to the point, clearly communicating a headline that can open a dialogue. When attendees can quickly scan your booth to get a general idea of what you do, they are more likely to stop. A disorganized, cluttered, overstocked booth is a sure way to turn off potential visitors.

Providing interactive experiences for visitors is a natural way to start a conversation. It can be something as simple as dropping their business card in a fishbowl to enter a drawing for a gift card. It's a good experience when people walk away happy, knowing they have a chance to win something; it builds a connection.

Provide Booth and Product Content  

Who doesn't like free stuff? Offering promotional products, information sheets, and product demos about your company to attendees has multiple benefits for you and the attendee. Having every one of these items displayed in your booth is unnecessary as long as you have quick access to them so you can provide them to people via email. When attendees leave your booth with a freebie or additional information on your product or services, they will remember you and feel like they gained some value from visiting your booth. 

Stay Connected After the Show

The customer experience doesn't end when the trade show does. You have to nurture each potential customer to encourage them to take the next step. This might look different for each attendee. You don't want to send an email with basic introductory information to someone with whom you had a conversation and who knows your product. Consider the buyer's journey stages they are in when creating follow-up messages. This builds trust with prospects when they feel like you remember them.

You want your trade show attendees to remember you for the right things, so it's important that you take them into consideration when you are planning your booth. Perenso Trade Show offers solutions to many of the things we discussed in this article.

Click here to request a demo and get your questions answered by a Perenso expert.