Smart marketing at key trade shows can boost your business, but only if you use the opportunity to your fullest advantage. Here are some helpful tips to make your trade show experience more impactful:

1. Set goals. What do you hope to achieve by attending this trade show? Increasing brand awareness? Building your contact database? Obtaining a certain number of leads? If so, what qualifies a lead? Until you determine what you want to achieve, you won’t know whether it’s a smart marketing investment or if you’d be better off spending that money elsewhere. Setting goals will also help you measure and quantify your successes while showing you where to improve next time.
2. If you’re going, go strong. Exhibiting at trade shows comes with a price tag, but don’t drop the big dollars reserving your booth space only to cut the budget for the event itself. Simply showing up won’t work. Make sure you invest enough to ensure success – reserve a key space and develop brilliant creative with the right message for your audience.
3. Start “working the crowd” BEFORE the event. A trade show is much more than a single-event contact opportunity. Treat it like one facet of a campaign and get your company’s name in front of your audience multiple times. Send out pre-show invitations to attendees and tell them why they need to visit your booth (register to win a prize, get a massage, learn exclusive information, etc). Place an ad in the trade show program. Offer a member of your leadership team to be a guest speaker. And always, ALWAYS follow up all potential leads with a personalized thank-you note. If possible, you might even create a mini-website component for booth visitors to interact with after the show.
4. Touch their senses. Strive to engage all five senses of your attendees. Find a way to make them hear or smell your booth before they even set eyes on it. The more senses you are able to captivate, the more likely the attendee will want to visit and interact with your booth.
   
5. Be unique. At the end of the day, make sure your exhibit was memorable. If your exhibit was just another booth with a full-color banner stand, you probably didn’t command much attention. Instead, think out-of-the-box and find a way to make your exhibit stand out. Go with a theme or concept that will make your message unique.