As I was reading this excellent article on the subject of dental expo stands by Mike Caiafa , I got to thinking about the importance of integrating both tactics and strategy into your online media marketing. Their article contains as cleanly thorough a review of good ground-level social media tactics as one could want, as well as some great ideas about how you can integrate social media into your trade show displays.
I do think he underestimates the growing importance of bloggers at expo shows, but that’s still a fairly minor issue in the grand scheme and one that’s only recently begun to rise in importance.
What that article doesn’t take time to address in nearly so much detail is the importance of having an overarching strategy behind all those clever tactics. The article is written from a point of view that assumes you already have a detailed strategic plan in place.
But, do you?
Know Where You’re Going With Your Expo Displays
Tactics and Strategy both work in service of a larger master: the Goals. These aren’t simply quarterly reports and sales earning sheets, but rather a comprehensive idea of where you want your company to be in five or ten years. These are the goals that give you Focus and Direction and all those other momentum-related words that business articles like to use.
Simply put, you need to honestly ask yourself where the company is headed, so you can understand how your expo stands and trade show marketing fit into that plan. Or, if you’re not the boss, get the bosses talking about it if possible. What sort of products are you planning on releasing, and why? What long-term investments are you looking at? Which growing technologies are you eying to potentially be leveraged in the future?
If you answer those questions. you can derive fairly concrete goals for your expo displays’ marketing, which then give direction to your social media campaigns.
Phew!
Let’s have an example! Here’s a new car company that’s “going green” and wants to be vocal about it. Their expo stand display goals might look like:
- Push green initiatives with a 100% carbon neutral and\or recyclable booth.
- Integrate easy power generation-themed trade show booth exhibits, as gateway to discussing our hybrid engine design and how it “recycles” (conserves) energy.
- Make power generation interactive with booth exhibits that are hopefully generating power onsite if it’s not too expensive. Track these numbers, along with viewer interaction numbers and their impressions afterwards.
- Include plenty of digital interaction with iPad kiosks, touchscreen displays, and as many ways of exchanging electronic contact information as possible.
- Investigate fun architectural enhancements, such as wall-hanging elements that move in response to visitor actions\power generation.
- Track visitors’ on-site software usage patterns, information most-frequently accessed, favorite social media sites, etc.
Obviously, this would only be one way of going about it, but this illustrates how to establish a well-defined set of goals for your entire company, and how that then makes it easy to form goals for your expo displays. When both understand the master plan for the company as a whole, both tactics and strategy can act productively towards your long-term goals.
So, after you read through that blog article mentioned above for any tips you can pick up, sit down and give a little more thought to where your company is going. Look at your long-term goals, and then look at the elements of them which you think would be most appealing to the public. Those create the connections that tell you what online media tactics will bring more traffic to your expo displays, and will also help you figure out whether you should be attending craft shows or woodworking shows or anime and gaming events.
And then, put your plan in motion and show off your unified vision!