Trade Shows as a Marketing Tool

The marketing industry has changed significantly in the past decade, with the expansion of digital marketing tools such as Google Analytics, Adwords, Pay-per-Clicks, and digital newsletter tools like MailChimp, Contstant Contact and StreamSend. With effortless access to all these new, exciting, and inexpensive tools, it's easy to forget about the more traditional marketing formats.

If you have been brainstorming other ways to reach your potential client base, it's time to seriously consider marketing at Trade Shows.

Websites can be back-buttoned, ads can be recycled, billboards can be ignored. When you exhibit at a Trade Show, you have the opportunity to meet face-to-face with and engage potential clients who are attending the show because they are interested in your market. Half the legwork for the sale is already done, because the client is looking for you.

This is not to say that digital and print marketing are not worth the effort. In fact, in our experience, building a strategy that relies on a broad range of formats and tools is the most effective marketing practice.

At Exhibit Studio we market digitally by handling the search engine optimization of our website, advertise with pay-per-click options and Google Adwords, run a digital Yellow Pages ad, send out a quarterly email newsletter and keep our electronic database updated with regular email check-ups to our clients. Our print marketing consists of mailing out an annual catalogue to our existing clients, semi-annual bulk mailers, vehicle decals, and our Yellow Pages ad.

With digital media we can measure the effectiveness of each marketing tool, using tracking sites such as Google Analytics and MailChimp. It is more difficult to gauge the success of printed materials, but we can say from experience: they work. When our annual catalogue is mailed out in the new year—a staggered mailing—we are inundated with inquiry calls, and the visits to our website skyrocket. Clients who have been on our email mailing list for a year, without ever contacting us, suddenly pick up the phone and give us a call. Bulk mailings garner a similar result, with the benefit of reaching a new group of potential clients and expanding our client network.

While digital marketing is a great asset, don't fall into the trap of relying on it exclusively. It's cheap and easy, but you may be missing out on an entire market of potential clients who are just not finding you in the digital world. And when you consider expanding your marketing, don't forget about Trade Shows, where your potential clients come to you.