Build it and they will come?
But stand design alone is not enough. Maximising the return on that investment through pre- and post-event marketing can make a significant difference to your ROI.
Pre-event marketing gives you the opportunity to maximize footfall to your stand. It enables you to announce your presence at the show to key influencers and generate excitement around the event.
Creating touchpoints
The most effective pre-show marketing campaigns are integrated, multidimensional and utilise the complete media toolkit. They not only announce your presence at the show, they provide a reason to attend. This could be a specific promotion or call to action at the show. It could be a particular activity going on at the stand, or a specific product that visitors may wish to interact with. Depending on your brand tone, you could keep it very mysterious, enticing people in to find out more. Whichever route fits your customer profile best, all collateral should ignite people’s interest to visit your stand to find out more. Each layer of the branded campaign generates more consumer touch points, leading to increased levels of engagement.
- Email marketing – Digital marketing campaigns utilising the show or venue theme can clearly announce your presence at a show.
- CTA buttons – Use clear CTA buttons such as ‘Register now’ to encourage people to pre-book appointments and meet with the team. This enables you to plan staffing on the stand more effectively, as well as monitor potential footfall.
- Event Landing Page – A dedicated event landing page can provide all the information visitors require alongside your branded messages. It can reinforce SEO and data capture with the use of download forms on event collateral.
- Video – A video infographic can give visitors an engaging taster of what your stand experience will offer in a dynamic, visual format.
- Social media – Social media enables you to interact with show organisers and other attendees, building real time relationships in a unique way. It can be used to promote partners as well as your own attendance. Social media can provide opportunities for pre-event marketing right up until the doors open. This could include ‘show previews’, stand production and teasers of the most newsworthy aspects of your attendance at the show.
- Direct Mail – Depending on your audience, direct mail can play an important, physical role in advising visitors what they can expect from your presence at an event, and why they should attend. For the right consumer profile, a physical invitation can still add weight to any pre-event marketing campaign.
Continuing relationships after the doors have closed
Combine data capture through pre-event marketing with interactive opportunities throughout the event to generate information for post-event marketing. Analyse data to facilitate follow up of quality leads and maximise opportunities from the exhibition.
Adaptive design expertise
At Courts Design our adaptive creative studio delivers not only award winning stand design and construction, but overall event marketing campaigns. We can manage your entire event marketing programme from start to finish, giving you peace of mind that every pound of your investment has been maximised to its true potential.
“Courts Design have been instrumental in bringing our exhibition stand to life, making our products and the whole visitor experience real, modern and exciting. They have been a fantastic team to work with.”
For more information about how pre- and post- event marketing could enable your brand to stand out in that crowded exhibition hall and deliver tangible, data driven results please email engage@courtsdesign.com. As a full service creative agency with over 30 years’ experience of delivering integrated marketing campaigns we listen, create and deliver branding, digital and exhibition projects for clients across a wide range of industries from pharmaceutical through to aerospace.
