Inbound marketing is all the rage right now, however not everyone is taking advantage of it’s usefulness, especially when it comes to following up on trade show leads.  Inbound marketing then uses social media to then stay connected to these qualified leads.  Those that find your content to be of value will want to stay connected to you in hope they will get more valuable content.  This is why they follow your blogs and twitter.

At a trade show you may meet a qualified lead that is not interested in your service right now, however they might need your service in a month or a year.  Sales personnel cannot follow and stay in contact with all of these leads, nor does this lead want the sale person to hound them.  This is where using inbound marketing and social networking outlets can be applied to trade show lead follow-up strategy.  Your follow-up emails should include an invitation to follow your company on twitter, or your blogs, or facebook etc, for them receive more information of value, such as tips.

In addition to this, your company can stay in contact with them so that
even if they are not interested now, you will stay in-touch with them for
potential business in the future.

This is just one way you can use social media and inbound marketing as part of your trade show follow-up strategy.  I hope this gets you thinking of ways to get better results out of your trade show exhibiting experience.  If you do find this information to be of value, follow us!

I just went to an American Marketing Association Boston event yesterday on the importance of inbound marketing for companies.  It was said that the idea behind inbound marketing is to put out rich content that your qualified leads would be interested in.  This content is then put out through different channels of distribution such as your website, blog, facebook page, linkedin page, and short snips of this content on twitter.  The more rich and relevant the content is, the more valuable you appear to be to search engines as well as your potential clients.  In doing so, this helps your search engine optimization, which allows these qualified leads to find you over your competition and for you to stay in contact with these leads.

Hearing some of the comments from the inbound marketing experts got me thinking about how this can be applied to trade shows.

Your exhibit booth should follow many of these same guidelines:

1.  Clearly convey your message to attract people interested in what you do.

All too often I have walked trade show floors, looking at booths with absolutely no idea what they did.  Now I’m not saying you should have a paragraph of information on your booth walls, but you do need to come up with a clear and simple way to convey exactly what you do to the qualified attendees in under three seconds.

2.  Inbound marketing relies on the value of your content specific to your qualified leads.  In this process it filters through all of the people on the web and connects you to those interested in what you do.  At a trade show, exhibitors give away things of value to the attendees, but all too often what the exhibitors give away are not filtering through all of the attendees to find those interested in your services.  Who is interested in getting an ipod?  Everyone!  An ipod giveaway does not qualify any of these leads; however, if you give away something of specific value to your qualified leads, such as an extended trial of your services or helpful tips, it will help attract your qualified leads.