Fill your sales funnels with these tips for trade show public relations.

Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Show. Trade shows are to make leads, to get inquiries, to get sales into the funnel. And today, I'm going to share with you some ways that you can use public relations to get a greater number of leads into that funnel. Because it's a big investment with a trade show. And you need to be prepared and plan ahead in order to make the most of those 3 or 4 days when you're on site. So today's episode, we're going to talk about how to create content for the announcement you're going to go to the show, how to reach out to the media to see if you can get them to cover you in advance or at the show, and how you can publicize across your whole organization what you're going to be offering when you're standing around looking for leads. Now, we all know that trade shows are an expense, both in terms of time and in terms of money. Often they're used as a way to get the whole organization to focus on an event, especially if there's a product launch. That creates its own tension, but it creates also an opportunity. What I'd like to do is to share with you some of my experience of what I do for clients, and have done for myself. Now, first of all, a trade show is all about getting people to come to your booth, or your event during the show, your speaking event, for example, if you're one of the conference people, and to get them to put you on their diary ahead of the competition. How can we do that? Now, first of all, what I always like to do is to just think about what's the focus for that trade show? What's the key message that we want to deliver? Too often a trade show is really people arriving with a booth that looks nice, but hasn't necessarily got a key message focused around that event. First of all, what is the key message that you want to give? And remember that a trade show, like any other kind of communication, should be addressing the issues in the mind of the audience. It's not addressing what you want to sell. It's addressing what the audience is looking to buy. So that's a key point, first of all. So when we think about the graphics, We're often thinking about what we've done and what we think looks good, prominence for the logo, for example, but we're not always thinking about what it is the people around the show are looking at. So how can you make the trade show graphics context-sensitive? Obviously, one issue there can be language. Sure, English may be a great language across Europe and all over the world, but it just shows respect to have the content in local language. Now, especially in light of COVID and the reduction, I think, in international travel, I think we're going to see a reversion back to European shows being European shows, Asian shows being Asian shows, and so on. Whereas for about a decade there in the late '90s, early 2000s, trade shows really became international, became global. I think COVID is going to change that. So I think that addressing the local audience with local language now is an opportunity to show that you are actually in the region. Secondly, let's just think about what you could do in advance. So you've got your key message, and ideally you're going to be making some announcement or showing something new and fresh. Every event will have some media attending. Normally events are organized by companies like Informa, or read that have both trade show or conferences and the publication as well. They used to call it the tripod. They used to have an event and a magazine and a direct mailing service so that they could offer a full complement to their customers. If you look on the website, as I've been doing today for one trade show happening in Paris, they'll have the organizer and they'll have official media partners. If you scroll down and look at that, you'll see it's possible then to be in touch with those media because the media partners have an interest in profiling the show and what's going to take place at the show. Some of the smaller media will not have journalists at the show, but some of the bigger ones might have their journalists or editors at the show. In fact, you'll often find that one of the contra deals done between the organizers and the publications is that the journalist will, for example, host a panel and will bring their audience to the event. That's because they know as well that if the journalist is speaking, that panel will get a write-up in the media afterwards. So it's all about exposure. So you can reach out to those publications in advance to find out which media are going. Some big events will hire a PR firm. East West Public Relations, my firm, have been the official PR firm for trade shows, for example, like CommunicAsia in Singapore. And the role of the PR firm is to make sure that all the exhibitors get the maximum exposure that they can from that event. So they're actually looking for news to share with the media in advance. Really useful to know. If you're going to be launching something, the official media agency will be promoting the show. One of the metrics for a show's success will be how many people exhibit, but another is how many people attend. The job of the PR agency is to get mainstream and other trade media to cover what's going to be happening at that event in order for people to want to go to that event. So there's an opportunity for you there, and what I'm doing is drafting a pitch for my client, which then we will send to the media in advance. And we're going to do 2 things with that. One is we're going to work to get an announcement just to say our client is going to that event. But secondly, I'm going to be working to get interviews for my client at the event. A trade show is a really great photo opportunity. And for the media, it's a very efficient venue to get lots of interviews done. Of course, there's a lot of demands on their time. For example, big shows like the NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters, the media will have a schedule of every 15 to 30 minutes with a different spokesperson and a different booth to visit. The same with the auto shows and all big shows. The journalists have to work very hard. One of the key elements of success then is to give the media a reason to come, but also to give it early enough. If you wait too late, then you will have missed the gate, and they will not be able to put you into their schedule. So let's just look at the timing. We've found our media, we've got them as a shortlist, we've got our key message. 4 weeks in advance, ideally, we've written to the media saying, hey, we're coming, and this is what we're going to talk about, this person's available. They're available on this day at this time. Would you like to come and meet them? Try and lock this in a whole month in advance. Some media may say we're not ready for that. We haven't got that diary organized. It's better to be too early than too late. If you're going in with just the week before the show, chances are you'll not get a slot. So what you can also then do, having looked at your media relations, which I'm prioritizing because the media have got communities that my client currently don't reach. So that's the venue that I want to promote within to get people that are going to be coming to the show to become aware of the client. So once I've got that in place, where I've possibly got my interview sorted out and I've got the media to run just as a sidebar saying who's attending at the trade show, I then work on my owned channels, the channels that we control. Here, the content that you create can be so much more flexible because you can control the medium. First of all, of course, it should be on your website that you're attending. It should be on the front page of whatever website you've got to say you're attending this trade show. Second, you can create an infographic. You can use a platform like Visme, for example, or Canva. Very simple to create an infographic, or you can just create it in PowerPoint if you want to. And just say the date, the venue, the booth number is important, and what you intend, your key message. What's the reason people should come and see you? Next, what you can do, of course, create a short explainer video. And that's what I'm going to be doing using Lumen5, which is one of my favorite tools because of the cost and the simplicity of that platform. There we can use that infographic, but also we can put in the logo. We can maybe put some stock video that we've already got, and we can put, for example, the logo and even, for example, a screenshot of the trade show website or conference website. And I can just make those into a very short 30-second to 1-minute video saying we're coming. That video can be loaded on YouTube, but it could also go onto your Vimeo channel if you've got one, but also you could then start to post that using one of your social media tools like Buffer or Zoho or HubSpot or AskEdca. You could then schedule that to be going out, and actually you can schedule it to be a repeat. That could be a repeat going out on Twitter, onto your Facebook, onto your LinkedIn. Now there's some debates about whether Twitter will let you post the same content multiple times, My experience is that it's allowing me to do that. But worst case, you just edit the headline a little bit and then get it to run. So you can create this content and post it on social. Now, if you're struggling for how to write the content, which frankly shouldn't be too difficult, but if you are, there are a couple of tools you can use. One is AI Writer. That's AI-Writer. For $29 a month with 2 months free trial, You can put in some keywords, it'll write articles for you. You can also use one called Jarvis.ai, which is also $29 a month for the basic version, and that will help you to write the headlines and write the copy. But you probably don't need that for a trade show. You're just going to say you're going to be there and what you're going to be showing. But of course you can if you want to. Another thing to do then is to take that content And make sure that all of your staff are promoting it. So often we see a company attending a show and they might send out a press announcement, but they don't ask all of their employees to share that. And now increasingly, employees are on social media, and many of their friends or their partners or their suppliers, for example, will be connected to them through Instagram or Pinterest or Facebook or LinkedIn or WeChat if you're using that in China. Get everyone in the organization to share the fact that you're going to be at that event. It's free to do, but also what we're really trying to do is to demonstrate a team effort. This is very simple and often overlooked. Now you can also give them that short explainer video. You could host that centrally, for example on Vimeo, and ask them to reshare the link or 1-minute video is only 4 to 15 megabytes depending on your compression ratio, and they can upload it themselves. So get the content then to be shared. Now another thing that one can do is to buy keywords because trade shows are not heavily competed for on AdWords because it's only a temporary event. The organizers by and large don't spend any money on buying the keywords for it. But you can. So you can even go onto Google AdWords and buy the keywords for that show. So if anyone looks for the show, your name is going to come up and your booth is going to come up, and that could link back to your website. You can buy related words. For example, the show's happening in Paris, you could buy trade shows in Paris in plastics, for example, or plastics and trade shows. Any combination of these, relatively inexpensive to do, and And you can run that for 2, 3, 4 weeks before the show. Obviously, there's direct mail as well. Now, if you've got a mailing list, the mailing list should also be receiving your key message announcement with a call to action, ideally to a booking system like Calendly, for example, which is one of them, or Book It Like a Boss. Because remember, we're trying to get leads. What we want to do is to send out to everybody that we already are connected with An email announcement could be that short video, for example, that I've mentioned you could have created, which you could host on VideoAsk. For example, you can send out to people through your CRM a VideoAsk, which is, here's our video, we're going to go to this show, would you like to talk to us? And it's a yes, no, maybe. It's a Typeform product VideoAsk, very handy. Or you could use another one like Vidyard, which actually takes your video and can integrate with Mailchimp. And when people open the video and watch the video, it actually tells you through Mailchimp, and it really helps you to update your CRM if you go all the way to the integration with HubSpot. So you've got a community of people that you've already got in your CRM, but also, as I mentioned, your staff also have that. So what they could do is they could add the booth details to their auto signatures. As I've mentioned before on one or two occasions, and we work with an auto signature partner here, but if you want— which is in the show notes— but if you want to create an auto signature around a particular trade show, you can also do that. And everybody in the organization can be sending all their emails And everyone, of course, is connecting with people related to the business. They may not all be in the same country as the trade show. They may not all be buyers or prospective, but if they're customers in some way or other, then why not add that to your auto-signature saying, we're going, click here to book an appointment with our salesperson on this day, and that will automatically link to their calendar on Microsoft Exchange depending on which platform that you're using. So trade shows are a huge opportunity to build leads. They're also a huge opportunity to lose the initiative. Now, what if you've had the trade show? At the trade show itself, you should have some kind of mechanism for collecting those leads. In the old days, it used to be collect the business cards, staple them all onto a piece of paper, go back to the office and type them in. Now, of course, you don't necessarily need to do that. You can have scan readers at the show, for example. Some trade show organizers provide those so that when people will arrive at your booth, you can scan the QR code on their badge, and because that data is already in the database, they can then provide that to you later. It's a whole area of lead inquiry and lead management, but what's important is that after the event, you somehow shared the fact that you were there, and you followed up with the people that attended. And also, you can have a message for those people that didn't attend on what they missed. Now, let's not forget that what we also want to do at the trade show is to promote the fact we're there. So on-site, what we've done is 2 or 3 tweets every day, and a Facebook post, and even a Facebook Live from the show. Everywhere now has Wi-Fi, or 4G is perfectly good enough for a Facebook Live. Or even a StreamYard to use from a trade show if you've got a big enough setup. And Zoom, of course, now you can connect to your Facebook and do a Zoom Live to your Facebook. You can upload the video, of course, to your LinkedIn directly. They like native uploads from your mobile phone into the LinkedIn to say, hey, we're at this trade show. If you're in the market, you're in the region, you're in the town, pop over and see us now. So being at the show is absolutely a dynamic place to create content, to share it. Personally, I love to think of myself as a reporter at the trade show. Pick up some fun bits, share not just what you're doing, but what other people are doing, because what we're doing is building a relationship with those people that we want to do business with. Trade shows are a huge investment, a huge commitment, and really can be a a huge waste of time, but they should not be a huge waste of time, and they don't have to be if you plan in advance, you proactively market when you're there, and then you follow up comprehensively post-event. If there's anything I can do to help you with your trade show or other event marketing and communications, please just drop me a line, jim@eastwestpr.com. And of course, in my book, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, which is just out on Amazon and on all major shops including Barnes& Noble. There are lots and lots of tools and tips on how you can get noticed at a trade show and beyond. Thank you so much for listening.