What Exhibition Marketing is Really About

"Exhibition Marketing is about convincing buyers and visitors it is worth their time and effort to attend"

In the years I’ve been working on events and exhibitions, I’ve gathered several dozen theories and principles about visitor promotion or marketing to attract exhibition visitors. I often say exhibition marketing (or marketing in general for that matter) is amazingly simple and beautifully complex at the same time. Of course, the goal for pretty much all exhibitions is to obtain more and more quality visitors--meaning serious buyers and trade professionals. The more buyers to your fair, the more famous it becomes, the more famous and visited the fair becomes, the more exhibitors there are who want to participate. The more exhibitors there are who want to participate, the more one can charge per square meter.

The amazingly simple part to exhibition visitor marketing I have surmised over the years is that at the end of the day, what event marketers are (or should be doing) is communicating the business value of their events towards convincing the prospective visitor it is worth their time to visit the fair. You may think this sounds so basic and so simple, but if you’re an event organizer pause for a moment and try this out.

Summarize in 30 seconds to one minute what your event is about, who it benefits, and why a person should make the effort to take a few days off from work and convince their boss to pay for their travel & hotel to visit your show. Can you describe how much better off their professional life would be if their visited your fair? 

If you can indeed articulate all the value of your event… wonderful.  Now take the next and oftentimes painful step of looking at your marketing promotional materials to see if these messages are well conveyed. Let’s take your event website as one example and of which is usually the frontline medium potential visitors use to learn more about your event. If you strip away the beautiful artwork and dazzling graphics, what are the words and messages your website is conveying about your exhibition? Take away grand sentences like “the best, the most innovative, the must-attend…” and what are you actually left with in terms of convincing content?

"The Marketer's dilemma..too many channels and topics to consider"

Now we enter the field of what makes exhibition marketing so complex. Event and exhibition marketers have so many channels of marketing to think about today. We have web and content marketing, PR, digital advertising, partnership marketing, and social media channels and influencer marketing galore. On top of this, events are deadline driven so your focused strategy and intensity with certain channels and messages is different at 6 months out compared to 3 months out compared to two weeks to your event. And though we have lots of great tools today which are largely digital and AI driven, the event marketer still has to maintain the role of the composer for every channel of marketing. In the decades (yes decades) I’ve been working on hundreds of shows with hundreds of marketers, I always encounter this sense of overwhelmingness in what they have to focus on. I calmly examine where they are in the event marketing cycle and what content we can use for which channels to best convince the potential visitor it is worth their time to visit the show.

Convincing visitors to participate in your event is actually what we do over and over again but in different ways. When you have the first line-up of speakers to your conference ready, communicate it.  When you discover first time to debut products will be at your fair, communicate it. When you have something very special about our event that no other event has done before, publicize it. Doing all of this over and over again until the end of your successful event, I have found generally leads to results. You want to show people not just tell people why your event is great and why visitors are better off from having visited than not. Let’s see if I can get some real -life recent examples to show you in the upcoming posts.

"Exhibition marketing is about articulating in different ways the value of attending your event over and over again. "