YOU’VE PAID FOR A STAND, NOW MAKE THE DAY COUNT!
There are two key things to decide on for every event you exhibit at, your Objective and your Offer….
Your objective: Why have you signed up to exhibit at lovelocalexpo and what do you want to achieve. Are you wanting:
- To create or build a list of contacts
- To generate face-to-face meetings
- To build awareness of products / services
- To have good conversations with new connections
- To sign up new clients
- To hold mini reviews / meetings on the day
- Something else or all of the above?
Even if you think you have this nailed, it’s worth booking a slot into your diary in the next few days and spending 20-30 minutes brainstorming this. When you’ve got your Expo Objective sorted you’ll be in a much better position to make it happen….
What’s your Expo offer?
You’ve decided on your expo objective, so now you need to figure out what your offer is. Your offer should be something valuable to another business, ideally something that doesn’t cost you anything but your time, and definitely something that makes them want to get to know more …
If you’re a fan of sci-fi your offer is like your tractor beam, it’s shiny and fabulous and pulls businesses into your orbit!
At this stage you shouldn’t be looking to make a sale – as above you want people to want to know more about you. It’s a taster, a teaser. It can be conditional on a sale but probably give people a month to go for it rather than being pressured to decide on the day.
So, what can you offer? Here are a few ideas, obviously they need to be relevant to your business:
- Complementary review of their printing costs / sales strategy etc
- Special expo offer, order 100 pens by XXX get 25 free
- Complementary sales review with immediate suggestions to improve sales
- Event consultation with coffee and complementary access to leisure facilities for two – if you’re a venue looking to attract business meetings or private events why not invite people over for coffee and give them a leisure access voucher or lunch for two?
- Complementary appraisal of their business growth aspirations to see if an apprenticeship is right for them
- Special expo offer, order XXX by YYY and get 20% off – with this you’re taking a financial hit, if that’s fine then great, if not then upselling is a good way to get round it like above with pens
- Order X at £299 and get Y (RRP £99) for free – especially if you bought a crate-load of Y for £10 each, bonus
- Free trial of your product / service
- Extended warranty of 3 years (rather than 12 months) on all purchases made by XXX
NB! ‘Free’ is OK but has no value – ‘Complimentary review worth £100’ sounds much better, apart from with the word ‘trial’ and actual goods when free is acceptable!
A sit down review of <whatever you do as a business> either virtual, or live where you provide coffee, is a great way to build on a relationship started at the expo, or anywhere else for that matter. Spend half an hour or an hour going through things with the client. If you make sure you give them a couple of golden business nuggets they can implement immediately to improve things, that will be of huge value to them and they’ll be really pleased with you.
Then you can say to them something along the lines of ‘If you’d like to become a client then that’s brilliant but there’s no pressure at all. We’d just ask that if you got something out of our time together today that you might recommend us to a couple of your contacts and we can see if we can help them too….’ They’re extremely likely to be thrilled to bits with you and will do this for you.
So, hope that’s food for thought – have a good think about your Expo Objective & Offer!
Smash Your Expo ROI is our 6 week programme designed to help you get the very best return on your investment of time, money and energy at lovelocalexpo. If you follow it and spend a little time each week on brainstorming, implementing or contacting – we guarantee you’ll get more high-value leads, have better conversations, make better connections and smash your ROI at lovelocalexpo and every other expo you attend.
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