If you are looking for a great way to stand out at your next trade show, while promoting your company and brand as an industry leader (who isn’t?), you should consider content marketing tactics that will allow your company to market itself as a provider of high-quality, relevant and useful content within your industry. Content marketing involves the use of high-quality resources, media or published content in order to attract attention to your company as an industry leader and a source of information and expertise.
Snazzy trade show design can go a long way to attract attendees to your trade show booth, but once they get there you need to have something that will allow you to wow potential customers, clients and contacts. It’s not enough to have the presentation down perfectly, with great sign graphics, trade show displays, marketing materials and smiling staff. To really wow the people at your trade show booth for your next expo, you need to provide something that is useful and informative. You need to provide content that could stand alone as an excellent resource, and integrate it with your marketing materials and your brand image.
Great examples of how to do this are companies which have done extensive write-ups on their industry, or developed an e-book to give away, or maybe even a smartphone app. In doing this, the company puts its money (or content) where its mouth is. Are your marketing materials constantly touting you as an expert in your field? Content marketing dares you to prove it. And when (if) you do, you will win over a lot of potential customers and clients who are more skeptical about flowery marketing materials than ever before.
Try this. Before your next trade show, get your marketing team or an independent contractor to create a great piece of content (like the examples mentioned above) and give it away for free at your trade show booth. Doing so will not only establish you as a leader and an expert in your industry, but it will enable you to create promotional materials that are actually useful and have a significantly lower chance of ending in the waste bin at the end of the day. Yes, it will cost a little bit to develop this kind of quality content, but if you get it right it will pay dividends in the end.
Content marketing is an excellent example of inbound marketing that will have customers and clients contacting you, instead of you having to constantly go out and find them. What is it really worth to you and your company to have a booklet or a guide with your brand prominently displayed that could sit on someone’s desk for weeks, months or even years? When they next need services or products in your industry, guess who they’re going to call first? That’s right, you. So, next time you are setting up your trade show displays for the expo, don’t forget high-quality content can be worth its weight in gold.