Trade shows are one of the most enduring sales and networking tools in existence today. Some see trade shows as an outdated marketing method, not necessary in today’s interconnected world of technology. But enough business people see the value of shows to keep them going all over the world.

This isn’t surprising when you look at the statistics. In fact, “81% оf trаdе ѕhоw dіѕрlау attendees hаvе buуіng аuthоrіtу. Whісh mеаnѕ more thаn 4 оut оf 5 реорlе wаlkіng the aisles аrе potential сuѕtоmеrѕ fоr еxhіbіtоrѕ.”

Aside from the opportunity to gain new leads and show off your latest products and services to existing customers, trade shows offer the opportunity to meet a wide variety of players that could help your business achieve its objectives. This is your chance to meet potential suppliers, re-sellers, partners, and connect with business leaders in a prospective market.

“67% of all attendees represent a new prospect and potential customer for exhibiting companies.” – exhibitsurveys.com 

Despite the many benefits of attending and participating in trade shows, there’s no denying they require a significant investment in time and money. So to help you make the most of that investment, we’ve gathered 5 tips from those who have mastered the art of a successful trade show. Here’s how to do it.

1. You’ve done the research, found the right event to meet your business objectives, and signed up. Now read that exhibitor kit carefully!

“Exhibitors often fail to read the information provided to them in their exhibitor kit. When they don’t read that information, and read it carefully, they often make mistakes and fail to leave sufficient time for shipping.” – Paul Urben, Former Manager, Mendelssohn Commerce Event Logistics.

This often results in expensive rush shipments which can break your budget, or worse, empty or unprepared booths due to unexpected hold-ups at the border.

Paul tells us that he has witnessed the results of a failure to read the instructions and make the proper arrangement on more than one occasion. However, the example that sticks out most in his mind involves hundreds of pounds of spoiled dairy products. He recalls a cheese company that arranged for shipment of its products to a trade show that was taking place in the middle of the hot summer months. The company didn’t think to ask for refrigeration when it shipped its cheese samples, so all that arrived at the trade show was a melted smelly mess. A rush delivery was arranged to be shipped by air that night and it arrived in the correct city at 2a.m.

“I remember loading 400lbs of cheese samples into my VW Bug and delivering it myself to the event to ensure that the exhibitor would have his goods on time. Exhibitor kits are almost always available online now with easy access, so there’s no excuse.”

2. Advertise! Let everyone know you’ll be there well in advance.

Canberk Tokmak has helped SMEs across the Middle East to find and excel in new markets. In his article “20 tips you can use to gain the most leads at any trade show” he says that one often overlooked way to maximize your trade show results is a simple one.  Advertise!

After you have determined which trade show to attend, add the name of the show and your stand number in your email signatures. Then invite your potential buyers and set up appointments for to make the most of your time at the event.

“Professional buyers often devote very little time to trade shows and tend to fit all their negotiations into one day. They decide in advance which conferences to attend, which forum to talk to and which stand to visit. Setting up engagements ahead of time is the best way to ensure you snag some of the precious time for your company.”

3. Don’t forget to take advantage of opportunities outside of the show grounds.

Lora Rigutto Vigliatore, CITP, has been on trade missions and attended shows all over the world. In her travels she discovered a big insight that every businessperson should remember when traveling for trade events.  Make every second count.

“To quote Yogi Berra, ‘It ain’t over ’til it’s over’. Opportunities are abound to make contacts and start establishing relationships.

Sometimes, contacts are not made in the exhibition hall; they’re made outside of show hours at a reception, in line for your favourite coffee, or, in my case, on the plane flying back to Toronto.

“You just never know who you may meet, hence the importance of always being engaged. Perhaps it was serendipitous, but I happened to sit beside one of our company’s supporters and investors. This conversation affirmed that the long days on our feet that my colleagues and I had endured, all of the handshaking and follow ups to come were all worth it.”

4. Don’t spend all of your time with prospective buyers.

Giovanni Gonzalez, CITP, an expert on carrying out successful in-market visits in foreign cultures, reminds us that trade shows are your chance to connect with all types of people that can help your business.

Don’t forget to connect with parties that can assist in the internationalization process.

“At trade shows you may have the opportunity to meet Government commercial representatives and sector specialists from the Canadian Trade Commissioner Services (TCS), investment promotion agencies (IPAs), and trade promotion organizations (TPOs) that can support your business interests and facilitate a soft landing should you decide to move forward.

“Potential customers, potential suppliers and potential partners can test the feasibility and fitness of the products and/or services you wish to introduce to your target markets. Business associations can provide you with market insights, guidance on how to navigate the market entry process and key contacts, including potential partners, distributors and end-users C-level executives and business owners who can validate the market opportunities you plan to pursue and can share nuances, challenges and constraints in the marketplace.”

Don’t miss out on meeting any of these valuable people because you were too focused on bringing in sales leads.

5. Only attend trade shows that match your marketing objectives

Does attending a trade show fit with your marketing objectives? Companies should base their decision concerning if and how to participate in a trade show on a number of factors.

It’s important to consider the purpose of the trade show, whether or not your target audience will be in attendance, information about other exhibitors, the layout of the show, and how trade shows may or may not fit with your larger marketing plan.

Examine those alongside your company’s objectives in the market to decide if participation in the trade show is the best way to reach those objectives. If your company is merely looking to meet with someone who will be attending a fair, it may not be necessary to exhibit. If the trade show attracts precisely the kinds of people buying the product or service, an exhibit can be extremely worthwhile. These tips and more can be found in the FITTskills International Sales & Marketing course material.

Are trade shows a significant part of your company’s marketing mix? What do you do to ensure you succeed at trade shows?

The post The top 5 tips for a successful trade show straight from the experts appeared first on Trade Ready.

Many companies hesitate to enter export markets because of perceived risk. Certainly there are some legitimate risks to be mitigated. There are also a number of “risks” which are exaggerated and promulgated with common myths.

But there is one fundamental risk which has traditionally challenged export growth – market selection. Technology is quickly helping to obviate that risk and clear the path for more companies to expand internationally.

The first market gamble

Companies considering global expansion typically follow one of three paths to market selection:

1. Follow a customer – an existing domestic customer is going international themselves and requests global support

2. Accidental – an order comes in from somewhere, unsolicited

3. Speculation – “market research” is conducted and an informed “best guess” becomes the basis for the speculative allocation of resources to market entry and development

There’s a reason why many companies that export follow existing customers. In that case, the only barriers are the transactional challenges of compliance and logistics. There’s very little downside for companies in that situation.

Accidental exporters occasionally stumble into success, but typically they develop a series of ad hoc transactions which don’t justify developing an internal infrastructure, but tax the operations team. This common scenario often leads to organizational frustration with the “complexity” of export sales.

The “well researched” approach is the most problematic. Companies realize that they can’t just throw a dart at the map to select an appropriate market successfully. So they research the options. Sometimes they rely on a government agency to assist, while in others the task is handed off to interns, or management takes responsibility.

Regardless of who conducts the research, it’s inherently hypothetical and based on the company’s perspective – not an objective view from the outside-in, as prospects in the target market might see them, their products/services, or their viability as a vendor.

With a theoretically sound selection made, resources are committed – after all, it’s well researched and very likely to succeed, right?

And companies recognize that it takes time. So, based on the researched decision, they often commit substantial resources to market entry. These resources include not only cash, but also management focus diverted from domestic priorities for an extended period.

Committed to their well-researched initiative, they persist through discouraging experiences, confident that patience and hard work will prevail. And after 3 – 5 years of frustration, they rarely wonder whether their market selection process was proper. Instead, the conclusion is typically that “export isn’t for us.”

In short, the risk is that companies commit resources to do “everything right,” yet risk getting it completely wrong – and at great expense.

Let markets “raise their hands”

Technology substantially changes the way that prospects and sellers interact. While sellers used to have to go forth and find prospects, prospects increasingly use the incredible power of the internet to find what they need/want at the time of their choosing.

They often search for ideas and information, and later search for solutions to challenges they have, and then products/services which may help them.

It’s said that there are already more internet connected mobile devices in the world than toothbrushes, and the rate of growth of connectivity shows no signs of slowing. That means that potential buyers globally have the same access to information, and products/services, as your domestic buyers.

This in turn means that great digital marketing, an imperative regardless of your market focus, generates rich data which provides valuable insights.

One can quickly determine, for instance, by country/region:

• who is finding you when they’re searching
• what searches they’re doing (some of this data is direct and some inferred)
• who interacts with your “content” initially
• who interacts consistently
• where leads concentrate
• where substantive, viable projects develop
• and even where you can consummate profitable orders

This approach provides real market intelligence. While it’s no guarantee of success or profitability, it’s a powerful tool both to identify what may be easier markets to enter, and to challenge and validate the traditional research.

Enter every new market agilely

This approach to market identification offers another huge potential benefit: companies can adopt an “agile” model for market entry.

As successful digital marketing generates international traffic, leads, projects and orders, and certain markets evidence themselves to be particularly promising, companies can progress step-by-step. It’s no longer necessary to skip directly to an extensive and expensive “on the ground” commitment.

Instead, companies can progress incrementally by testing assumptions, efficacy and return at each step along the way. And again, they can focus all efforts on markets where they have data to indicate they’re likely to have some traction.

A reasonable progression might look like this:

1. Collect data generated through great digital marketing focused on the domestic market

2. Use early projects to learn about the prospects’ challenges, concerns, buying process, common questions, goals, market barriers, etc.

3. Create some approximate ideal customer profiles, target buyer personas and buying journey maps

4. Begin to optimize some content around those learnings, gradually incorporating local language keywords (from those interactions, not translation!)

5. Adopt a CMS (content management system) that delivers contextually appropriate content (using IP address, for instance, shows a different version of the site to a visitor – not just language, but even primary content, images, etc.)

6. Start to display some content offers, to targeted visitors, that are designed for those markets

7. Transcreate some early articles, landing pages and eventually some offer documents (while translation converts words, and localization considers dialect, context, images, colors, etc. transcreation builds content from the bottom up as it should be locally)

8. Create a local language microsite

9. Undertake sophisticated SEO (TLD/top level domain, hosting from an IP address that corresponds to the TLD, etc.)

All of this can be accomplished from the home office.

Much of this groundwork can be done for less than the cost of a flight to the target market.

And each step will yield data which will be used to refine subsequent steps and inform resource allocation decisions for deeper engagement within markets as well as guide priority of entry into future markets.

And much of the work contributes to improved results across all markets.

It’s a process, not a solution

Is this a substitute for being on the ground building relationships in a market? Of course not. What this does, however, is provides a platform for companies to explore international market opportunities with much lower risk than the traditional approach.

That allows them to iterate inexpensively until they identify great markets for more intense focus, and helps to guide the direction of limited resources with a series of data driven decisions, rather than a gut feeling.

The post Take the gambling out of global expansion by making decisions based on real data appeared first on Trade Ready.