Many business owners believe that expos and big shows are the best way to promote and grow their business. But are they?
Expos and Shows are expensive with costs for hiring the space, stands for displaying the goods, paying staff to help with the long hours of a show, marketing materials, transport costs, accommodation and meals if you’re away from home and there’s always other costs that you just didn’t see coming.
So you need to set out what the end results you want from the expo to be – how much money do you want to make, how many new spending customers do you want, how many warm leads do you want from the show and what size customer list do you want?
I learned my lessons very early on with an expensive show that everything went wrong. Customers didn’t turn up, the show was a fizzer and I was out of pocket many thousands of dollars and none of my show goals were achieved. I was fortunate that I don’t sell food or a limited seasonal product.
So when I started figuring out what went wrong and how I could have reduced my risks I started seeing other ways to get the benefits of shows.
I decided the local trade show was an expo worth exploring so I went along to see what is involved, get talking to exhibitors about what they like and dislike about the show, who was the competition – what they sold, how they managed customers, what business systems they had and what was their approach to customer service.
I came out of it thinking it was an expensive project and wanting to figure out how to get the benefits of their customers without the cost.
The trade show is run by an industry association with two levels of membership – the broad retail customers level and the more expensive wholesalers membership level.
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