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As a new business, making the step to exhibiting can seem daunting. After all, it can come with a fairly big upfront investment so you’ll want to be sure that it can deliver a positive return on investment. Luckily for you, it can. Here are 5 reasons why your new business should exhibit:
1. Proven to have a good ROI
When carefully planned, exhibiting is proven to have one of the best ROIs in comparison with other marketing methods. If you’re exhibiting for hard sales and leads, then it’s a proven medium to help you meet your aims.
In order to get a good ROI, you need to make sure you carefully plan your event. Once you’ve worked out how much the event will cost to attend (after adding up all those hidden costs too of transport, stand space, displays, etc), work out how many leads or sales you have to make to break even. From here, you can set your exhibiting goals to define how successful your event was.
2. Get feedback
There aren’t many other means of advertising that get you face-to-face with your future customers. It’s a great time to ask them questions and see which products they like and what they are looking for from you. It can be a real eye-opener to receive this feedback to help you grow and develop your new business in the right direction.
3. Establish your business
There’s something to be said about being seen at exhibitions – being shoulder to shoulder with your competitors and allowing visitors to make a direct comparison between you to see who is best for them.
Of course, this also provides you with a perfect opportunity to establish yourself as part of the market and be seen as an equal player. To make sure you’re seen and heard above the noise, make sure you have stunning exhibition displays.
4. Brand awareness
If you choose the right exhibition to attend for your business, then you’ll meet highly targeted customers. There’s a potential for hundreds of people who could buy your products or services to find out more about you.
Remember that brand awareness plays a huge role in a purchasing decision – so being known before the start of a sales cycle is really important! So even those that don’t directly convert to anything more now, could do in the future.
5. Increase your data
Being able to increase the number of people you’re in contact with about your business is really important in order to nurture them for repeat sales, increase their sales value and even convert them from a lead to a sale.
By hosting a game, or competition on your stand you can ask for people to add their business cards to a bowl or enter their contact details into a tablet to be entered to win a prize. Of course, make sure that they understand that in exchange for their data, you’ll contact them. From there, you’ve now got an opportunity to send them your email marketing messages as well as to phone them post-event to grow your data and ongoing awareness of your brand.
Also read: Challenges of the Event Planning Industry
About the Author
Sathesh is a freelance writer based in London. His main interests include economics, business methods, and labour relations. He is a History graduate from the University of Southampton.
