Sowing Seeds of Success: The Trade Show Harvest Cycle

To many, especially those in finance, trade shows are expensive and more of a boondoggle for those who lead the traveling circus of parties and dinner tabs. In fact, after headcount, trade shows generally represent the largest line item in a marketing budget, especially for small to mid-market vendors, making it an easy target for CFOs. That view can be short-sighted. 

For CMOs in the ever-evolving landscape of post-pandemic demand generation, trade shows have re-emerged as fertile grounds where the seeds of business connections are sown. Much like agriculture, this dynamic environment provides a unique platform for marketers to plant the initial seeds of awareness, carefully nurture their growth, and ultimately harvest the bountiful yield of customer engagement and revenue. Not every trade show is fertile ground, but marketing budget decisions should be based on the holistic value of all customer journey stages, not just the short-term payoff of signed business at a particular event.  Here are some tips to maximize the long-term sustainable yield from this year’s tradeshow season.

Tilling the Soil: Preparing for Growth

Before the planting begins, a farmer meticulously prepares the soil, ensuring it’s fertile and ready for the seeds. Similarly, the groundwork for a successful trade show involves thorough preparation: understanding the market landscape, identifying target audiences, and crafting messages that will resonate and take root. The more data on potential attendees, the better. Any attendees with the right persona from strategic target accounts should have a dossier that calls out their current needs and potential hot buttons. That information and other goals should be shared with everyone traveling for the show in a pre-meeting. Effective planning prepares the soil for the seeds of connection to have the best environment to flourish.

Planting Seeds of Awareness: The Initial Engagement

As seeds are carefully placed in the prepared soil, so are the initial engagements at a trade show. If creating awareness is the primary goal of the field marketing investment, ask organizers for data on audience turnover. Some shows bring the same people back every year. Building a strong recurring presence over multiple years may make sense for longer sales cycles. For shorter cycles, quantity may be more important than quality. Each interaction serves as an opportunity to plant a seed of awareness within the minds of the decision-makers and the broader buying committee. These seeds, once sown, hold the promise of future yield, contingent on the care and engagement they receive thereafter.

Nurturing Growth: Deep Engagement and Relationship Building

Post-planting, a farmer’s job shifts to nurturing: watering, providing nutrients, and ensuring adequate sunlight. In the trade show context, this translates into deepening relationships through building an authentic connection. People hire who they like, and effective follow-up, providing valuable information, and engaging in meaningful conversations are likable vendor traits. It involves a delicate balance, like adjusting water and nutrients, ensuring that prospects are nurtured but not overwhelmed, and guiding them towards maturity and closer to a buying decision.

Harvesting Ready Fruit: Converting Leads into Customers

The harvest is the most rewarding phase of farming and trade show marketing. After seasons of diligent preparation, planting, and nurturing, the ripe fruit of your labor is ready to gather. In trade show terms, this is when leads become opportunities, and opportunities become customers.

The harvest culminates past efforts and a starting point for future service, retention, and references. Having representatives of the onboarding or success teams is an excellent investment for engaging with current accounts and providing prospects with confidence in the post-contract relationship. Like any fruit, those seeds are tomorrow’s harvest.

Crop Rotation and Sustainable Growth: Building Long-term Relationships

Just as farmers practice crop rotation to maintain soil health and sustainability, marketers use the insights and relationships gained from trade shows to diversify and adapt their strategies. It’s about understanding which crops (or engagement tactics) work best in different fields (or markets) and adjusting accordingly to ensure long-term, sustainable growth. Also, bringing a leader from the product team can re-calibrate priorities around current customer demands and the competitive market. This approach not only preserves the vitality of your marketing ecosystem but also ensures that your efforts yield a diverse and robust harvest over time.

The Cycle Continues: From Harvest to Preparation for the Next Season

As the cycle of agriculture loops from harvest to preparation for the next planting season, so does the trade show marketer’s journey. Depending on the average sales cycle, each show is an opportunity to refine your approach, gather new insights, and prepare for another cycle of planting, nurturing, and harvesting. In any case, a show should provide ample opportunities for deal progression throughout the buyer journey. Make it a priority to measure and report on this progression. You can also develop simple but objective measures of a tradeshow’s return – think beyond the contracts that result immediately after a particular show.

• Emphasize net new sales-ready leads (ICP accounts) over any other lead measure. Badge scans of everyone who picked up a free stuffed bear for their kid will not matter in the long run. Net new meetings are the easiest to attribute to the show’s cost credibly.
• Measure deal progression among the leads you brought into the show. How many engagements did you have, and are there now clear next steps to reach the next stage? Your CRM data should show a surge in all activity from current opportunities with each show.
• Current customers count. You should schedule meetings with every current account you have. These meetings may not transfer to revenue that can be attributed to a particular show, but they solidify a relationship, making that customer referenceable and an easier contract renewal.

In conclusion, adopting the agricultural framework for understanding trade show marketing offers a rich perspective on cyclicality and growth potential. Just as farming requires patience, diligence, and adaptability, so does cultivating leads and relationships through field marketing and trade shows. By embracing this natural cycle, marketers can nurture their fields with precision and care, reaping the rewards of a well-crafted strategy and hard work. Happy planting.