It can be fun and exciting to exhibit at a trade show—meeting directly with attendees and networking with colleagues—but you also know that behind all that socializing and energy is the practical need to develop business. You want to generate leads and turn them into customers. Having a good strategy in place can help you maximize your trade show lead generation and make the most of your presence at trade shows.
Thankfully, the stage for your success has been set, as the trade show industry itself has become big business. According to a report from GM Insights, the value of the exhibition market was $39.4 billion in 2023, and poised to grow with each subsequent year. Even just a tiny slice of that pie can mean great financial success for you and your company.
While you may have others, lead generation is one of the main ways to gauge your trade show ROI. How many leads you get, and then how many of those leads turn into actual customers, are measurable indicators of your trade show success.
So, how do you generate more qualified leads at a trade show? The following trade show lead generation ideas can help you get there.
How to generate leads at trade shows
Successful lead generation at trade shows comes down to two basic things: planning and execution. As part of your trade show strategy, you need to plan things out ahead of time to bring your A-game to a trade show. Then, you need to follow through and make the most of every minute you have at that event.
Pre-show preparations
Planning ahead will help you target the most qualified leads possible. Plus, it will give you the tools and confidence you need to succeed during a trade show.
Determine your most qualified leads
Who are your customers? Who do you want to become your customers? Do some research prior to a trade show to identify the industry, demographics, income, etc. of the people or companies most likely to be interested in your brand and its products or services. With that information in hand, you can tailor your presentations, demonstrations, and marketing materials to speak directly to your target leads.
Create a booth that attracts
As your budget allows, make your booth the place to be. Use attractive display elements that will catch trade show attendees’ eye and draw them over. Once they’re there, make sure that your booth feels welcoming and comfortable, with a flow and sense of space that encourages them to spend time to ask questions and have conversations with your staff.
Bring in the right staff
Next to your display, the personalities and professionalism of your booth’s staff are what will best engage potential leads. For that, you want your booth populated by people who are friendly and knowledgeable. These are people who will willingly answer questions and encourage longer conversations without feeling overly pushy.
Promote your presence
Let your social media followers and visitors to your website know that your company is going to be exhibiting at an upcoming trade show. Lots of potential leads will appreciate the opportunity to ask questions face-to-face and see products in real life. For them, being able to do so is what will take them from a lead to a customer.
Schedule customer appointments ahead of time
Use the trade show venue as an opportunity to meet up with attendees who you know are already interested in your company. Setting up appointments beforehand will help you fill in times that could be slow and keep you busy. A possible side effect of having already-interested parties at your booth could be other attendees stopping there as well to see what the buzz is all about.
At the event
You’ve done your research, you’ve built an eye-catching booth, and you have your best staff working in it. Now’s the time to make the most of your trade show opportunities and generate leads.
Stay engaged
Over the course of a trade show, with its fluctuations of traffic and hours on your feet, it can be tempting to just sit down. However, doing so can mean lost leads. For that, while they’re in the booth, encourage staff to stay off their phones, make eye contact with passers-by and, very importantly, smile.
Offer incentives
People like freebies, especially high-quality ones. Have good-looking totes, pens, and other swag available for visitors to your booth. You can advertise show-specific deals or raffle off a high-profile item for leads who sign up. One caveat here: prizes can encourage non-qualified leads. So, to limit that effect, be sure to require more in-depth information with entries, such as entrants’ contact information, actual level of interest in your brand, and/or their agreement to get more information from you.
Keep track of all leads
As a measure of ROI, you want to track total foot traffic as well as your more engaged, qualified leads. However, you need your staff focusing on customer engagements, not manually counting people. Raffle entries can be a great way to track a lot of booth traffic, but they won’t capture everyone. The use of automated lead capture tools can help you with accurately collecting leads at trade shows without interfering with relationship-building.
Following up with leads after trade shows
You may generate some leads that are ready to become customers right away. That’s great! However, you will also generate leads that are still thinking and need time to be nurtured. To keep your brand at the front of their minds, you need to follow up and stay in communication.
Follow up quickly
Don’t wait to communicate with promising trade show leads. Reach out immediately with personalized emails to keep the momentum going. Reiterate any trade show incentives. You and your sales team will quickly get a feel for where leads are in their decision-making process and determine if they’re about to convert or if they will require some longer-term lead nurturing beforehand.
Get feedback
Follow-up emails can also be a great way to get feedback from leads. Did they like your trade show display? Did they get the answers they needed about your products or service? Is there anything else that they think you could have done better? Such information can be invaluable for planning future trade show appearances.
Analyze data
After an event concludes, you should have access to a lot of useful data. Use the data you’ve collected and the data that trade show organizers have collected about attendance, engagement numbers, popular exhibits or presentations, and so on. Compile it all together with attendee feedback and your own impressions to create a thorough event debrief that you can share and discuss with stakeholders.
How technology can help with trade show lead generation
As suggested previously, there are ways that technology can help to automate and streamline your data collection and trade show lead generation processes. The right trade show solutions can help to make those workflows much more efficient and frictionless.
Capture leads at trade shows
Manually counting attendees and determining how qualified they might be as a lead is time-consuming, to say the least. Plus, it distracts from the goal of building relationships with leads and converting them to customers. Lead capture technology can help you stay focused on the task at hand while accurately gathering and sorting leads.
You simply scan in a person’s ID badge, business card, QR code, etc. Then, your lead capture software helps you to segment and prioritize these scanned-in leads with automatic lead scoring (ranking), and it sends them to your sales team for follow up. Plus, it does all of this with the utmost security, keeping your leads’ private information safe and sound.
Schedule meetings
Don’t let a manual form be the reason you lose a lead. An automated meeting scheduler makes it seamless to transition from trade show conversations to more formal, in-depth customer meetings. No interruptions, no hesitation.
While useful for setting up post-event meetings, you can also use your scheduling tool to pre-schedule appointments at the event. What’s more, you can track your appointments in a collaborative workflow with the help of automatic notifications of calendar updates by all relevant parties.
You can even use this tech to report on your meetings, as it records and aggregates all data related to scheduled meetings, offering easy-to-interpret, actionable insights.
Trade show lead generation FAQs
The following FAQs should address any further questions you might have about how to effectively generate and collect leads at trade shows:
How do you track leads at trade shows?
The simplest and most effective way to track trade show leads is to use a lead capture tool that allows you to track, measure, and report on all leads.
How do you track leads at a virtual trade show?
You may not be able to look leads directly in the eye. However, a virtual trade show can offer you the benefit of automatic lead tracking, depending on the event organizers’ chosen platform. Attendee questions and other requests for information are digitally recorded, making it easy to track interest and qualified leads.
How many leads should you expect from a trade show?
There is no hard and fast figure you can always expect. The number of leads you might get from a trade show is dependent on several variables, such as the industry you’re in, the anticipated number of show attendees, the trade show location, how long the event runs, and so on.
What is trade show lead retrieval?
Trade show lead retrieval is another term for trade show lead capture, which is a record of someone who is interested in your products or service and might eventually be converted to an actual customer.
