All too often I hear contractors say that home shows are not worth it. However, for a lot of contractors, this is one of the best potential lead sources of the entire year. The question is: will you maximize your leads or will you leave the show unsatisfied with the number of good leads that you get?
There are some trade show secrets that need to be practiced to make your experience a positive one. After all, you wouldn’t see so many contractors entering the show every year if they weren’t getting enough business.
So how do they do it? First, you have to have a trade show plan. You must know what it is you want to get out of the show before you do any other planning. You can’t know what you need to do at the show unless you know what you want from the show. –Assume that your goal is to get 5 new kitchen renovations from the show. All your marketing materials talk about how you can do great renovations, on time and on budget and your brochure shows a beautiful master bathroom and state of the art basement. The displays in your booth focus on before and after shots of the outside of a house.
If this sounds like your display then people will be walking by your booth so confused about your marketing message that they will skip right on by and you will not even have a chance to talk with them about the kitchen renovation they were planning. Even worse, you will see them stop by the kitchen manufacturer who is displaying beautiful kitchens, 3 booths down from you.
So take a really good look at your goals for the show and make sure that your marketing information and your message to home show visitors supports your goals. You will have a far greater chance of finding the 5 kitchen renovations that are hiding in the sea of people attending the show.
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2 Comments » for Home show strategies
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Dear Mike
The article is called home show strategies, but you don’t give us any. You give an example of a confusing marketing method, but don’t tell us why it was confusing. In my humble opinion, there is no useful information at all in this article. Perhaps you can re-write this with some helpful tips for those who participate in home shows.
Mark
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the feedback. In terms of strategies, the first and most important strategy is to have a trade show plan. Know what it is that you are expecting to get out of the show. Typically, there are so many people at these shows that you can’t talk to everyone. So it is key to make sure that your booth attracts the type of leads that you are looking for. To do so, you have to know what what you want. From there, everything in your booth and the message the people working your booth are giving, has to be consistent with the type of leads you want. If your booth looks like the example in the article, trade show visitors will be confused about what type of customer you are looking for and won’t stop at your booth. You have seconds to attract a visitor so your message has to be very clear.