Q: What is best practice now?
A: As with every product, trade shows grow by retaining customers year on year. Customers will stay as long as you continue to provide something they value. Your trade show must evolve continuously as the needs of your customers change. Good knowledge of the macro regulatory, social, and economic factors will help, but most trade shows are not built on complex analysis and strategic plans, they are built on relationships, gut feel, and repetition.
Private equity likes trade shows because repetition creates predictable results that generate loads of cash (paid upfront). The on-site rebook is the jewel in the crown, maintaining the high customer retention rates that drive the growth whilst allowing you to issue invoices a year ahead.
Rebooking is a tried and tested process that uses the fear of losing a stand position to motivate the purchase. There are many ways to approach rebooking and big decisions to make, such as how much you change your floorplan year on year, do you offer first refusal, do you offer a cool off... The factor that will have the biggest impact on your success is how early you start. Start your rebook six weeks out and aim to have half your floorplan for next year full before you open the doors.
The annualised activity plan, often referred to as the show cycle, is the blueprint, and the closer you stick to the plan the better the outcomes. For many, including myself, the rebook often initiates that next show cycle. Best practice would see strategising and an updating of your plan before rushing headfirst into another sales cycle. Any positioning, branding, or messaging changes need to happen before the rebook commences. The rebook starts the sales and marketing campaign for the next year, and you do not want to change message mid campaign.
This means that about four months before you go onsite, you are writing the plan for the following year. At four months out, you know how the event will perform, with year-on-year trends for sales and visitor registrations always surprisingly similar!
Current best practice starts with knowing your customers’ needs, having a good plan that starts far earlier than feels necessary, and obsessively sticking to your schedules. These tried and tested cycles of activity excite the largest private equity houses.
Q: How do you see it changing in the future?
A: We are an industry built on playing customers off each other to create urgency. The question to ponder is how we do this in a faster paced world. The annualised repetition of show cycles becomes challenged in a fast paced, information saturated environment, for which a year is far too far ahead to think about.
Face-to-face annual ‘industry’ gatherings will remain especially important in our digital-first world. But the only people who will remember that the gathering is annual will be the organisers! For our exhibitors, they may well plan quarterly, and for visitors, it is just that show next week they want to check out...
Looking ahead, organisers must still understand and meet the needs of their customers. The difference will be your ability to adapt. Be ready to innovate mid cycle, flex plans as needs change and respond to customers’ needs.
The ability to adapt comes from good foundations, and the 16-month cycle must be in place. Schedules and milestones can be built on with adaptations and innovation, but flexing without a strong core will leave your show plans wildly out of control.
Best practice in the future will still start with knowing your customers’ needs. And it will still require that comprehensive plan the investors dream about. You must obsessively stick to your plan, until you decide you need to adapt. Get good at planning, and at changing plans quickly, and moving the team to the new plan.
Three top tips
1. Evolve more frequently, changing as rapidly as your customer. Tweaks to the proposition are essential, so rewrite your business plan frequently. The plan needs to start from what is happening in the market, what that means for your exhibitors / visitors, and what that means for your show.
2. Ensure your visitor experience works for short attention spans. Immersive multisensory experiences are possible at trade shows. Keep the schedule full, varied, and high energy. If attendees change schedule, do not fight it, let people get distracted. Let attendees jump from stand to stand, whilst also providing space for them to take a video call or mindfully escape.
3. Set clear budgets and manage costs ruthlessly. Poorly managed trade shows can rack up colossal bills very quickly. The ability to flex plans without losing control of the cost line takes discipline and real-time tracking of spend. The more comprehensive your budget and the more controlled your procurement, the better prepared you are to do things differently.
Join Tim and the other contributors to our Events Special on Wednesday, 13 November for a Q&A webinar when you will have the opportunity to put questions to them.
This article was included in the Events Special, published by InPublishing in October 2024. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
