Now is not the time to invest thousands of dollars into an unknown venture, by exhibiting in the big cities.  Unless you’ve been exhibiting at these big national shows already, I suggest you wait on signing up for the premium space.

Now is the time to look to low cost or no cost exhibiting options.  Turn to your local chamber of commerce, SBDC, city planning department, shopping mall, library and internet.

Ask your chamber to host a small business fair.  A small Xpressions SNAP tabletop will make you look more professional than all the other businesses at the fair.  Attention often goes to the exhibitor that looks the biggest and most professional.

Create a seminar for your local small business development center.  Helping new business people get their businesses started is a great way to get known in your community.

Start a company blog site.  Write about your product and or service offering.  Not from a sales pitch point of view, but as a how-to guide or helpful resource.  Use your blogsite like a tradeshow venue: exhibit your company logo along the side bar with a link to your company website.

Pitch a tent on main street.  Not a camping tent, but a business tent.  Ask City Hall, of course, you need a permit to take sidewalk space.  If there are no local trade shows appropriate for what you offer, then setting up your own exhibit downtown can gain you some new eye balls.

Sponsor your kids sports club.  Be sure to setup a place for the parents to watch the event.  Using your company tent is a great way to increase company exposure and since you are sponsoring the event, there is no extra cost for the exhibit.

Give out company bags at the shopping mall.  This strategy has been working for the big clothing stores for decades.  Custom printed bags are not too expensive and your logo is seen be the bag holder and people around them every time the bag is used.

Post flyers at the grocery store.

Put a stack of business cards on display at the dentist’s office.

Attend city council meetings and hand out cards.

And the list goes on…  Finding inexpensive (even FREE) venues is easy.

Ed Bejarana
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.

Exhibiting at a tradeshow costs money, no two ways about it.  You can do your show on the cheap, but cheap looking handouts, flyers and exhibits translates into less attention.

This article is NOT about your display, but your trade show marketing effort.  If you are going to invest in exhibit marketing, then pull out all the stops and take advantage of FREE pre-show and post-show internet marketing.

People who attend tradeshows look up information about the show before and after the event.  Your pre-show marketing effort should be associating your business name with the trade show name: so when show attendees search, they find your company name along with the show name.

Use business blogging (a FREE blog site on WordPress.com will work) to blog about the trade show and your reason for attending.  Your wordpress blog is NOT a time to sell, rather a time to build relevant keyword associations to your company name AND the trade show name.

When blogging, you should write about the demographics connection and why your company decided to speak to that particular audience.  Be specific, write about how women who own their own service based business (if that is a demographic of a potential show attendee) are an important aspect of your business.  Write about ALL the show demographics if they apply to your business.

Do not relate your blog articles to customers, they are not customers yet, they are not even prospects; they are internet searchers looking for information about the show.  You will have plenty of time to sell later.  Right now you are making marketing impressions.  Write about the show and include your company name as it will appear on your tradeshow booth, business cards, flyers, etc…

Plan on publishing at least one article per week.  Use my FREE Business Blog Article Outline as a starting point for formatting your blog article.

Why?

Basic marketing theory 101 is it takes seven impressions of your business name to stick.  Between your blog site, website, tradeshow exhibitors list, common area signage, trade show booth, business cards AND post-show advertisement; you’ll have seven hits.

Ed Bejarana
Zenith Exhibits, Inc.
BusinessBlogging.net is the internet marketing division for Zenith Exhibits, Inc.

Because this subject is so BIG, I have broken it into three parts and published it on three blog sites.

On this site I covered changes to your face-to-face, trade show marketing efforts and how to use internet marketing to improve your ROI.

Over on PortlandBusinessCommunity.com you can read more about business blogging concept and using community blog sites.

Over on BusinessBlogging.net you can read more about social marketing part of the discussion.