B-to-B Events

Danish shoe brand Ecco hosted a special event for fashion bloggers on April 18 at the Scandinavia House on New York City’s Park Avenue to promote the brand’s couture chops in addition to its legendary comfort. Ecco took over the upper level and outdoor balcony at the venue where it displayed its new collections and walked attendees through its men’s and women’s offerings.

How to bring your brand message to life at a trade show? Let us count the ways. There’s signage and graphics, high-tech experiences and theatre presentations, press events and cocktail parties, to name a few. But trade shows can also be a forum to release a brand’s more creative side. Like Lenovo did this year at CES when it hired Hollywood stuntmen to ride through Las Vegas on top of taxis and limos. Or Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, which turned rubber duckies and conga lines into business-generating engagement tools.

If you want to have a meaningful engagement with attendees in your booth, the first thing you have to do, after you get them there, is to encourage them to stick around. After all, your booth is an ideal touch point for cementing face-to-face relationships and providing hands-on information about your product or service. But you’re competing with hundreds of other exhibitors for the attendees’ time and attention.

In this regular series, EM brings you tips and tricks from pros and experts who’ve been eating social media marketing for breakfast. So eat up, and check us out on Twitter @eventmarketer and Facebook.com/eventmarketer for more.

The days of in-booth demos and glassy-eyed product presentations are quickly going the way of the fax machine. In their place are trade show programs that are heavy on pre-show promotion, in-booth technology and laser-focused lead qualification strategies. Maybe the biggest shift changing the face of the trade show landscape is the consumer-generated experience. No longer are your prospects and customers content to merely pass by and act as receptacles of information.