B-to-B Events

Though Bell Helicopter’s booth at last month’s Heli-Expo at the Dallas Convention Center (Feb. 11-14) was nearly an acre in size, its integrated marketing strategy went well beyond its footprint to deliver results. The company’s program centered around a teaser campaign that drove more than 2,000 attendees to the reveal of its latest Bell 525 Relentless aircraft at the show and about 18,000 eyeballs (7,000 were non-employees) to the webcast version of the event.

Across the U.S. and around the world, trade show budgets are coming back, albeit slowly. As a result, trade show programs are getting refined and redefined as exhibitors try to make deeper connections and get more efficient with their spends. Here are five best practices for trade show marketers from two industry vets, Philips and Dell.

Go off the Show Floor

Truck and engine manufacturer Navistar on March 21 held a panel on a hot button issue for the industry—natural gas. The VIP event took place one day prior to the opening of the Mid-America Trucking Show, an annual forum for the heavy-duty trucking industry and the largest trucking show in North America, held March 22 to 24 in Louisville, KY.

Build it and they will come. That’s the idea behind SiMan, an 18-foot tall, 700-pound glowing behemoth built and decorated by attendees over two days at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) held this past September in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. It was a simple way to engage and inform attendees about a more complicated concept—intelligent connected solutions and embedded technology that is key to the future of computing. SiMan helped drive the message home.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all quickly becoming vital contributors to b-to-b event programs. As attendee communication tools, channels for fast and cost-effective content propagation and forums for feedback and real-time troubleshooting, mainstream social media is changing the way conferences and user events get planned and managed. But for many event marketers, the strategic value of LinkedIn still remains a mystery. Is it a pure networking tool for industry job seekers?