Tradeshow Strategies

I am so excited for this upcoming tradeshow in California this weekend. We have some cool new strategies to increase ROI. It is so difficult at tradeshows because you typically give away promo items and collect business cards and network. All that is well and good but considering how much you spend, it might not be worth it. I am testing out a social media strategy to this tradeshow. I have been posting on our Twitter and Facebook accounts to mention the tweet/post for a chance to win an IPod. I am curious to see if people who will be attending the show are receiving our social media messages. Also, at the show I will have a laptop opened to these social media channels and encourage people to sign up to interact with us right there. Then, I will update/tweet at the show, take and post videos and photos, and hopefully get a significant increase in social media participation. We are also taking advantage of a new tradeshow technology where when participants come to our booth, they have a name badge with a bar code which we can scan and gather their contact info electronically. In addition, we will have interest forms to be filled out if they want to receive more information about our programs. This will get them into our automated prospect marketing procedures. They get entered in, and we don't have to do a thing. We set the parameters, what they receive, how they can opt-in or opt-out, and the number of marketing pieces they receive before they are taken off the prospect list. All this with little effort on our part. Technology rules!