Maximize Your Trade Show Experience
 by Gene Muchanski, Editor
The Dive Industry Professional

There is more to trade show marketing than we realize.  Much more.  With over 40 years of experience attending and exhibiting at trade and consumer shows, I think of trade show marketing as the tip of an iceberg in our face-to-face marketing strategy.  On the surface, trade shows may seem like a short duration event that is very expensive and terribly time-consuming, but after you do a deep dive into this intriguing subject, you quickly see how integrated and interconnected trade shows can be to your overall sales and marketing strategy and success.

We could go into an incredible amount of detail about trade show marketing, and I promise we will in the months to come, but for now, let’s just talk about trade shows in the context that most of us are familiar with.  That is the diving industry’s annual trade show, the DEMA Show.  If you were one of the 490 exhibiting companies who were in New Orleans two weeks ago, along with the thousands of attendees, presenters, exhibitors, and sponsors, you may think that DEMA is over for the year.  Well, it’s not!  Not by a long shot.  As far as trade shows go, there is still a lot of DEMA Show work that needs to be done.  The moment we all returned to our offices from the DEMA Show, we officially entered into the post-show part of the trade show experience.  That’s the part of the process where we follow up with the people who expressed an interest in our company and its programs, products, and services.  We call all of them “Leads” and we could classify them further as contacts, leads, or hot leads.    They are usually the people that we saw, or spoke with, or got a business card from, and who may not have completed a buying decision to our satisfaction.  It’s up to us now to make contact with them again and complete the sales process.

Rhonda Abrams of The Planning Shop, wrote in her book, Trade Show In A Day; “According to industry sources, up to 80 percent of trade show leads aren’t followed up.”  Think of all the time money, and manpower that you spent on the DEMA Show process.  The average company spends $5,000 per person per booth, for booth space, airfare, hotel, and food.  And that is not counting employee wages and trade show supplies. Divide that by the 31 hours of the show and you quickly realize that you are spending over $161 per hour per person to educate attendees, acquire contacts, get sales leads, and sell products. And 80% of you are not going to follow up on the leads you get at the show?

Industries across the globe participate in trade shows for one major reason.  They work.  Convention Centers and Hotel Meeting Venues have expanded greatly in the past few decades.  The COVID pandemic set the Shows & Events Industry back a few years, but we are starting to see a recovery in meeting and convention venue bookings.  We thought that digital conventions would replace face-to-face events during the pandemic, but that just didn’t happen.  For a while there were concerns about face-to-face, digital, and hybrid models competing within the meetings and conventions industry for the leading venue type position, but the jury is still out on that one.  I believe that each industry must deal with their own trade show venue choices to see which one works best for them.

Last month’s DEMA Show in New Orleans was my 38^th DEMA Show, so this wasn’t my first rodeo.  Since my first DEMA Show in 1982 (San Antonio, TX), I have only missed 3 DEMA Shows and 1 DEMA Show missed me (2020 New Orleans).  In all that time, I have exhibited in the Manufacturing, Training Agency, Dive Travel Wholesaler, Trade Association, and Non-Profit Organization stakeholder groups.  As an attendee I have registered as a Retail Dive Store Buyer and a Media Professional on assignment.

Each time I exhibited or attended a DEMA Show I had to plan and prepare myself for achieving outcomes that were in the best interest of my company at the time.  As a Trade Show Professional, you quickly figure out that different stakeholder groups have different reasons for being at a trade show and therefore, different agendas.  It helped me early on in my career to think of trade shows and event venues as a blank canvas awaiting my input.  I also understood that different show and event producers run their events based on their own agendas and not ours.  Over the years, industry planners have customized their trade show experience to meet the needs of their companies.  You should do the same for your company.

As an exhibitor, attendee, and media professional, I thought the DEMA Show in New Orleans was too big and too spread out.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing and it certainly is not a criticism.  DEMA Show has become, in my opinion, a trade show, a professional development conference, and a consumer show. It was designed as a Trade Show in 1977 to bring diving equipment manufacturers (sellers) and retail dive stores (buyers) together.   In 1982 when I first exhibited at DEMA Show in San Antonio, there were 182 exhibitors and about 2,400 dive stores in the United States.  The qualified retail buyers had plenty of time to meet with all their top vendors, attend the big DEMA Party, attend the Film Show, and still have private social time with their peers.  The dynamics of the exhibit hall has changed over the years, from order writing to open view-only displays of diving equipment, training, and travel.  The exhibit hall attracts qualified retail buyers, and Dive Industry Professionals who are interested in diving equipment, training programs, travel opportunities, and lifestyle products.  The big show party and the film shows are gone now, replaced with smaller social gatherings, and private dinners for elite buyers.  What hasn’t changed is that revenue from selling booth space is what pays for the venue.  Without an exhibit hall, there would be no show.

The concept of the show being a Professional Development Conference is understood by everyone in the industry but never really talked about much or even capitalized on.  In today’s industry, we are looking at about 1,000 dive stores.  Even if all 1,000 stores brought 2 people to the show, it would not compare to the 200,000 active Diving Educational Professionals in the industry.  The only problem is that is that without revenue from the exhibit hall, tickets to an annual professional development conference would cost well over $1,000.  So, we need the exhibitors to keep the cost of the ticket sales down.

I don’t see what is wrong with having an annual dive consumer show.  After all, we are all consumers of diving equipment, training programs, travel opportunities, and lifestyle products.  Regardless of whether you are a Dive Industry Trade Professional or a Dive Industry Educational Professional, we are all diving consumers.  Answer this for me.  If you walked up to a travel booth at the show and wanted to book a trip for you and your spouse, do you think the travel vender would tell you no?  Do you think they would send you over to a Dive Travel Wholesaler’s booth or write you up and take your deposit?

So, if you agree that the DEMA Show is a combination of Trade Show, Professional Development Conference, and Consumer Dive Show, shouldn’t it be a yearlong event?  We think so.  I propose that we integrate our annual trade show, annual professional development conference, and our regional consumer dive shows into a year-long event.  We could construct a number of pre-show and post-show campaigns, before and after a number of at-show, face-to-face events, and tie them all into an ongoing digital convention.  Seriously though, until we can incorporate all our buyers and sellers needs into one major annual event, we may be able to integrate our efforts into cooperating regional and national events, meetings, conferences, and conventions.  It is very do-able to strategically plan and achieve our desired outcomes on a Global Diving Community level.  We start by maximizing our trade show experience on a show-by-show basis over a period of time, at a local, regional, and national level.

To help Dive Industry Professionals maximize their trade show experience, we can share some of our education, experience, results, and opinions with you as it relates to our own experience on the trade show circuit.  Please understand that this is our opinion, based on our experience.  That’s why they call this an editorial.

Attending a trade or consumer show is not a one-time event.  It is a part of your annual sales and marketing strategy. Like a puzzle that has a pre-designed outcome, there are many individual yet interconnected components to a trade show strategy.  In my opinion, trade shows and events need to be studied, planned, executed, and reviewed.   To prepare yourself for a successful show or event, you should start off by reading Trade Show in a Day.   I also recommend you do some research on display manufacturers who publish white papers on the finer points of exhibiting at shows and events and who conduct local seminars and webinars about exhibiting.  Skyline Exhibits is an excellent source at www.skyline.com

The planning part of a trade show is very important.  The number one question to ask yourself is why are you exhibiting in the first place?  We suggest you establish a purpose for exhibiting first.  Are you exhibiting to educate, socialize, or sell?  Are you looking to acquire new customers or to meet with existing clients?  Maybe it’s even to connect with former customers that you are hoping to re-capture as current customers.  A major question to ask yourself is, “Are my customers going to be there?”  A major show promoter once told me that it was not his job to make sure his show attracted customers for me, but that it was my job to make sure my customers came to his show.  I totally disagree with that philosophy.  In my opinion, if you want companies (sellers) to exhibit at your show, you have to do your best to attract qualified buyers to attend.  The Surf Expo has 2 Buyer Relations Professionals on staff to persuade Qualified Retail Buyers to attend the expos.  Registration is free for Retail Buyers at the 2 Surf Expos.  That’s because a trade show is about selling products or taking orders from qualified buyers.

The execution part of a trade show that works best for us includes pre-show, at-show, and post-show components.  For a DEMA Show in November, we start our pre-show campaign on September 1 and run it up to the opening day of DEMA.  Our at-show phase is the 4 days of DEMA plus 2 days before and 2 days after.  It’s the entire time we spend at the show, because face-to-face time is the best part of a show or event.  Our post-show phase starts the day we leave DEMA and finishes when our follow-up on all of our leads is complete.  The review phase begins immediately after the show and everything we learned goes into the next year’s planning phase.

If your trade show strategy is well balanced using planning, execution, and review, you can maximize your shows & events experience.  Based on historical data, we know that 75% of exhibitors and attendees are the same people. If you know who exhibited or attended last year, you are 75% of your way there.  Only about 25% of exhibitors and attendees are new every year, roughly speaking.  Our advice is to have a strong pre-show campaign and close as many sales as you can.  If you are successful at that then you can shift your focus to a smaller number of uncommitted buyers and spend mor time socializing at the show than selling.  That’s what we call strategic selling and maximizing your time, money, and manpower efforts at shows & events.

This is an exciting time to become part of the Global Diving Business Network.  For more information about target marketing, contact Gene Muchanski, Executive Director of the Dive Industry Association, 2294 Botanica Circle, West Melbourne, FL 32904.  Phone: 321-914-3778.  Email: gene@diveindustry.net  Web: www.diveindustry.net

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