Maximize Trade Show Effectiveness for Your Marketing Team

Last updated Apr 26, 2024

Trade shows are a key part of marketing for many companies, small and large. These industry events provide a concentrated opportunity to connect with a targeted audience, gathered in one location. For marketing teams, trade shows and conferences are often a valuable source of leads. Plus, participating at these events increases brand awareness and may lead to valuable partnerships and connections. If you’ve been using a spreadsheet to plan schedules, organize ideas, and keep your team coordinated, here’s a better option: Teamup is visual, collaborative, user-friendly and great on mobile.

Make the most of trade show marketing

Many attendees at trade shows and conferences are focused on the speakers and sessions they’re most interested in. For marketing teams, however, the focus is different. Typically, your main focus as a marketer is the exhibition portion of the event. To make the most of it, you need a smart strategy, good organization, and a prepared team working together. These three factors help you stand out from other companies, which is important; everyone is competing for attention during this short, packed time period. Planning ahead, preparing as much as possible before the event, and staying organized are invaluable for marketing teams.

Better team coordination, more live communication

An organized plan helps your team make the most of each opportunity. Teamup can help you bring the plan together and keep everyone on the team informed and able to do their part.

Set goals and coordinate messaging

As you build a strategy and set goals, make sure that team members know what matters and what you want them to focus on. For example, perhaps the focus is on gaining leads from a particular vertical or scheduling product demos with new customers. As you determine priorities for the event, you can add all the information to the calendar along with messaging and materials. Then it’s easy for everyone on the team to reference and use throughout the trade show.

As you and your team plan your trade show presence, you can save documents, images, and other files on the calendar. Add links, notes, information sheets, online forms, and any other resource that can be helpful. It’s accessible for the whole team, and easy to update if changes are needed.

Organize your team in one place

With the basic strategy in place, you’re ready to consider who is going and what they’ll be doing before, during, and after the show.

You can set up your Teamup Calendar so each team member has their own sub-calendar. That way, you can easily assign tasks, events, and responsibilities to each team member. Everyone can see the big picture of who is doing what, when, and where. And each team member can see their own schedule with all the assignments they’ve been given.

Organize other trade show elements

Use additional sub-calendars or custom fields to organize and schedule other key parts of the trade show experience:

• A dedicated sub-calendar for the booth to plan staffing for all the hours that the exhibition hall will be open.
• A sub-calendar for “whole team” items such as travel details, unassigned tasks, and after-show social events.
• A custom field to track task status so it’s easy to see what’s been completed, what’s on hold, and other important updates.
•  Custom fields to capture and categorize leads, which helps everyone be consistent with getting the key details and makes it easy to sort and follow up after the event.

Use the built-in filters to filter events by a certain status or other category, to find relevant notes, to review scheduled meetings and more.

Schedule meetings and book rooms

Larger organizations may have a dedicated exhibition area that includes meeting rooms and demo space. Use Teamup to enable your team members and interested customers to easily self-book use of these spaces.

For example, you may want to set up meetings between customers and company executives. You can use a sub-calendar to schedule the use of each room so anyone on the team can see when it’s available and schedule a meeting for an open slot. You can even allow customers to self-book a meeting; customized access permissions allow them to add a meeting request to the calendar. Then an available team member can review and confirm the meeting.

Keep your team coordinated and updated

During the event, Teamup helps the whole team stay coordinated and synced automatically. Team members can use the Teamup app to stay updated and view each others’ assignments from the calendar. They can check on the availability of meeting rooms, check any events or tasks assigned to the whole team, and view check their own schedule details easily.

The calendar can function as a live team journal, instantly updated with the notes, pictures, and bookings added by the whole team. Each team member can capture leads, schedule meetings, add notes, and save photos as they go through the day. And event comments can be enabled to ask questions and share related information on each other’s events.

Plan and promote special marketing events

Many companies plan special marketing events as part of their strategy. These can range from small gatherings for a few key customers to large events for hundreds of guests. Plan these events on your calendar to keep team members in the loop. And use the event page feature to promote the event and invite guests. It’s a free event flyer you can share on any platform, with signups built right in. Create an event with all the details, share it as an event page, then send the event page link to all invitees via email or share on social media. If you update the event details, the event page will automatically update.