Power-Gen International, one of the best-attended trade shows in the pump industry,

is a great opportunity to meet your customers and share valuable information about existing solutions for their day-to-day challenges. As a product or service company, you most likely already have a good idea of what those challenges are, but how are you utilizing your time AT the trade show to share your solutions?

Here are some ideas to consider for increasing the success of your trade show experience.

If one of your goals for the show is to generate new leads, consider going one step beyond using the lead retrieval system that you may have opted to use at your booth and invite the new visitors to join your social media network and/or subscribe to your newsletter mailing list. Remember to take notes after each interaction so that your follow-up communications are tailored to share your solutions for that person and their specific needs. With over 20,000 people at Power-Gen, a small note pad and pen might just be the best tools to have on hand!

A goal you might have for the show is to create awareness about a new product or service; consider hosting a product demo or having a service specialist in your booth. Take short videos of visitors in your booth interacting with your product or having their questions answered by the service specialist. Post the short video clips to your company’s YouTube channel and use Twitter to share the link to watch the videos. Be sure to use the #POWERGEN hashtag to excite the attendees following the action online to visit your booth and participate (for more information about hashtags, read our previous article The Power of the #Hashtag).

Twitter is a great avenue to share the information that your target audience will find truly helpful. If you are a company that prides itself on being helpful to its customers, consider stocking up on bottled water and energy-packed snacks. With so many hours on the trade show floor, your customers might be grateful to see that tweet inviting them to your booth to get those little extras to help keep them going throughout the day.

With potential customers in your booth, consider offering select whitepapers for free download exclusively at your booth. If your company has already developed informative case studies, guides, tips, or other educational documents that can help support pump users in their everyday work-life, create a simple landing page on your company website where they can exchange their contact information for the free download of that informational tool. Make everything easy and user-friendly. If there are too many buttons to click, webforms that have too many fields to fill out, or if a landing page does not work, it will degrade the quality of your interaction.

Having a successful interaction at your booth means showing your potential customers that you are interested in adding value to their professional lives. Whatever you have planned for your time at Power-Gen International, remember to use social media during your social events. With a little planning and effort, you should find your trade show experience to be greatly enhanced.