Trade expos can be an excellent marketing activity and resource for connecting with new clients. But often companies get lost in the shuffle of eye-catching stalls and innovative exhibitors. You need to stand out, get the attention of your target market and, most importantly, get those warm leads to come to your stall.
So, what can you do to get noticed and approached by your target audience? Check off these twelve things before the day!
Signage with bang-on messaging is a must. Your name, and what you do must be absolutely clear. If you don’t let your audience know that you are offering what they need, they won’t know to stop by your stall. Clarity is essential.
And your signage must be visible above head height so potential leads can read your banner from a distance. This pulls an individual’s attention out of a fast-moving crowd and focusses them on you. It’s the first step in moving them toward you intentionally.
If your signage isn’t clear to the reader, they’ll walk past. And if it’s not visible, they’ll never even know you were there.
Once you’ve captured attention with good signage and a clear message, you may find you have more people at your stand than the number of staff available to chat during peak periods.
Waiting is boring, and when people have to wait to speak to you, there’s a risk they’ll decide to look at something else and come back later. This is not what you want. Instead, you want to keep the attention of waiting warm leads by placing interesting and informative elements on your tables or around your display. This could include, smaller signage, brochures, business cards, annual documents or magazines, special checklists or tear away forms. These are all usable marketing items which can be read while they wait to speak with you.
There’s nothing better than a moving visual element on a business trade exhibit. If you’re attending an event at a major conference centre and are allocated a booth, you’ll have space for a TV to play video or images on a loo. If you don’t have a large area, a laptop will do the trick as long as you can present it easily. And there are fabulous and fairly inexpensive iPad stands available from expo suppliers, should a tablet be the best option for you.
You can spend big on fancy equipment or put together a smaller, less expensive presentation method, but having a visual element is an excellent way to grab attention.
Consider having your visual element on a three-minute loop. One- or two-minute loops will run out quicker than you can wrap up a conversation. Keep your audience captive!
Venues vary greatly and each venue will have limitations with regard to the space, size and shape of your display. Find these out before the day of the expo. Even if you’ve been a stallholder at the event before, double check that nothing has changed.
Then, be flexible. Think how those limitations might be used to your advantage. If there are no walls around your stand, could you place seating for waiting guests, which would also delineate the area? Could you show a video in that section?
Each venue requires some adjustments and flexibility. Be creative, be innovative and keep asking yourself, ‘what would keep my guests here at my stall?’
If you’re a product-based business, bring boxes of product and display them as though you’re the perfume section at Myer. Be beautiful! Think luxury! Even if your business has a boho-vintage vibe, go boho-luxurious! Putting your best foot forward for product display is key as a trade exhibitor. You don’t actually have to sell your product on the spot. If your presentation is quality, people will be more likely to buy your product later, if not right now. And if they love your product, they’ll be back without you needing to chase them.
Competitions are the easiest ways to secure contact details from expo guests. Make entering the competition easy. Use a large container for business cards – think see-through Perspex boxes, a pretty glass bowl or an engraved ice-bucket. Use sign holders next to the container to list what the prize is and encourage stall visitors to enter.
It’s essential that the prize includes something tangible – a real prize – not just a prize of your time or a discovery session with your company. Think about what other items could be attractive to your target audience. Your book – or one you’ve found beneficial – a sample of your products, a gift voucher for your business or another, tickets to your next workshop or conference or even a professional service every business needs, such as design work or videography.
All of these will encourage warm leads to engage with you, meaning you’ll have more opportunity to engage with them in the future.
You have approximately two minutes to acknowledge someone before their patience runs out and they walk away. Plan and practice polite ways to pause your conversation with one person, so that you can address others visiting your table. Excuse yourself briefly with an easy, ‘Excuse me, I’ll just point these people in the right direction’ or, ‘Pardon me, while I let these people know I’ll be with them soon’.
Short, sharp (but polite) direction or acknowledgement to those waiting is invaluable in having them wait for you a little longer. It also reminds the person you are talking to that they aren’t the only person interested in chatting to you.
You also need to think about the conversations you are having. Some may be more worthwhile than others, and it’s important to determine that fairly quickly. It’s also essential to be able to gauge whether or not a long or complicated conversation should be put on hold for a follow-up phone call or a meeting away from the event. This way you don’t lose the next waiting lead, and can still nurture your new connection at another, more convenient, time.
If you have a lot of services or products in your business, ask a friend to help you out. You might want to offer a service exchange or simply pay them, but having two people on a trade expo stand is a must for major events.
There’s nothing worse than being underprepared, understocked or overwhelmed – all of which are regular problems for small businesses at expos. Remembering you have outlaid funds to exhibit at this event. Don’t waste the effort and resources you put into getting there by not being able to cope with enquiries on the day.
You also have the added bonus of being able to have lunch (you don’t want to be that person eating and talking to a potential lead) and toilet breaks, and even spend time visiting other stands yourself.
Expos are not easy for exhibitors. Standing up for hours on end is a hard task. But the last person you want to be, is the person seated with a phone in your hand, looking down. Keep the energy up. Don’t ignore the traffic flowing past you (and yes, I see these people at every expo). Keep standing, smiling and engaging politely with people who pass by or stop to chat.
Being a trade exhibitor is your opportunity to get yourself in front of new leads, present yourself well and represent your business and brand to hundreds of new clients (if not thousands at a major convention centre event). It’s worth pushing through any uncomfortableness.
Pre-plan your communication strategy with your new contacts from the expo. Don’t start sending an email a day for seven days. This will just annoy your new leads and ensure they unsubscribe and throw out your business card.
A simple, well-crafted and short communication following up is the best approach. You can give the results of your competition (if you’ve had one), or email a link to connect with you on LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram, if you prefer. You might also send them a downloadable resource or a link to a video that reminds them of who you are and what you do. In every case, you must ensure that your communication is helpful and adds value and isn’t just spam.
Run a Facebook Live competition. Organise when you’ll do this before you send out your follow-up email (as above) and make sure to let your reader know how they can listen, and enter your competition (use your Facebook link to take them to your page directly).
If you run the comp a day after the email it allows time for it to be read and action to be taken by the reader. It also puts you front of mind as you’re now, quite literally, at the top of their Facebook or LinkedIn notifications.
Use LinkedIn to reach out to every person whose business card you received at the expo. Send a Connection Request and, when doing so, add a personalised note reminding them that you met at the event, and that you’d like to keep in contact. This technique means you’ve layered your emails and Facebook Lives with a professional and direct connection that you can foster further in the future.
How many times you get approached by visitors at a trade expo is completely up to you and the effort you put into your display before the day.
You control your destiny. Your trade expo success relies on you having more than a casual chat. Make genuine connections and provide marketing material or other collateral to those connections. But most importantly, you need to capture contact details from those people in return. This is the beginning of turning warm leads into engaged customers.
Before you invest in your next trade display stand, get an audit on your last results.
Speak to the Social Ocean team about your event outcomes, get creative with your call to actions and set up for success. Book an audit in today.
Getting people to attend corporate events, in what is fast becoming a flooded market of choice, is even harder.
Guests walking through the door has always been the hardest part of event management, but is the most important outcome of event preparation.
Event management takes ages in planning, logistics, marketing and implementing all of the elements you prepare. So why would you make a decision that results in a guest’s first impression of you a crappy one?
The first impression your guest makes of you and your event occurs upon arrival to the venue.
Therefore the most important decision in selecting your event is the selection of your event venue.
You’re probably thinking I’d never choose a crap venue to host an event. It’s likely however, that you have and weren’t aware of it, as it’s rare to think about your guest before they show up at the door (or registration table).
Take the host of an event I went to last year. She’s the inspiration for this article – unfortunately someone had to be – but I also have her permission in writing my story!
The event was a three-hour Masterclass for approximately 30 people and it was a ripper! The host has inspired more than this article in me, because she ran a ripper of a morning seminar.
But…
The venue of choice was a central Brisbane location, in Teneriffe. A well-off trending suburb of Brisbane. It has great coffee shops, beautiful tree-lined avenues and historical locations of interest.
You could, if it suited you, catch a ferry up the river and take the short walk to the hired rooms from the dock.
If you were looking to add some incidental exercise into your working day, you could have gotten off a transit bus about a kilometre and a half away and walked, city-cycled or lime-scootered from the main drag.
Doesn’t it sound idyllic? It sure does. But idyllic isn’t how I’d describe my commute to the Brisbane seminar.
I don’t live in the big city – I live in a city to the North of Brisvegas, and though we finally have the ability to boast our own train line, if you want to use it to get to the trendy suburb of Teneriffe you’d also need an additional mode of transport to cover the distance from the nearest train station in business attire.
As I don’t carry a pair of joggers in my handbag like those clever CBD savvy white collar workers whose commute includes a lengthy walk from “somewhere” every day, that one wasn’t an option I’d consider.
I’m a soft suburbs girl, who uses her GPS to take her door to door from the home office to any other location. I expect any other location to be close to the car door from which I then exit from. If I’m required to walk any kind of distance greater than 100 metres to access an event, I need to be prepared.
When I arrived on the block of the event with well over 15 minutes to spare, I was scoping out the uber-trendy coffee spots along the block and looking forward to picking up a caffeine hit after finding my park.
You may be able to imagine that by the time I’d driven past the venue four times looking for a parking location, that scoping out coffee shops became a distant memory.
I had in fact turned my attention to whether or not I should drive around the six blocks I’d just looped around one more time… or whether I would drive back home.
I might sound a little picky as I’d “only” been 15 minutes early and I “should” have been much earlier – but remember, I’m a soft suburbs girl where you can get a park anywhere outside of a Westfield shopping centre in the blink of an eye.
Add in the red line fever that starts to rise at the potential of being late, to anything. Yep, I’m one of those people. Ten minutes early is perfect timing for a three-hour seminar.
Here’s the problem IMO. This idyllic location doesn’t meet (my) event standards, because it does not provide parking for guests.
I’ll qualify this statement.
Catching a ferry isn’t a regular form of public transport for many.
I’ve literally never, ever in my life considered catching a ferry a form of public transport – not even remembering the time I organised a private sunset ferry trip along Sydney Harbour.
That day on Sydney Harbour required a bus pick up from the ferry terminal for the final stretch of our journey, as part of an atmospheric afternoon for my corporate group – it was not public transport.
If there isn’t a train station within 500 metres of your location (even if it’s beautiful tree-lined trendy street), a private or public parking facility should be considered a must to be available within this distance.
I didn’t just think about driving 45 minutes back out of the city. I started to head back home, when I found a shopping centre with paid underground parking facilities. It turned out it was 800 metres up the road.
Whilst walking this distance, I thought at least 50 times I should go back home and enjoy an early start to my weekend.
Until I was seated inside the venue, which I’d arrived at now ten minutes late, I was desperately trying to counter that attitude by repeating the words “This seminar is just what I need right now, it’s going to be great!”
I was thinking through that mantra at short intervals as my heels started burning inside my Winter boots. I was dressed for the city remember, I wasn’t prepared for walking an unexpected distance from a far and exotic car park.
To rub salt to my frantic, stressed out wounds, I was then walking past all the trendy coffee shops I’d scoped out whilst doing repetitive blockies for 15 minutes, but I was now too late to stop and order.
“So what?” Do I hear you say?
Here’s some great tips on how to avoid your guest from red lining with stress trying to get to you.
Help your guests to arrive in plenty of time with a good coffee in their hand. Don’t have guests regretting their investment in your event, or feeling disillusioned about the quality of your presentation for the next three – eight hours. Let their first impression of you – before they walk through the door by positive by:
If I’m due to be arriving for your event and available street parking is limited or you’re aware parking is non-existent – then this is an event a soft suburbs girl will need to be wearing joggers and active-wear for, and prepare mentally for incidental exercise. I’ll need to know this in advance, and it’s your job as the Event Host to tell me.
If you need help with choosing your next event venue selection or with any part of your Event Planning, find out how Social Ocean can help you here.
Hosting your own events? Want to start running corporate events to promote your business? Use the Social Ocean Event Checklists to help you get started on your event management success.
Updated your social media profile photo for your “new year, new me” already?
You might have updated your profile photo because you look different. Maybe you lost 30 kg, gained 30 kg, grew your hair, chopped it off, grew a beard or fell in love with a recent image of yourself.
Whatever the reason for updating it, that never matters because we love to see our friends, family and clients update profile photos to reflect the current version of themselves.
I can’t think of any bad reasons to update your profile, unless you’ve managed to select photos suffering from items on our 5 top profile photo tips list.
I update mine to acknowledge my personal changes. This year my hair is the same length as my 2020 portraits, but I’ve now got a fringe though I’ve retained the 10kg the year gifted me. Check my LinkedIn profile here.
Not everyone has a professional photographer following them around (which is a bummer, you really should try to get one).
Instead, run through our five top tip checklist and prep to upload the new you.
Even if you think your profile has a killer image, review our list to double check.
The number one reason for updating your profile image is so that your connections recognise you offline. I want you to recognise me, seek me out at a conference or meet for our first coffee chat without wandering around in circles.
When auditing client social media accounts, the profile image or logo and the cover photo are the first things we see. The percentage of those clients that have room for improvement here is at least 50% of our Social Media Audit clients.
Changing your style, brand and other obvious physical changes are a perfect reason to update your profile photo.
Your profile photos is the first element people see on their timeline or home page so it should be a good one.
You may not have experienced physical change, but across time they creep in unnoticed. Excluding those brave enough to get a face-lift, we don’t wind back the clock just by stepping out of the office. Don’t let your profile photo reflect a back to the future experience.
You might have lines on your face, and a different hair colour or hair line (sorry guys, it’s true). But it’s equally true that many people will look better now than they did 20 years ago.
Accept your age. Upload a profile photo from within the last 12 months.
Like one of my sisters (the inspiration behind this article), you’re likely to have a phone full of beautiful selfies.
My sister’s problem is that she’s wearing huge dark sun glasses in 70% of those photos.
Allow people to connect with your digital self and let them see your entire face.
If you wear glasses to see – don’t stress – you should be wearing them, so don’t let them stop you posing. Also, don’t take them off. People recognise you in glasses and may not recognise you without them.
Same problem for wearing hats or longer hair. Remove hats if it’s covering your face – and definitely take it off if it’s a cap or you’re wearing it backwards – and flick your hair back, out of your eyes.
Avoid confusion over which person belongs to the profile, by discarding photos with multiple people.
You don’t want to cause confusion about which person you are, nor do you want to use a photo of you and your significant other as your professional profile. Leave the personal photos for your personal Facebook account and put a business front on for your professional profiles.
Review others with a crowd in the back of shot.
Struggling to decide on what to cut out? Cut out any with people in the background entirely, as the image is likely to be too busy for the small piece of real estate your profile takes up. It’s YOUR profile remember, distractions are not your friend.
Landscape photography with you featured in the foreground is often a great choice. Non-professional versions of this regularly have the background still in focus and can sometimes take the focus off you. Keep an eye on that.
When you zoom in or out of your photo in the LinkedIn or Facebook profile editor, you’ll know selecting an image you are not in the centre of is a pain in the butt.
Best options here are the photos with unimportant background or space around your face. This allows you to zoom in and centre your head in the circle template in your photo uploader.
This also means you’ll be able to discard more from your “maybe” pile. Remember you can zoom in to you during this process.
Showing clients or potential clients what you look like when you get out of bed, where you holiday with loved ones, and when you are sweaty from a workout isn’t a good look.
Even if you are a professional sleeper, traveller or personal trainer – professional profiles should reflect a polished version of yourself.
If you don’t have a photo suitable on your phone or on your desktop, there’s a quick and easy solution.
Book in with a professional photographer, ask a colleague or friend to take snaps of you in work attire, or grab the closest teenager you know.
Let that first impression of your online self make a difference and update your profile photo with an image that makes it through all five tips above.
Put your best foot forward, show off who you are and reflect your personality. Your aim to stand out from the crowd is a necessity that every one can achieve to get noticed in a busy online world.
LinkedIn image sizes have changed several times in the last few years. Not only have sizing changed since Microsoft took over the platform ownership, but there’s been more changes with feature introduction and feature updates as well.
There’s lots of positive changes happening, with new tool tip suggestions popping up whenever they roll out this year.
As a business using a Company Page on LinkedIn we want our pictures to look great! So we spend time preparing them. When a new feature gets introduced, it’s likely we need to adjust the templates we use to create pictures with too.
Use our 2024 LinkedIn imagery sizes (below) to make sure your published posts are looking sharp.
Enter the pixel sizes into Canva’s custom sizing or create your own digital templates with Adobe or other software.
Here are the latest LinkedIn imagery sizes.
When working with business owners, we like to create connections between their personal profile and Company Pages. We do this by using the same LinkedIn images as for the cover banners in both places to create consistency and connection.
Your LinkedIn profile photo should be square with a size of 400 pixels x 400 pixels.
Your LinkedIn Personal cover banner image should be a rectangle sized at 1584 pixels x 396 pixels.
For great tips on selecting your personal profile photo, read our blog 5 Profile Photo Tips.
The two key images for your LinkedIn Company Page are your logo and banner.
Your LinkedIn logo image should be square 300 pixels x 300 pixels minimum. At Social Ocean we use 400 x 400 pixels for clarity.
If your logo isn’t already a square shape, ask your designer to provide you with a square option. This will be handy for all your social media profiles.
Or make your own. Put your logo on an all white background – simply centre the logo to a solid white square shape – with plenty of white space around the edges of the logo. This is what lets you zoom in and out to inside the logo uploading tool.
LinkedIn banner sizing has always created issues for page administrators. Trying to choose images that look good on both Desktop view and the App is tricky.
Your LinkedIn Company Page banner image should be square 1128 pixels x 191 pixels.
Overall, when you’re making your own Company Page banner we don’t advise adding too much text, due to devices cropping your view differently on computer verse smart devices. That means parts of your image might not be seen.
The new LinkedIn Events has a different cover image size. It’s short and wide like all other LinkedIn cover imagery.
Your LinkedIn event cover image should be rectangular with 1776 pixels x 444 pixels.
If you want to place the name of the event on the photo, make sure the text is centred so that the Event logo on the far left doesn’t cover your text.
LinkedIn Events also have a square logo option. When viewing the event the logo sits on top of the cover photo and can make viewing difficult.
If you need help to create or update your social media images for LinkedIn or any other platform check out our Graphic Design options.
Don’t forget to read great tips on selecting your profile photo here: 5 Profile Photo Tips.
Article compiled by Social Ocean’s Creative Director, Kirsty Fields. To follow her on Instagram or LinkedIn for more regular helpful hints, follow Social Ocean on LinkedIn or Instagram. Last updated – January 2024.
