What to do with Follow Ups After the Trade Show Ends?

As an exhibitor, you attend a lot of trade shows and exhibitions, and make new and profitable business connections. However, the more important question is how will you keep up with these connections once the exhibition is over. Since it directly impacts the number of leads you convert into sales, you’re going to have to include a brilliant follow-up strategy, so that all the connections you’ve formed during the trade show do not end up like a pile of business cards on your office desk. There are a lot of ways to keep up with all the business connections you’ve acquired during the event, without coming across as an aggressive salesperson trying to make a sales pitch.

To enhance the return on your investments in the exhibition, you can take a look at the following useful follow-up strategy points:

1. Classify your leads: The first thing you have to do after the trade show ends is to categorize your contacts based on their potential to turn into sales. You connect with a lot of people during an exhibition and may have collected their contact information and business cards. Now, you should classify your connections into various categories, like, as sales prospects, potential partners, vendors, journalists, industry influencers, and competitors. You can also classify them on the basis of their interaction with you during the exhibition, to make an educated guess whether they are your qualified leads or not.

Qualify your leads based on sales prospect: Now that you have your list of qualified leads, you have to further categorize them as hot, cold, or warm, on the basis of their willingness to buy your product or service. If they are not even in the buying circle yet, then they are considered cold leads, warm leads are those who are actively researching the product/service they want to buy, and when a person is willing to make a purchase decision, that is regarded as a hot lead.

Email the qualified lead: After the trade show ends, you should send emails to all your qualified leads in a timely manner, whether they are classified as hot, warm, or cold. Send some insightful and useful information to all of the qualified leads on a regular basis, like twice a month. Information sent must not be your sales pitch but rather information regarding your industry.

Write a blog about the event and your participation: Writing blogs about the trade shows, providing some insider information and analysis gives you a chance to keep the communication good among the contacts that you’ve made during the event. You also have the option of sending your blog links via email to your new connections that may or may not have read your blog before. Always give an appropriate reply to the comments you get and don’t forget to thank them for taking the time to read your blog and leaving their comment. You can also invite your business connections to write a guest blog post for you.

Connect with your qualified leads via social media: It is always a good idea to connect with your qualified leads via social media. It will help them remember who you are and why you are sending the information. Make sure that you find out and keep in touch with them on their preferred social media platforms, whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Since social media is only beneficial when you put a certain amount of time into it on a regular basis, so make sure that you spend a few minutes every day on the social media platforms.

6. Stay in touch with contacts that aren’t customers: All the contacts that you have managed to collect during the trade show need not necessarily be your qualified leads, they can be people with connections in the industry that are able to send a lot of new customers your way. So, even if they seem like a cold lead, you should still keep in touch with them rather than ignoring them.

About Blueprint Exhibits:

Blueprint Exhibits is a premier exhibition booth builder company in Germany that provides comprehensive exhibition services across Europe and worldwide at a competitive price. We have years of experience in building bespoke exhibition stand designs in Germany for domestic as well as international clients. Our clientele of diverse industry types makes us your reliable and ideal exhibition stand contractor in Germany.

For information regarding exhibition services, feel free to connect with us at enquiry@blue-prints.org