A properly cultivated presence at a market show can add a lot of positive value to your business. But what happens when you’re on a limited budget? There are various guerilla marketing techniques that can come to your aid. Guerilla marketing has everything to do with creative, low-budget strategies that have the potential to make a big impact. Below are a few essential tips to get you started:
A. Before the show
Before the actual market show, be keen to use humor to surprise people and break their expectations. Send an email to your existing audience to let you know that you’ll be attending and that you’ll be having a lot of cool stuff that they should want to take a look at. Customize your postcards with a sneaky but creative quote that’s specifically tailored to your brand. Another ingenious strategy involves handing out a key to your customers and leaving them to wonder where it opens. Also, do a professional press release at a local newspaper or niche blogs and highlight the upcoming story for your market show. Social media should also be adequately used to create a buzz around your event. You want to create anticipation so that more people can attend.
B. At the show
Separating yourself from the competition is one great way to make sure that you attract a bigger audience to your market show stand. So how do you do this? Create a wireless charging station and make visitors wait at your booth while charging their devices. During this time, your sales team should be busy engaging them in business-beneficial chit-chat to present your brand at its best. Holding a contest is a particularly clever strategy. Most people expect that they’ll get freebies when they come to your stand. So after they get them, they just leave. Hosting a contest such as raffles or puzzles is a way to make sure that you capture your attendees’ information for future marketing purposes. You could promise free samples, free gifts, shopping vouchers, etc for the winner. An additional tip is to make people tweet or post photos to Instagram, Facebook or other social networks with your amazing show display. Of course, you should encourage them to use relevant hashtags. These seemingly simple things can go a long way towards making your market show a success.
C. After the show
Now that the show is over, you want to continue getting more leads to your online business page. Consider making a funny (or entertaining) slideshow video using photos that you captured during the event. Make sure to ask people for permission to be included in the video to make sure that you don’t’ get in trouble with the law. Publish a blog post about how the event was and encourage your customers to read and share it. Give the contest that you organized a few more weeks to mature and encourage people who missed the show to actually participate online. This way, you’ll be sure to reap more leads!