Exhibiting Your Startup at an Expo
Trade shows and expos have historically been crucial calendar events for businesses of all sizes. They are a great opportunity to showcase your products on a large scale, attract investment, and secure new customers. But are you making full use of them?
Even in an era of online marketing and virtual stores, trade shows and expos still play a vital role across almost every industry, and none more so than tech. Online marketing techniques such as promotional videos will only go so far — there will always be a need for face-to-face demonstrations, allowing prospective customers to get hands-on experience with the product.
Today, the expos market is bigger than ever — worth an estimated $14 billion, according to IBISWorld. There is a forecasted growth of 2.8% in the industry for 2019, making expos a crucial avenue of outreach operations for startups.
Here’s how you can make the most of them.
Finding the Right Expo
A huge variety of tech expos exist all over the globe, from established giants like Web Summit that cover every technology under the sun and attract Fortune 500 companies, through to more specialised events such as the AI & Big Data Expo.
Finding the right expo for your startup is key. Don’t just look for one that caters for your general industry — research past attendees and exhibitors to discover if the expected traffic for this year will align with your intended market audience. Do exhibitors come back after previous years? If they didn’t, it may well be because they didn’t see any returns.
Factoring in the Cost
There are many initial costs that go into securing an exhibitor place that must be considered. As a startup, it’s likely you are working with a limited budget, and research has shown that B2B companies spend on average 39.2% of their annual marketing budget at trade shows.
It is not just the rental of the booth space at the expo that commands expenditure, but also the cost of travel for team members attending the event, including hotel bills and food, along with marketing your presence, branded merchandise at the event, and so forth.
Be aware of hidden costs and don’t just spend money for the sake of it, don’t waste money on crap merch — either don’t bother or spend on something people might actually take away. Really consider how you promote your presence too. You want to drive as much traffic to your stand as possible and it’s worth spending that extra bit to let everyone know why they should come and talk to you and how.
Take the Right People
A stylish product display is great, as is running a pre-built demo for visitors to your stand to observe. More important, however, is to have people who really know the product inside and out.
Attendees will likely come from a large array of professional backgrounds, with varying levels of technical expertise. Developers will be keen to ask more informed questions about the foundations of your product, making it prudent to have people on-hand from your development team who can answer such inquiries.
They don’t only need to be technical enough to answer questions either. They also need to be personable enough to generate sales leads, and have the savvy to build database numbers through signups. Not an easy find!
Get Immediate Feedback
Expos offer a superb opportunity for startups to test out their products/services with attendees. Developers can see first-hand how people interact with the UI, which can aid in tweaking the product. The questions asked can help developers gain a better understanding of potential new features to add. There is also an opportunity to gather product testimonials which can be used in future marketing campaigns.
Networking and Competitors
Working non-stop on a product in a startup can be an isolating experience. Expos provide the ideal setting for startups to observe competing companies in the industry, including how they position their products, and the type of considerations that they have made in regards to UX and design. This is not industrial espionage by any means, but rather utilising public consumer showcasing to get a better idea of how others have approached their products. Your startup’s presence alongside competitors will also highlight you as an alternative for consumers looking for choice in the market.
Of course, fellow attendees at expos will not all be competitors. The diversity of industries like tech, even in segmented areas like AI and blockchain, means that expos provide an additional opportunity of networking with other startups. Complementing solutions can be found between companies’ products or services, and trade events give developers and designers a fertile environment to make connections that can benefit all parties concerned.
The variety of expos all over the globe provides startups with ample opportunities to bring their products to the attention of an international audience. Of course, no startup should rush their development cycle to meet the deadlines of such expos, as showcasing a buggy or plain unfinished offering can irreparably damage that company’s reputation. However, with careful research, budgeting and logistical planning, an expo exhibition can be a real boon to startup’s public presence and ongoing product development.
