3 Ways to Make Your Content King for Trade Show Marketers February 22 2021

In today's digital marketing class where I explore ways to more effectively market online for trade show booth design ideas, I discovered that there are 27 million pieces of content published online per day. So how do you make your content king for trade show booth marketing?

I'll start first by outlining today's lesson:

  1. What is content distribution? What does that mean for a booth design company?
  2. How do I build a content marketing distribution for a trade show booth design company?
  3. How do I set metrics for a content distribution plan?
  4. What to do before launch?
  5. After launch?

LOOK FOR: 3 WAYS TO MAKE YOUR CONTENT KING. These are my 3 top takeaways from this class:

  1. Prepare, Plan, Execute - Then observe results, and fine tune!
  2. Launch your content like it's a product!
  3. Realize there is a big opportunity in digital marketing - most people don't believe they are using it right!

What is a content distribution process and why do we need one?

"content is king"

27 million pieces of content shared everyday.

  • 93 percent of B2B marketers use content marketing
  • 90 percent of c2b use content
  • 42 percent b2b feel they are doing it right
  • 34 percent c2b feel they are doing it right

While these stats don't say specifically what trade show booth design companies are doing, I would venture to guess they are within the B2B outlines above. This also demonstrates a massive market opportunity. Most people don't think they are doing it right! And many don't know what they don't know.

  • Launch your content distributions like a product. This is the most important insight that I've seen. I've never approached doing content for booth design services that is interesting beyond the narrow focus of what the product does.
  • You can't just create interesting content and people will come. 
  • They are going to go through step by step process for launching effective content.

Planning

  1. Prior to Launch
  • Ask the right questions. What types of trade shows are we going for?
  • Gather insights. Are there trade shows we are not aware of that tie into our value propositions (green booth design, vertical banner stands etc)
  • Plan promotion early (quotes, stats, data, co create content). Well, we have not needed to do this. We get plenty of booth design projects without having to do paid ads
  • Create outreach lists, break into tiers. We have done this a lot. We make lists from trade show marketing suppliers, business journals, etc. We target by industry 
  • Create blogger promotional packs. Other than The Boothologist we have not done this.
  • Prepare email templates. We do highly targetted emails for different trade show products be it custom, green, portable, etc.
  • Launch
    • Email - key to plan based on dates of purchase. Usually for us this is around the tradeshow dates, schedule, sometimes key industry info
    • Social - also need to pre echo the trade shows a few months before 
    • Content amplification (paid) - what is best source for paid ads for B2B trade show companies...
    • Promote across online real estate... we don't have a lot of real estate. A lot within our own site boothster.com
    • Look for guest blogging opportunities. I've done very little on this but need to source green design publications and see what is out there.
    • Complete outreach
  • Ongoing - scrub
    • Content leaderboard
    • Content revamp
    • Optimise historical content

    Goals and Metrics

    200 engagements leads to 2 percent sales; maybe that needs a reach of 10,000

    What is reach?

    1. Depends on channel. For email it may be who opens an email.
    2. For Facebook it would be views.
    3. Build a table to identify each channel, available audience, engagement CTR, Engaged audiences.

    Prior to Launch

    1. Who are we targeting
    2. Why would they love it
    3. What action would I want them to take
    4. How will they find it?
    5. Why would they share it with their friends

    Getting Insight - what type is going to work most effectively.

    1. Use an insight webstie like Buzzsum. 
    2. Check our competitors

    Pre Launch Outreach

    1. Create outreach lists in advance
    2. Use insight tools to make sure tools have max impact
    3. Think about outreach such as email and social.
    4. Advocates. Influencers. Journalists, bloggers, active social media people.
    5. Create lists of people you want to target.
    6. More time you put into building the outreach list the more successful the results will be.

    Launch

    1. Email - a single topic email or include it in a regular newsletter
    2. Social - (organic) Make sure to optimize things like time of day and learn what works from previous content (use social channel analytics)
    3. Content Amplification - Use paid promotion on each channel and or use content distribution platforms like taboola or outbrain
    4. Promote across online real estate - use your existing websites and apps to promote your new content
    5. Guest blogging opportunities - look at where you can create content for other websites that point back to your content
    6. Complete outreach - reach out to any social media advocates or influencers not contacted in the pre launch

    Post Launch

    1. Go back to content after a period of time
    2. How could content be repurposed?
    3. Changed for a different audience?
    4. See how it could be useful in the future to get more impact

    Improve Content - Google analytics

    1. Look for most popular content
    2. Make sure that content is improved. More detail. Infographics etc.
    3. Find other content that is not doing as well and improve it. 
    4. Tinker with the not as successful content.

    Conclusions

    Set clear metrics for reach, true reach

    Pre launch - gain insights, do any outreach we need

    Complete launch plan

    Post launch