Virtual Trade Show Best Practices: Best Practices for Exhibiting at a Virtual Trade Show

1) Feature relevant and engaging content. Research the expected audience profile for the event and hand-select content that addresses their objectives to maximize relevance and engagement.
2) Feature a variety of content. Everyone has different preferences for how they consume content; offer different types of content including videos, webinars, case studies, data sheets, white papers, and URLs to appeal to the largest audience. And, don’t forget to clearly label your content.
3) Provide multiple ways for people to connect with you and your company both during the live event and during the on-demand period.

Everyone has provided some great feedback. Here are some additional tips not repeated above:

1) CONSISTENT MESSAGING: From your sales person, marketing to product development, you want to Ensure that everyone is consistent on the key messages you want to communicate at the virtual trade show. I recommend creating a one-page cheat sheet that you review with everyone before the event begins. Include sample answers to frequently asked questions. This way, your booth staff can copy and paste the answers quickly versus leaving dead space as you type in the responses.

2) ASSIGN ROLES: The temptation is to have everyone "staff" the virtual exhibit. However, one person may be better apt at answering technical questions while another can handle questions related to pricing. When scheduling shifts, make sure to include folks from different disciplines and clarify their roles accordingly. Assign one "moderator" per shift. This person will be responsible for monitoring the group chat and controlling the flow of people to specific virtual staff members.

3) GENERATE EXCITEMENT WITH NEWS: Like a physical tradeshow, you want to create a reason for people to come by your virtual exhibit. Schedule a time when you will announce a new product, service or partnership in your virtual exhibit booth. You can then hold a 30 minute text-based "press conference" within your booth with key executives, inviting members of the press and customers to attend. Depending on the platform, you can also make relevant materials (e.g. press release, photos, and a video) related to the announcement public at that time.

When considering exhibiting at a virtual trade show, try to follow these simple rules...

1. Take the time to learn the platform that you are exhibiting on and understand the strengths and weaknesses of that platform. Many platforms provide different features and engagment tools and it is important to master these tools. Just like you would take the time to understand the flow of traffic and ways of engaging your live audience, this is an important part of a virtual experience.
2. Make a connection. Like many have said above, online provides you with many additional options for making a connection with your prospect. Give them take-aways that will keep you and them connected. Maybe you will run a complimentary webinar after the conference and you are providing them with the ability to sign up as a guest for stopping by your booth.
3. Be personable! Even though you are not meeting them face to face, that is no reason why you can't make a personal connection. Interact with them on a personal level and you will find that you can make strong business connections online.
4. Like Miguel said, it's all about VALUE!! You must offer something that your prospect finds valuable and helpful.

Lastly, much of what is being said above lends itself to higher levels of engagement and this will ultimately lead us to developing virtual exhibits in 3D immersive spaces. The challenge, just like in education, is keeping people engaged.

Best practices for Virtual Exhibitions

1) View your virtual participation as one touch to a certain market or industry. Virtual participants tend to be less sales ready. You are more likely to generate new leads for your marketing funnel for nurturing not for immediate sales opportunities. Virtual show participation can be a real winner when it is a preview for another show that you are invested heavily in.

2) Virtual participants respond better to thought leadership than they do pushy sales tactics. Think creatively about what you have that may help educate them or solve a current problem or pain. Staffing with engineers and product experts will be more productive than your sales hunters.

3) When measuring your ROI, your cost per lead should be considerably lower than a live show. Virtual can deliver high unqualified lead volume. Until more is proven, I recommend a cost-per-lead expectation be 25% lower than a live show opportunity.

4) When making the decision to participate or not, look hard at the attendee acquisition strategy and content. If it is too general, don't participate. If their plan maps well to your existing or potential customer profile, take a chance. Virtual shows with a vertical or niche focus trump horizontal shows for getting more qualified leads.

Follow these best-practices to ensure you have a successful virtual event.

1. Establish Roles and Responsibilities

Once you decide to hold an online event and select a virtual-events provider, hold a project kickoff meeting to identify core stakeholders in the event. In addition to Marketing, be sure to include Sales and any other relevant teams in the meeting to establish good communication and collaboration right from the start.

The primary purpose of this meeting is to review the project scope and define roles and assign responsibilities for the event team and service provider.

2. Sponsorship Sales Considerations

One way to ensure sales success is to create and carefully review sponsorship sales materials in collaboration with your sales team. Clearly define and differentiate sponsorship tiers to increase the effectiveness of sales efforts. You may also want to involve your experienced event provider for input or training on establishing sponsor packages, sales materials, pricing, and other best-practices in sponsorship sales.

3. Messaging and Positioning

As with any event or project, positioning and message creation begins with a thorough evaluation of event goals and deliverables. First identify the ideal sponsors and attendees and determine how many of each you need to make the event a success. Work through the value proposition both for sponsors and for attendees.

This important exercise will put into focus the event messages, campaigns, promotions, and content that you will need to reach your target audience.

4. Choosing and Coaching Speakers

The delivery of the presentation content is just as important as the message. No matter how thought-provoking or high quality, your content will not create the necessary impact if it is not delivered in an effective way that engages and captivates the audience. Therefore, it is critical that you train and coach your speakers.

Moreover, enlist experienced, eloquent professionals who are comfortable in front of the camera to deliver the message and create the necessary impact with your target audience.

Tom Wieser is the vice-president of business development at CGS/VirtualEvents365 (www.virtualevents365.com).

Thanks Lee, one thing for everyone to consider: this question is for VIRTUAL trade shows.

Thanks!

As many experts are pointing out, content is absolutely KING. This said, I think that exhibitors need to differentiate themselves from others and from the enormous content offering that the web has already in place

1. CUSTOMISE the experience for your attendees

Give them contents they cannot find anywhere else, nor in your corporate site, your social media sites or googling your brand name. Prepare something taylored to the event and the audience.

Regarding to this, customise your virtual stand, prepare specific videos, chroma recordings, downloadables, etc.

2. GIVE MORE VALUE

It is not just about content, but about INTERACTION. Give your attendees many ways to have real time interaction with you. Provide video and written chat tools and have people on your end that are able to deliver correct answers!

3. GIVE EVEN MORE VALUE

Provide virtual merchandising, or bonus experiences for attendees that are "converting", that is generating the kind of transaction you are looking for (i.e. submitting their info, rating a product, sending info to a friend). Exhibitors are used to physical merchandising, don´t be afraid to offer free (pre-paid) i-tunes songs, free exclusive images, videos, etc

My two bits...

1. Plan for short attention spans.

Online attention spans are shorter than offline. Craft content, interactions, demos, etc. to be relevant if you have little time...and be thankful when you have more.

2. Find your virtual candy.

Online you can't use candy to get them into your space, and you can't hand out teddy bears with logos to help them remember you after they leave. Consider creating one piece in your content suite that you craft to be particularly sticky (no pun intended). Remember that their virtual tradeshow bag fills up with stuff, too...and sticky helps it "make it home" with attendees instead.

3. Measure.

Many virtual tradeshow solutions make it easy to measure and report things that are more difficult to measure offline. Take advantage of what you have to improve how you provide an experience, how you message and target, how you follow up.

The main point is to be interactive so:

1. Look for your prospects,
don´t wait for them to sit down in front of your virtual desk, so define what your prospect´s profile is and look for them using for example a profile search tool.

2. Prepare your booth for all type of attendees.
So you can expect people that would enjoy chatting with you and others that would prefer to visit your booth by themselves.

3. Introduce special promotions or offers that allow your visitors to try you out.

4. Have in your booth content that allows you to know if it is relevant to your attendees or not.
For example, if your attendees download a pdf that means that they have downloaded it, but you are not sure if they have read it or not. On other hand if you have a streamed video, and it has been watched always to the end, it is giving you more relevant information that a simple download.

Excellent points from Dennis so trying to add another 3 points of value:

1. 'Content is King' - prepare the most compelling content in the right formats for the audience you expect. Videos should be a few minutes long at most and all collateral (videos, pdfs etc.) should be of high quality (poor quality detracts from your message and could harm your brand).

2. 'Context is Queen' - know your audience, why they will attend the virtual event and put your messaging into that context. No matter how good your offering it needs to fit the environment and theme.

3. 'Commit Fully' - if you have gone to the trouble of researching the right virtual event for your company, invested the time, money and effort in creating your stand/booth and collateral, and resourced the right virtual stand/booth representatives, don't stop there! Don't be afraid to market to and invite your own customers and prospects to the show - don't rely on the show organiser to deliver all the visitors - be proud and confident that you have prepared well and that your presence will reflect well on your company, brand and ultimately generate a considerable ROI.

1) Understand your target audience well and make sure atendees are able to engage when visiting your virtual event

2) Be creative, include a 'wow' factor. Being virtual allows you to be extra creative which is what I believe is a strength of a virtual eent than a physical. Anything can happen when it's virtual!

3) Last but not least, it's very important for your platform to be user friendly and easy for atendees to control and use. Although it is a very obvious statement, I would say it might be the most important one too. Once a visitor sees there's a complication, it is easy for him to leave.

Kind Regards,
Sophia Fantis

1) The web is a powerful research tool for competitive analysis; identify some of your competitors attending the show and use a tool like Aaron Wall's toolbar to understand where/how they are advertising or Spy4U.com for PPC advertising, look at their backlinks too, PR, etc.

2) Twitter is a great Marketing Research, Broadcast and Engagement Tool. Use the Hashtag associated with the Trade Show to Follow people Tweeting about it via your Account; use Twitter's Search with Keywords being used by people talking about the tradeshow and Follow them; identify Competitors attending the show and Follow their Followers and Lists.

3) Talk about your show attendance across all Social Media Platforms including Blog Posts, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc - water drip some kind of "contest" or "call to action" in your Social Commenting across these platforms to build buzz.

4) Don't go to the Trade Show! Rent a suite in a nearby hotel and use the money you would have spent on the Trade Show to advertise your Suite.

5) Chocolate is one of the greatest guerrilla marketing show giveaways - everybody likes it, can be low cost but attractive. Bonus, also keeps your show booth team energized.

6) Feature your Trade Show attendance via your site and mention your call to action about the show in your Newsletter.

7) Utilize front end advertising on Targeted Blogs with Bloggers who are in this market segment.

8) Utilize Pay Per Click advertising for the Trade Show with keywords that are specific to the Trade Show and/or industry - look at your long tail keywords via your Google Analytics; might be some low cost high value keywords in this mix to use for PPC.

9) Look at GEO Targeting Advertising via Foursquare at restaurants, bars and/or other locations during the Trade Show and you might also look at Mobile Marketing that is also GEO Targeted.