Broadcasting conferences
One of the best ways to drive further attention to a trade show is to make it accessible to a broad audience online. By putting on a live feed of the keynotes, panels, and workshops, you can get the content out to a much bigger audience and attract more interest, too.
There are many advantages to broadcasting conferences live. For a start, this ensures that valuable insights can be shared broadly, which helps promote the trade show as a place for knowledge.
Plus, it’s a win-win for the speakers and sponsors: their message gets seen and heard by a bunch more people and stays relevant for longer. This requires a specialised set-up and reliable broadcast tech, such as rf transmitters to back you up, so you can get a really high-quality broadcast even if you’re in a crowded or complicated space.
As an added bonus, you can record the sessions and use them as content to continue delivering value to your attendees and sponsors for months to come.
Speed pitching
Trade shows are a great chance to network and bring people together, but the sad truth is that unstructured networking can feel awkward or useless. That’s where speed pitching comes in. By setting up a designated area where people can get together and pitch their ideas in a short amount of time, you can turn networking into something more dynamic and focused.
In a speed-pitching format, businesses get a chance to give a quick rundown of the problem or opportunity they’re working on and then get a group of other attendees to chip in with ideas. It’s a fast-paced format that generates a lot of ideas and gets people talking about the things that really matter quickly.
Speed pitching is particularly effective for smaller or local businesses and helps energise the whole event, making it more likely that people will get involved and have a good time.
Keeping the conversation going
After a trade show is over, the real test is whether the people who connected will get back in touch. More often than not, contacts disappear after a generic follow-up email that nobody really pays any attention to.
What you can do is give it a bit more structure with activities that make sense:
- Get everyone together to revisit some of the key topics that came up.
- Offer up some curated resources that the attendees can use.
- Facilitate some introductions between the businesses that seemed to have some common interests
It’s also a chance to get some valuable feedback and find out what people really enjoyed and what they didn’t and figure out how to improve things for the next event.
All in all, trade shows no longer have to be some one-off experience that happens and then disappears. If you design them with longevity in mind, you can make them a platform for ongoing conversations, learning, and all kinds of useful collaboration.
