Best Strategies to Host a Virtual Trade Show

Best Strategies to Host a Virtual Trade Show. Products and services need appropriate marketing. Businesses often take the events route to display and garner attention for their brand’s products and services. 

Undoubtedly, events are great for launching and creating the much-required attention around your business. However, things have changed due to the current pandemic crisis. Now, virtual events have taken over the wheel and become a new reality. They have proven to become the best solution for businesses to virtually display their products.

Businesses are aware of the webinar concept. But, the sudden transition between a trade show and a virtual trade show can be quite challenging. In other words, it’s not easy for some businesses to host the show with perfection. 

In this blog, we have listed a few strategies that will help you a great deal in creating a proper plan for your upcoming virtual trade show. They work by focusing on a few points that will make it easy for you to create a proper strategy before hosting a virtual trade show. 

• Decide Your Venue

First things first, don’t get carried away with the word ‘virtual’. Even a virtual event needs to take place in a proper venue. So, just because it is virtual does not mean you can do it in your office. On the other hand, conducting a virtual event in the office may save you a lot of money. However, be careful about the number of people you would be catering to. 

Depending on the number of people attending your virtual trade show, you can leverage various platforms for live-streaming. Facebook live, Twitter live and YouTube Live streaming are some of the most popular platforms. 

A few platforms offer free trials that you can use to familiarize yourself with them. It works by testing out the services and back-end support. More or less, choosing a venue is a personal choice and depends on the number of people attending the virtual trade show. 

• Stick To A Budget

Before planning for a virtual trade show, it is important to fix a budget and abide by it.

Sticking to a budget helps you in keeping track of your expenses. 

Try creating a proper detailed budget since a detailed budget will instantly improve your virtual trade show’s functioning. 

• Publicize Your Event

You need to market your virtual trade show as a regular trade event. Leverage the power of social media to market your virtual trade show. 

A few ways to get your audience involved and excited about the event is to keep giving glimpses about the pre-arrangements, give a countdown to the event in your stories. 

You can add links in your social media posts redirecting to the profile of the speakers and special guests who will be a part of the virtual trade show. 

Another incredible way to garner attention is by creating a hashtag campaign. This is good for motivating your audiences to participate. 

Keep reading to know how to further increase engagement with the content created through the hashtag campaign. 

• Focus On Engagement 

The truth is that no audience would want to participate in a boring event, be it virtual or in reality. You want your audience to be active and not to just log into your event and simultaneously browse other pages or channels. So, you need to create a strategy on how to engage them in the event. 

One ideal way to increase the engagement of the audience is to display your social wall during the virtual trade show. Like we mentioned, by creating a hashtag campaign, you can curate the content through a social media aggregation tool and display it on your social wall. 

Who doesn’t like to be featured on social media? Getting featured will excite the audience and compel them to participate in the campaign. Motivate your audience to be a part of your campaign by displaying live tweets and User-Generated Content. 

Summing It Up

A virtual trade show is a brilliant way to connect with your audiences virtually. Just make sure that you create a well-planned strategy and stick to it. The points mentioned in this blog will come in extremely handy for you to plan your virtual trade show seamlessly and achieve the results you wish for. 

The key point to focus on is to engage your audience with good content. Also, to practice the event beforehand to avoid any technical glitches during the show. 

Do spread the word and create an awareness in your audience about the virtual trade show. That way, you can motivate your audience to participate in your event, and you will surely benefit from the outcome. 

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Author bio for this guest post:

Maria Scott is a content marketer at Taggbox, a user-generated content platform that allows you to collect, curate & moderate content that can be displayed anywhere be it website, virtual event, digital signage, or any digital screens. Maria is passionate about writing on different marketing topics & loves to read. You may find her work @Taggbox Linkedin