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Trade Show Marketing Part 3:
Keep the Ball Rolling After the Show Is Over
John Himes
January 16, 2025
Founder @ Dynamic Tech Media
Trade show marketing doesn’t end when the expo hall closes.
Your company invested significant resources into attending a trade show or convention. As a marketer, it’s your job to maximize that investment.
Since trade show marketing is ultimately about developing relationships, the most important thing a B2B tech marketer can do after the show is create more opportunities for leads and customers to engage with your brand.
By tapping into the event’s relevancy cycle and publishing content in a timely manner, you’ll keep eyeballs on your social media, your website, and your other marketing materials as folks travel home and settle back in at the office.
These are our top 6 tips for B2B trade show marketing strategy after the event.
1. Publish Trade Show Takeaways on Social Media
Social media marketing should be the first thing on your mind after the trade show. It seems simple, but your post needs to stand out from the boring and repetitive event-based content that’s everywhere on LinkedIn.
When you think back on your experiences at the trade show, what comes to mind? Did you learn something interesting, notice a trend in the industry, or discover a breakthrough innovation? Try answering these questions from your customers’ perspective as well. After all, this content needs to be valuable to them.
Be sure to add some pictures you took at the event and use the event’s hashtags in your LinkedIn post.
Whatever you do, don’t make it all about you! Sorry to say it, but the people who care that you “had a great time” at the show are probably trying to sell you something. Instead, focus on providing information that’s useful to the people you’re trying to reach.
Bonus points for tagging people who are likely to repost, and for sharing the post with key people via DM and asking them to like or comment.
2. Create a Wrap-Up Blog or Landing Page
This trade show marketing material for your website is essentially an extension of the takeaways social post. You’ve got more room to go a little deeper and provide your audience with even more value.
Think about ways to tie the web content and the social content together. If you teased an idea or mentioned a session or interaction that people seemed interested in, try pushing that theme further.
Don’t forget to share this content on your social media page and in your newsletter so your audience can easily find it.
3. Send Marketing Materials to Leads
from the Trade Show
Talk to the team that staffed your booth to make sure you understand who their most promising leads were and what they talked about.Especially in B2B technology, a lot of times the conversation revolves around a technical problem that the customer is facing.
If you’ve been doing your job as a good marketer, your website already has valuable content that answers their questions, provides value, and establishes your firm’s credibility and expertise.
Now, connect the dots and make sure the people who would be most receptive to that content actually get the chance to read it. When the right person sees the right content at the right time, well, that’s where the B2B tech marketing magic really happens.
If you want to go further than that, or if you don’t know what specifically would resonate with an individual, you can always follow up with them by sharing your takeaways social post and your website content from the previous sections.
This is going to require coordination with your sales team, so talk to them to get their input on how to streamline this process.
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Understand the Sales Team’s Perspective
on the Trade Show
Beyond working with them to follow up with leads, talk to your sales folks about the trade show and events marketing more generally to get a sense of what worked, what didn’t, and what they think would be helpful going forward.
For instance, maybe they are seeing a new class of applications for your tech picking up momentum, and they recommend creating some marketing materials to support your company’s efforts to expand into a growing market.
Or perhaps leads are constantly asking the same questions, and now would be a great time to either refine your topline messaging or create some FAQ content.
Remember, B2B marketing is ultimately about setting up your sales team for success. In order to win as an organization, they need us and we need them. The better your marketing team understands the actual buying process, the more effective you’ll be at generating qualified leads and moving them through the sales cycle.
5. Measure Digital Marketing Analytics
Take some time to analyze the data from whichever digital platforms—social media, website traffic, email blasts, etc.—you used before, during, and after the trade show.
There’s a lot you can learn here: which types of media are most effective, which topics are most engaging, and what channel or even what time of day gets the most engagement. Everything you observe informs how you move forward.
Not only can you then optimize for next time, but your boss probably wants to see the information too. Time to show off what a great job you did! 🙂
6. Incorporate Lessons Learned into Upcoming Trade Show Promotion and Convention Marketing Materials
Particularly in the fast-moving industries we serve, like quantum, photonics, and aerospace, you have to stay dynamic. If you aren’t learning and evolving, you’re falling behind.
Look back on those analytics, think about the conversations you had with the sales team and with customers during the show, review the budget, and then put that brain to work.
The most effective trade show marketing strategy is the one that works for your brand. That strategy can only come from a deep understanding of where you are now, where the industry is, what problems customers are facing, and how you can take them on a journey to where you both want to go.
It’s a long haul. But that’s exactly why Dynamic Tech Media prioritizes long-term partnerships with our clients. We don’t just show up to a single show and then bugger off.
By collaborating with our clients year after year, we’re able to continually optimize our marketing strategies and then execute on them. We specialize in maximizing the return tech companies get from investing in event-based marketing.
If that’s what you’re looking for, get in touch today to schedule a free consultation. And if you haven’t already, be sure to check out the first two installments of this series on trade show marketing, How to Get Ready and 7 Tips for During the Event.
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