Maximize your AHR Expo Experience
Use Social Media to build
brand awareness and boost traffic at your booth.
|
Manny
Mandrusiak
Managing Creative Consultant,
4 Bravo Marketing
Contributing Editor
|
January has always been known as the month where everyone attempts to
live up to the resolutions that they made on New Year’s Eve. For those
in the BAS space January contains the dates where the largest HVAC
marketplace is held – the AHR Expo.
The AHR Expo is a fantastic opportunity for companies to generate leads
and set-up business opportunities for the rest of 2014. This article is
going to provide some tips to leverage social media to help drive
traffic to your booth and generate more leads.
5 Tips for leveraging Social Media at the AHR Expo
- Always start at the source. For those that have not yet been to the
AHR website it can be found at http://www.ahrexpo.com/. This site has
a wealth of information and is extremely well set-up. Make sure that
all staff attending are registered and pass the link off to the
marketing department, so that they can use it in standard corporate
social media strategies.
- At the bottom of the main page you will find the icons for the
social media feeds that the AHR Expo will be using. For those that have
not yet visited the site the platforms are: Twitter, Facebook, and
Google +. Here is a quick explanation of each of the three social media
platforms that the AHR Expo chose to use and how you can leverage them:
- Twitter-The AHR Expo has embedded a Twitter feed directly on the
center of website homepage, posting a tweet is simply free advertising
for any company attending the Expo. It also provides instant exposure
for your company to all of the followers of the Expo’s twitter feed.
- Facebook- Posting booth location and pictures of people at your
booth are always good for generating interest in your Facebook page.
Tagging someone who has visited your booth will naturally get them to
want to follow your company page and probably get them to share the
photo with their followers. This gains you nothing but more exposure
for your company and products.
- Google+ - Posting your booth number here provides exposure to all of
the Google Followers, but also gives you the ability to conduct a
hangout. As I have discussed in previous articles companies at a
tradeshow could leverage hangouts to have an unofficial training session, or discussion, with up to 10 people at a
time.
- Right in the center of the website is the official AHR Twitter feed.
Take a good look at the feeds and note the different hashtags (#) and
mentions that are being made by different companies. These are things
that any company or individuals attending the expo will want to use
when promoting that you will be attending the show. Some examples from
the feed are: @ahrexpo, #NYC, #HVAC, @hpacmag. By checking out the
Twitter feed you will also be able to see what products competing
companies will be bringing to expo and be prepared to have products
with similar functions at the show.
-
Post and Tweet directly from the show. This is a great way to
conduct contests and giveaways during the show to try to pull more
people into your booth. If you are giving away an iPad at your booth
you could push out a tweet that the draw for the iPad will be at four
o’clock. You can also announce the winner via Twitter or Facebook and
then post a picture of you and the winner online. This makes the show
very interactive for the end-users and it demonstrates to those who
come to your booth that you are a tech savvy company who embraces new
forms of communicating with clients. As in real estate everything
hinges on location. If you do not appear where your potential clients
are looking they are more likely to stop looking for you and choose a
company that is seen where they are looking.
- Leverage LinkedIn to stay connected with important contacts and
potential prospects. I realize that the AHR Expo is not using LinkedIn,
but every sales rep that is attending the show is. Always keep track of
important contacts that you meet at the show (potential partners,
distributors, and advertising opportunities) by using LinkedIn. I
always ask people that I meet if I can connect with them via LinkedIn
because LinkedIn provides me with a ton of valuable information about
the people that I am connecting with. At a show like the AHR Expo a rep
can very easily get overwhelmed by the sheer number of people that they
will meet. Connecting with them on LinkedIn will easily enable reps to
be able to contact them in a more personal manner, while providing
information about who the person is and what company they work for.
These are only a few of the tools that companies can use to generate
more leads while at the AHR Expo. I have no doubt that there are many
more that will present themselves while at the show, but at the minimum
the above tips should help companies get more out of the show with
regards to lead generation and brand awareness.
Keep posting and have a great Expo!
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