CDS Insights

• July 31, 2019
• Mac McCarthy
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How to Get Your Exhibitors to Invite Customers
The companies exhibiting at your event should be your event’s best advocates. After all, they are spending money to exhibit at the show and it’s in their best interest to make sure quality customers and prospects are attending the event.

The one problem? They might not know how to invite customers or even that it’s an option. The CDS Exhibitor Resource Center, available to all exhibitors, has multiple options to help increase booth traffic with invitations and promotional tools. Invitation success can be reviewed in the Data Sense^® reporting system.

Track Your Exhibitor Invitation Program in Data Sense
To get started, you need to setup a filter in Data Sense to measure the effectiveness of your exhibitor invitation program. If you don’t know how to do this, it’s easy and can be done in three clicks. View the instructions here.

Below is a typical view of an event’s exhibitor driven attendee registrations. You can see from this graph that the majority of registrations happen within the last four weeks before the event. You should be checking this report weekly to make sure invitations are on track with previous events.

Communicate Directly with the Booth Staff to Increase Registrations
Each exhibiting company has a main point of contact that typically manages the various aspects of exhibiting at an event—registering staff, booking housing, working with the decorator, etc. It’s entirely possible that this contact is not in marketing and doesn’t know how important it is to promote the booth in order to drive onsite traffic.

For this reason, you need to go straight to the booth staff with your message—these are the sales and marketing folks who are working at the show and will want to fill the booth with qualified traffic. Give this group the promo code as soon as possible so they can begin inviting customers and prospects. It’s best to set up an automated campaign that goes to the new booth staff on a weekly basis.

Here’s some sample text to start your campaign.