Nowadays, internet marketing seems to be the future of international trading, but do you know if offline methods like trade show or exhibitions also still have an important role? The answer is yes, especially if you want to sell your products or services to a country like China. So it would be a shame if you miss the events like this.
It still presents an opportunity to build direct relationships, attract your targeted audience and to build relationships in the industry. Stepping outside the digital marketing and remote sales will provide you a valuable insight into how customers interact with your products and the services directly, so it will allow you to meet their needs.
What is Trade Show
A trade show is an event that is held to bring together visitors of a particular industry to display, demonstrate, and discuss their latest products or services. Most trade shows commonly take place in convention centers in larger cities and last several days.
Moreover, local trade shows might be held at a local arena or hotel and allow businesses in the area to connect with prospects.
The Benefit of Trade Show
As a country with a huge population, it is not a surprise if Indonesia and China have important diplomatic and trade relations. Both countries have an important role in the global economy, so it’s important for both countries to maintain their relationship through various methods including trade show.
According to the United States Small Business Administration (SBA), trade show can give you many benefits for your business progress. Do you want to know what the benefits are? Here is the list.
1. Getting Prospective Buyers (Sales Leads)
In the perspective of a business owner, through exhibitions that are held, this is a good opportunity to introduce your products or services to targeted visitors. Why? Because at exhibitions the visitors who come are people who are interested in the theme of the exhibition being held and intend to buy or use a product or services at the exhibition.
For countries with huge populations like Indonesia and China, this kind of event can attract more targeted customers so it will increase your product or service to get more recognition and gain a good reputation from potential customers.
Even though the exhibition only lasts for a few days, the opportunity to expand your business is wide open. Such as the increase in the number of new customers and orders that will increase after you participate in exhibition events.
It’s not a secret if one of the big benefits that can be gained from an international trade exhibition is that you can learn to increase your confidence in communicating directly with prospective buyers from abroad even if you only attend it for the first time.
For your information, one of the important steps that every seller/exporters must go through in the export process is sending samples abroad. By participating in international exhibitions, you can bring your best quality products or samples to be shown globally so that prospective buyers can see directly and can discuss the quality, specifications and price of the goods.
Just to remind you, if you want to join an exhibition abroad, especially in an Asian region like China, make sure to hire an interpreter because most of the population can’t speak English very well. Hiring a good interpreter or learning English will definitely make communication between you and future customers easier.
2. Generate Transactions during the Exhibition
Doesn’t matter where you are, people always love bonuses. During the exhibition, you can optimize the number of sales transactions in various ways. For example by providing discounts, gift coupons and other interesting bonuses.
Don’t forget, you have to make the stand as attractive and unique as possible so that the stand gets lots of visitors. A beautiful, clean and tidy stand will always be a better method to attract people’s attention especially in China.
3. Improve the Branding
For events like trade show, to make your product or service stand out, you must remember if the products can be seen by thousands of pairs of visitors from around the world. This is a golden opportunity to increase your product’s brand image especially in such populated countries like China and Indonesia where competitors always show up.
With this trick, visitors will be easily embedded in your product because visuals are one of the most important aspects for marketing.
4. Targeting Specific Visitors
Contracts to purchase goods directly at the exhibition location are another main benefit that can be obtained by international exhibition participants and are one of the targets of exhibition participants.
Just like we mentioned before, trade show visitors usually are people that work in the same industry. If you have a special market segmentation, participating in exhibitions is one of the best ways to capture the customer.
Apart from direct contracts at the location, the opportunity to get contracts after the exhibition is also very huge because potential buyers have seen the quality of the goods and have communicated directly with you as the exporter/seller.
5. Improving Effectiveness of Various Marketing Efforts
When taking part in an exhibition, it is like casting a net in the sea. Whoever comes to your stand is a netted fish. This is also a direct survey of the effectiveness and efficiency of your business marketing strategy. If you have found which parts that need to be improved, you can change your strategies immediately.
6. Increase Networking
Always remember if you will always need networking because it will be beneficial to grow your business. A large, well-known exhibition especially in China is like a magnet that invites all parties related to the business, like suppliers, distributors, investors, research institutions, media, and of course customers.
This is a good opportunity not only to expand partnerships but also to increase the possibility of working together in the future. Exhibition or trade show are a very strong marketing medium.
7. Know Potential Competitors
Through this exhibition, you can gather information about your current and future competitors, such as product prices, their popular products, what equipment they used or just find out how far their business has developed.
At the exhibition you also get information about popular market trends by looking at visitors’ interest in the exhibition. That way you can estimate what strategies are needed to further develop the business you run.
From the benefits of participating in the trade show above, it can be concluded that the advantage of participating in exhibition events is that it helps business owners to introduce their products, but there are also disadvantages because not all exhibitions will be crowded with visitors. Therefore, you must be careful in choosing the exhibition activities offered.
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