90,000-Visitor London Boat Show Drives Collaborative Marketing with Exhibitors

Collaborative marketing with your exhibitors is a great way to stretch your marketing budget and drive attendance.

We like the multi-faceted collaborative marketing program for the recent London Boat Show 2016 (LBS) so we share three of the tactics this organizer employed to help exhibitors promote their participation in the show to their audiences.

(1) LBS offered exhibitors a robust package of online creative assets promoting the show. Exhibitors were able to easily download multiple web banners (300×250, 728×90, 160×600 and 180×150), logos and embed code for a show video from the show website.

The more creative assets you offer, the more applications that are possible, which will yield more promotion for your show.

In addition to the above, consider offering tablet and mobile ad units for general web advertising and a 600 x 315 image for use on Facebook, which is automatically scaled across its News Feed and Right Hand Column ad slots.

(2) LBS enabled exhibitors to host competitions with special offers for visitors on the show website. By working with your exhibitors and other partners, you can expand the content available to engage potential attendees, from contests/special offers as LBS did, to articles, white papers, webinars, etc. not just on your website but through social media and other channels.

For example, one of our trade show clients deployed a list of industry tips provided by one of its partners through email and organic/paid placements across major social nets.

This one piece of content alone helped drive several thousand engagements, including a very high number of social actions (likes, shares, etc.), which the organizer paid nothing for.

(3) LBS provided an email template to exhibitors to send to their database, with info on the show and a ticket offer. Leveraging your exhibitors’ audience pools is a great way to reach potential attendees so consider other tactics here too such as data sharing.

Your exhibitors’ first-party website and CRM data can help you scale and target your data assets to reach new high-value audiences through retargeting and other digital advertising, a tactic that could potentially be your most valuable collaborative marketing activity.

However, using second-party data (another company’s first-party data) may also be the most complex as you will need a technology platform which enables you to transfer and activate the data in a secure, anonymous manner that adheres to consumer privacy laws and best practices.

All of the above LBS creative assets and program information were on a dedicated page on the show website, which kicked-off with the line “Exhibiting at the Show is a huge investment so make sure everyone knows you are at the London Boat Show.”

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Posted on January 27, 2016