Contents
- Introduction
- Pick Your Target: Have a Clear Goal
- Targeted Messaging: Tailor Your Messaging to Suit Your Target Audience
- Content Creation: Show Off Your Innovation in Innovative Ways
- Lead Magnets: Get What You Want by Giving Them Something Valuable
- Conclusion
Introduction
Standing out at events like the Farnborough or Paris Airshows can be extremely challenging. Especially when you’re competing for attention against over a thousand other aerospace companies.
In this article, we’ll share some event marketing strategies to help you stand out at your next aerospace event. For skim reading, we’ve even highlighted the key takeaways from each strategy.
These strategies will focus on enhancing brand visibility, maximising return on investment (ROI), and enhancing networking capabilities.
Target Practice: Have a Clear Goal
If you want to stand out, you must have a clear objective in mind before attending an industry event or trade show. It doesn’t matter what the objective is as long as it’s ultra-clear and everyone in your team knows what it is.
Here are some common objectives:
- Lead Generation
- Brand Awareness
- Finding Partners
- Finding Investors
An ultra-clear objective is essential if you want to stand out at industry events and trade shows.
How many times have you been to trade shows and found people exhibiting who, when you speak to them, seem to have no clue as to what they’re trying to achieve by being there?
They stand out for the wrong reasons.
When you have a clear objective, you have a clear target audience. With a clear target audience, you can develop clear, effective, outcome-focused messaging, which we will discuss next, and almost guarantee that your event will be a success.
So, the first step to standing out at an aerospace trade show is to have a clear objective.
Targeted Messaging: Tailor Your Messaging to Suit Your Target Audience
Targeted messaging is one of the most important aspects of marketing and sales, and yet so many aerospace companies get this wrong. In fact, very few companies in the world get it right, regardless of their industry.
Too many companies focus far too heavily on themselves and their products rather than address the needs and wants of their target audience.
This is why having a clear objective is so important. If you don’t know who you’re targeting and why, your messaging will be confusing and lack personalisation.
Not to mention, trade shows are fantastic places to trial new messages. You can easily evaluate the success of the message and its impact on your target audience by measuring message conversion using one of the strategies we’ll explore later.
Anyway, what do we mean by targeted messaging?
Put simply, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole” (Professor Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School). While this might seem obvious, companies frequently get it wrong.
Think about your target audience and ask yourself what they want.
If your objective is to find investors, then we can assume that investors want to find an innovative company with a scalable product that can give them a large return on their investment. Your messaging should reflect that.
If your objective is lead generation, then you need to create personalised messaging that appeals to your target audience by solving a problem they have or by helping them achieve their goals.
More often than not, people trust themselves far more than they trust anyone else. So, if your target audience finds a targeted message that feels personal and addresses their wants and needs, you can be sure that you’ll stand out.
Content Creation: Show Off Your Innovation in Innovative Ways
Content creation is our bread and butter, so we feel exceptionally comfortable telling you that having varied content guarantees you will stand out.
The most engaging and innovative type of content to showcase at aerospace trade shows is video content.
These can be brand promotional videos, product videos, case study videos, you name it. If you want people to stop at your stand and quickly understand who you are, what you do, and what you’re all about, then video is your best bet.
Video content combined with a clear objective and targeted messaging will help you stand out from the crowd at every event.
So, why video?
You only have to look at the success of platforms like YouTube and TikTok to see that video content is exceptionally engaging.
With video, you can make complex topics far more understandable (which, in the aerospace industry, is very useful), you can show off your brand personality (after all, people buy from people), and they are far more memorable.
So, once you’ve established a clear objective and targeted messaging, channel these into creating video content that will turn heads.
Lead Magnets: Get What You Want by Giving Them Something Valuable
This is arguably the most important step. Even if you do everything else perfectly, not having this can spell disaster for your aerospace trade show exhibition.
Everything in marketing is about getting information about the target audience that can be passed on to the sales team. You might have heard the saying that marketing is the reason you’re in the shop, and sales is the reason you bought something.
Well, normally very few, if any, sales are going to actually happen at a trade show - especially in a complex industry like aerospace, where sales negotiations can last several months. There are some exception to this rule and many deals are announced at trade shows.
So, the most important thing is collecting target audience data. This can be in the form of email addresses, phone numbers, or survey responses. IT really doesn’t matter as long as you get the data and you’re able to contact them after the event.
Now, that’s all well and good because we’re assuming that people will give you this data for free. The truth is most people don’t like giving their data away, so there needs to be a trade. Their data for something valuable.
This is why you need a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is something valuable that you can offer people in exchange for their data. The type of lead magnet you use depends entirely on your target audience and the type of data you want to collect.
Lead magnets can be as simple as exchanging email addresses for free beer, a tote bag, or even socks (yes, it happens, and yes, it works). Or, you can use more professional lead magnets like discounts, access to a white label or a free educational book.
Either way, the point is that you trade value for value, and the more value you can give your target audience in exchange for their data, the more you’re going to stand out.
Have you ever been walking around a trade show and seen someone carrying a beer or cool branded item and asked them, where did you get that? That’s how you stand out at an aerospace trade show.
Conclusion
If you’re planning on attending aerospace trade shows and want a good ROI, follow these four steps to guarantee a successful event.
To recap, you must:
- Have a clear objective and, therefore, a clear target audience in mind before you attend the event.
- Once you know who you’re targeting and why, you need to create personalised messaging that addresses their wants and needs.
- Create content, preferably video, using targeted messaging to keep your audience engaged, break down complex information, and ensure that your brand is remembered.
- Finally, you need to collect data using a lead magnet and trading value for value. Remember, the more value you give people, the more you’ll stand out.
See you at the next event!
If you want to create content that puts you in the spotlight, contact us today so that you can stand out tomorrow.
