Trade Show Marketing--Low Cost

Get the most marketing benefit from a trade show--even without your own booth.

(Shel Horowitz's Frugal Marketing Tip, June, 1997)

I've just returned from a huge book-industry trade show in Chicago - with four potential foreign-rights republishers, three potential distributors, two possibilities for book authorship or co-authorship, several people interested in my marketing services, a few easy no-work co-marketing deals, and a new agent to represent one of my books. And for my wife the fiction writer, I brought home three agent and six publisher contacts who'd seriously consider her new novel.

If all these deals materialize (admittedly unlikely), I will gain tens of thousands of dollars. If even one materializes, I'm likely to cover my costs several times over.

Booths cost $2400, and on-site costs such as electrical hookup raised the typical point of entry to about $4000 - but my cost to reap all these contacts was only slightly more than plane fare.

That's because I didn't take a booth. I did participate in two cooperative exhibits, where for a small fee I could display my book titles along with other independent publishers - but the way I got most of these contacts was by walking the floor myself.

Some tips to make a trade show work for you, along the lines of the way this one worked for me:

* Offer the best products or services you can - stuff that has real value - and be confident in what you offer.

* Make yourself a walking advertisement for what you have to offer. I did up three custom t-shirts with a color photocopy of one of my books, the name of the other book, my phone numbers and URL; two of the key contacts were initiated by other people who saw my shirt.

* Go where the action is. If I had known how easy it was going to be to generate foreign interest in my books, I'd have hit the foreign publishers' area much earlier in the show - and perhaps landed another 4-6 worthy contacts.

* Select a strategy that makes sense. I browsed the foreign publisher displays looking for compatible books (got a South American publisher interested that way), talked to the country coordinators for recommendations (came away with a contact in Germany), and - when I showed my titles to someone who didn't feel it was a good fit - asked for other companies that would be more in line with what I offered (landed my most serious bite here, from a publisher in England).

* Don't neglect competitors. If you have products that complement each other, you may be able to strike co-marketing deals. For instance, I met a publisher with a book on attracting the opposite sex. She will take fliers for my Hedonist book on cheap romance and distribute them at a singles convention, while I will mail her flier to a sideline business mailing list of singles. The cost to each of us is only photocopying, and we'll pay each other a 40% dealer commission.

* Be creative. Consider your product as a premium (or look for premiums you can bundle with your product to make it more attractive)... Think about bulk-quantity sales in the corporate market... Consider what markets you already reach, who would like to reach those markets, and how you can find some mutual benefit in working together - and likewise, what markets you'd like to reach through other people.

* Follow up your contacts promptly and appropriately when you get home.

Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.


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