How To Optimize Your Website And Digital Strategy For Trade Shows Or Conferences?

News | Jan 08, 2025

A trade show or conference for B2B businesses to engage with buyers

Q1 is officially here! Are you preparing for 2025 trade show marketing? Follow the exclusive tips from the Ready Artwork Team in this article to prepare and optimize your website to capture buyers’ attention.

Highlights of the video

0:29 Why is your website and digital strategy important for your trade show marketing?

1:20 Pre-event promotion strategies

3:51 Post-event engagement strategies

5:58 How to win keywords

7:24 How to optimize your home page for trade show marketing

7:59 A hack for your product page

8:45 The most overlooked – the contact form

Why Is A Website An Important Asset For Your Trade Show Marketing?

Secure Meetings Before You Actually Meet The Buyers!

It’s no secret that most buyers (up to 77%) conduct research online before making a purchase. But did you know that you could capture buyers’ attention as early as possible to increase your show’s success?

The Stages You Can Capture Buyers’ Attention

Aside form the traditional techniques, such as cold calling or relationship selling, here’s how you can engage your leads with your trade shows or conferences.

1. Pre-Event Promotion To Increase Visibility And Reach

Email Lists

This is the time to cash in your email lists! Share your event or conference information with your email lists and invite them to engage with you. The information to include in the email includes:

Show information: Such as date, time and location.
Value: Provide value in your email to attract subscribers to engage with you, for example, by sharing industry insights and exclusive access to try the latest products or innovations.
A meeting scheduler: Capture the hot leads that are ready to engage with you!

Winning SEO Keywords for Your Website

Leverage event organizers’ visibility by including trade show names, conference names, or related information on your website to rank for the keywords and drive visitors to your website.

Tip: If your website has a blog already and the show is ongoing, create keywords around the show itself. Essentially, this approach will make your blog posts evergreen. So every year, your marketing team would update the information in the blog post. And year over year as interest increases, it helps with the traffic and ranking.

Ads, an Alternative to SEO

SEO does take some time to build and with a small marketing team, it might be a bit challenging. The alternative is to run ads for more instant results and findings.

Build a Form

Use a form to capture the information of your leads and prospects and engage with them. Pro tip: integrate your form with your CRM software for an automated process so you can stay on top of the results and your sales team can focus on closing deals and no one has to worry about data entry.

2. Post-Event Engagement To Maintain Engagement

After the events or conferences, the website can host follow-up content like photos and surveys to create more touch points with the prospects and nurture them.

Share The Show’s Buzz Or Highlights In A Video

Use any smartphone to capture the show buzz and share it on LinkedIn! This can help increase visibility and impressions to the company’s profile especially if the event organizer reposts your post.

Embed A Meeting Link In The Emails.

Use meeting scheduler tools, like Calendly and integrate it with Zoom, or Google Meet to provide buyers with an easy process to book an appointment with you.

How You Can Optimize Your Website

Trade show marketing and digital marketing goes hand in hand to generate leads and empower your team to engage with buyers and prospects.

Pages You Need to Optimize for Your Trade Show Marketing

Home Page

Home page is the most or second most visited page. Aside from making sure it’s user-friendly and on-brand, make sure it’s set out to support lead generation and sales enablement with a call-to-action (CTA) section.

Here’s what you can include in the CTA section to remind prospects and buyers that they can actually engage with you way before the show kicks off:

Show date
Show logos
Location
Insights
A form

Product Page

Add an e-catalog or downloadable PDF to your product page to encourage users to sign up for product updates (yes, email marketing isn’t dead and it’s actually more effective).

Contact Us page

Test, test, and test!

The untold secret is many businesses do have a contact form but fail to attend the prospects or buyers who come through the form. It’s because oftentimes, no one is notified about a submission or the form is just not working. Rule of thumb, test the form yourself and think about, as a prospect, what you’ll expect to see next after submitting the form so you don’t miss out on the opportunities!