October in Hong Kong is the month for trade show. I’ve met with a couple of trade show organizers who want to know how online media works to support their events. Truth is, trade show organizers have been building websites to promote their events for over a decade. But still either the online vehicle is not driving the conversion effectively, or many trade show organizers are not quite doing the online strategy correctly.
Let’s summarize into 5 problems that will ruin a trade show website:
1). It is the content that discourages your visitors and the “robot” from visiting your trade show website. Trade show website is inherently lacking content. A typical trade show website should have less than 1,000 pages, the one with over 5,000 pages would be considered a big site. But that big site may already include all the contents of the previous events. If the information are not current, then the readability is low. Also, the small content volume will discourage the search engine robot from indexing the site. It then affects the visibility in the search engine result.
2). Talking about content readability. Most of the B2B marketers are trained to compose technical articles that focus on feature and function. The non-conversational style of writing weakens the call-to-action and won’t be effective when engaging and triggering the readers’ responses.
3). Almost all trade show organizers build websites to facilitate pre-show visitor registrations. I hardly see an exception. But at least half of the trade show websites have buried the registration page deep down in the sub-page options. If you want registration, why don’t you put the form in the first landing page?
4). Most of the trade show websites are monologue. Today your visitors are more interested to share peer experience and second opinion instead of acquiring the brochure information. Let them to talk to each other through your website.
5). Lastly, let you marketing team to lead the website project, not the IT team. The visitors and exhibitors want to talk to the customer service people. They are not interested in dealing with the webmaster. The website can facilitate your CRM, but they are essentially two different things.
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Thanks for visiting this weblog. I am a digital marketer based in Hong Kong. After founding a marketing consulting company, merged it with a trade show company, and completed my tenure in 2007, I am blogging my insight and commentary for marketing and entrepreneurial experience. Now I am the Managing Director of 
