Activating Public Relations for Trade Shows

Activating Public Relations and Content Marketing for Trade Shows Amplifies ROI and Takes the Heat off of Sales

The 2025 trade show season has started! Whether it's for the supply chain and logistics industry, biotech automation or HVAC systems, rest time is over and it's time to get some leads!

The first quarter of the year always starts off with a bang as our clients with cutting-edge automation, robotics, and AI solutions head out to Manifest, LogiMAT and ProMat (or MODEX depending on the year.)

Although trade shows are a tone of work and fill many with dread, it's an exciting time of year. I like that because it gives us all focus right away after we come back from the leisurely holiday break. The trade show season helps kick off the year. 

As our clients, who are mostly marketers for the middle market growth companies in auotmation/AI, industrial or biotech, focus on the booth experience, sales enablement materials and lead generation tactics needed for the show, the Portavoce team galvanizes to create the essential storytelling elements for the brand:

• Case studies, technology explainers and by-lines on the role of technology in the logistics and supply chain sector.
• Media materials like press releases and fact sheets journalists need to support their story development.
• Content the marketing and sales team will need to talk the walk at the shows like case studies and customer announcements.
• And the essential brand and product messaging, questions and answers that the sales and marketing team, and company leaders and spokespeople use to prepare for the trade show – so that no question is a surprise, and no one is ever grasping for answers.

Oh, and of course, we start reaching out to all the journalists and editors in the trade media who attend the shows to book interviews, podcasts, vlogs and new product demonstrations. We also engage with industry analyst firms who always send analysts to these shows to identify market trends and hype the new technologies and innovations introduced at the events.

In fact, our work starts before the first of the year. We start engaging with trade reporters and editors in November and December to place pre-show stories that drive registered attendees to our clients booths to see and experience new technologies and interview company leaders, product experts and other thought leaders within the company.

Are you still wondering why the public relations team is going to these shows? 

Because public relations is an excellent way for brands to capitalize and extend their trade show investments - which are massive. A 2023 Statista survey of U.S. exhibitors found that companies plan an annual spend of $1,368,000 on trade shows!

• In today’s media environment, and when working with trade media, meaning outlets that cover sector-specific markets and product, there is no opportunity to meet reporters and editors face-to-face in the world. Meeting in-person deepens relationships between the media and the account team, and the client, in a way that a Teams or Zoom meeting and emails cannot.
• Trade shows are the perfect place to support walk-and-talk media interviews. A walk-and-talk interview is wherein your spokesperson can answer questions while looking at and demonstrating the technology they are promoting. These can be hosted at a company showroom or technology center but those are really hard and costly for media to get to. At a trade show, the media are there and eager to see the technology and have access to people to ask questions to at the same time.
• Journalists are set up for all kinds of engaging interview formats at trade shows. Event producers, magazine editors and writers, vloggers and bloggers all want to speak with company leaders at the shows via podcasts, broadcast interviews and traditional one-on-one chats. The photo above is of Fox Robotics CEO, Marin Tchakarov, interviewing with the MHI content team at ProMat 2024.
• The fun and casual environment of a trade makes it natural to ask reporters in person, “What are you working on?”, “What are you working on in Q2 we can help you with?”

So many meaningful interactions happen onsite at trade shows. And the payout isn’t always immediate so it’s important to understand how the public relations workflow unfolds. 

Reporters and editors do publish live from the show. What we usually see is a handful of live stories published from the show which continue to drive traffic to the booth. Analysts publish their observations about the event and the market trends they see coming approximately four week later. Video interviews and podcasts recorded at the show hit six to eight weeks later, and then long-format thought leadership articles three to four months after that. 

Are you wondering if it’s worth the wait? Yes! This creates an ongoing pulse of coverage rather than a “launch and leave” strategy that leaves your hard-spent new product innovation in the archives of the digital media. It keeps the technology, its outcomes and differentiated elements alive I the media for months to come.

True Trade Show Success Comes from Marketing and Communications Before, During and After

I’ve met dozens of business-to-business brands that go to one trade show a year, only rely on their sales teams to book meetings at the event and then rely on those leads for 12 more months until the show comes around again. There are many inherent risks in this strategy that public relations and content marketing can mitigate, but this approach puts tremendous pressure on the sales team, overlooking a wellspring of creativity and capacity – the marketing and public relations teams. 

Activating public relations and content marketing before, during and after trade shows takes the pressure off the sales team. Marketing’s support of a trade show isn’t just to make it look and feel pretty (although that’s part of it).

The success of a trade show investment hinges on having a well thought out marketing plan to engage attendees before, during and after a trade show. 

A great example of how it’s done was the work we did with Biosero, the developer of Green Button Go lab automation software. Each year Biosero goes to the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS) conference and exhibit. In 2019 the impact they were getting from the annual show was waning, primarily because they were only relying on the work of the sales team to book meetings at shows, a very heavy load for just one team. 

Portavoce worked with Biosero to activate pre-show content marketing, email marketing strategies, and public relations outreach to increase booth visitors and attendees of their thought leadership presentations. The results were tremendous:

• 70% increase in qualified customer leads generated at SLAS
• 411% increase in attendees at Biosero’s tutorial presentation - 94 participants total
• 98% increase in organic website visitors during the conference marketing period
• 11 new purchase orders totaling $5 million in potential sales within four weeks of the conference

Are you going to be at ProMat 2025? Our team will be there too and we’d love to visit you at your booth or grab a coffee. Message us on LinkedIn or email us at Portavoce@portavocepr.com if you’d like to connect!