For decades, trade shows were the ultimate opportunity for B2B businesses to find new customers, increase their sales revenue, and expand their business on a rapid schedule. 

While trade shows are still hot marketing opportunities today, they’ve largely lost their crown to another excellent marketing platform: the Internet.

In this guide, we’ll look at the biggest benefits and the biggest downsides of using trade shows to market your business. We’ll also look at how the Internet is now a chief competitor to the trade show industry, and how it can help your business.

Trade Shows: The Positives

Trade shows might be old-fashioned and expensive, but they have a huge amount of benefits for savvy businesses. With thousands of prospects all in one place, meeting new clients and customers at a trade show is a very simple process.

With a skilled and experienced sales team, a proven closing technique, and a service or product that attendees are genuinely interested in, a single trade show can often turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for your company.

There’s also the network potential – trade shows are great places to meet new faces and expand your business network. With the right strategy, you can rapidly expand your personal network and start taking on referral business and new customers.

Trade Shows: The Negatives

Trades shows can be excellent opportunities, but only for some businesses. Hosting a booth at a large industry convention can cost a lot of money, and small businesses are often left financially depleted and overwhelmed by the experience.

If you aren’t ready to deal with the volume of new business that a trade show could bring in, be very careful about exhibiting. Trade shows are far from cheap, and a bad showing could cost you tens of thousands of wasted marketing dollars.

Another downside of trade show marketing is the scaling potential. While an online marketing campaign can rapidly scale up or downwards in size, a trade show is very difficult to scale without hiring additional sales staff for your business.

Why the Internet is replacing trade shows:

Marketing experts love to compare the Internet to a trade show, particularly as the two marketing platforms have so much in common. In many ways, the Internet is an everlasting trade show, with search engines acting as the aisles and websites acting as the booths.

With a high-ranked website, you can build a virtual booth sitting on the best floor space that the show has to offer. With prospects increasingly searching online for new business opportunities, being ranked prominently in Google for your industry’s top search terms is just like showcasing your business at a trade show.

As well as offering immense amounts of interest from prospects, the Internet gives your business the ability to rapidly scale its marketing efforts. Stumbled onto some lucrative keywords? Scale up your pay-per-click spend and get more business than any trade show could hope to generate.

Need help taking your business online?

Let us bring your business into the digital era. At SEOPOP, we’ve helped Los Angeles businesses find new customers, loyal clients, and lucrative deals using a wide range of effective online marketing techniques.

Contact us today to learn more about how SEOPOP can help increase your sales and give your business a profitable new online marketing platform.