To become a top booth salesperson, you must overcome "two major hurdles"

 If you are a newcomer to the exhibition industry, this article may help you achieve your exhibition dreams; for those who have been working in the industry for many years, I hope this practical guide can bring you new inspiration!

　　The First Mountain: Collecting Potential Client Information

　　The methods for collecting client information for exhibitions across various industries are largely similar. The sources of such information are mostly: exhibition catalogs from similar trade shows, company directories on industry websites, and targeted distribution of one's own exhibition recruitment materials to participating companies at similar trade shows, and so on.

　　Since the information collection strategies adopted by investment promotion personnel in various companies are similar, obtaining the latest first-hand information is particularly important.

　　The Second Mountain: Search Engine Optimization for Exhibition Investment Promotion Materials

　　This is a seriously overlooked issue, but for individual investment promoters, it is precisely one of the most important low-cost ways to achieve performance. According to the editor, in a considerable number of exhibition companies, the performance brought by search engine optimization has even surpassed that of telemarketing. Due to SEO is a very systematic job, and due to limited space, the editor can only provide a brief popular science introduction, hoping it will be helpful for everyone's work.

　　Take a 20-person booth sales team as an example. When the new exhibition materials are released, everyone receives the same information. The vast majority of people (possibly as high as 99.9%) may immediately publish investment promotion information on websites they are familiar with.

　　If each salesperson has 20 information publishing channels, the entire team will send out 400 identical exhibition messages in a short period. Taking Baidu as an example, due to the different weight values of various websites, only over 10 of these 400 centrally published pieces of information might be indexed (i.e., appear in search results), with the vast majority being untraceable.

　　Why does this happen?

　　Firstly, the prerequisite for Baidu and other search engines to give a good ranking to an exhibition message is the originality of the content, followed by the weight value of the information publishing website itself. If the information content is original and the publishing website has a high weight, this piece of information will basically appear in the top five positions of the results.

　　What does it mean for search engines when hundreds or thousands of identical exhibition materials are published?

　　Firstly, there's the problem of information inundation. Search engines have filtering mechanisms. Once identical information floods to a certain extent, even if high-weight portal websites like Sina or Sohu publish this exhibition, it won't receive good visibility and ranking. In this situation, only rewriting an original piece of investment promotion material will improve things.

　　This is also a question that most salespersons have been puzzled by: Why doesn't Baidu index the information I publish? Now you know why, right? So, how can it be improved?

　　Firstly, after getting the new exhibition materials, don't rush to publish them, because your 99% of colleagues will directly publish them, which will annoy search engines and trigger spam content filtering mechanisms. Therefore, you need to be among the other 1%.

　　To be among these 1% of people, you need to first analyze the exhibition materials. If your company allows, you can write the "Exhibition Overview" section yourself. The overview of most exhibitions mainly introduces the features and advantages of their own exhibition; just organize the language. If your writing ability is limited, you can re-create sentences with the same meaning without affecting readability and completeness.

　　For example, this sentence: The 18th Chengdu Furniture Fair in 2017 realized a "one city, two exhibitions" model, with a total exhibition area of 250,000 sqm. The exhibition content will include finished furniture, custom home furnishings, soft furnishings and home textiles, home accessories, mahogany furniture, furniture production equipment, and furniture raw and auxiliary materials, becoming a "pan-home exhibition" covering the entire home furnishings industry chain.

　　You can change it to: Hosted by the Chengdu Municipal People's Government, organized by the Sichuan Furniture Import and Export Chamber of Commerce and Chengdu New Oriental Exhibition Co., Ltd., The 18th Chengdu Furniture Fair in 2017 will be held from June 7th to 10th. This exhibition will adopt the "one city, two exhibitions" model, with a total exhibition area of 250,000 square meters...

　　For fixed content like "Business Scope," where there is no room for "pseudo-originality," the suggestion is to adjust the order.

　　Taking the Chengdu Furniture Fair as an example again, their scope of exhibits includes:

　　(I) Finished Furniture Exhibition: ......

　　(II) Home Textiles and Soft Furnishings Exhibition: ......

　　(III) Production Equipment and Raw Materials Exhibition: ......

　　To differentiate from others' information, we can adjust it as follows:

　　1. Production Equipment and Raw Materials Exhibition: ......

　　2. Finished Furniture Exhibition: ......

　　3. Home Textiles and Soft Furnishings Exhibition: ......

　　This is information "pseudo-originality." The handling of other content can be inferred by analogy, provided that it does not affect readability or mislead merchants.

　　Secondly, the extraction of information keywords.

　　Every exhibition has keywords (including long-tail keywords) that are well-known and recognized within the industry. (including long-tail words). The keyword widely known for the China Import and Export Fair is Canton Fair, and the long-tail keywords are: Canton Fair 2017, the 121st Canton Fair, Canton Fair dates, etc.

　　Take " 2017 8th Cross-Strait Motor and Electrical Appliances Expo " as an example. The name of this exhibition does not include information about the city where it is held. Companies that have previously participated or are interested in this exhibition, when looking for the latest information, might first enter "Ningde" into a search engine. That's right, this exhibition is held in Ningde, Fujian, and coincidentally, it has an official abbreviation: Electrical Expo. So the first keyword is extracted: Ningde Electrical Expo.

　　Analyzing the exhibition name further, it's found that the main subject of the exhibition is the "motor and electrical appliances" industry, and the term "Electrical Expo" is too broad and lacks specificity. If we want other companies in this industry to also pay attention, the keywords could be: Ningde Motor Exhibition, Ningde Motor and Electrical Appliances Exhibition, etc. If it's an exhibition that has been held for many editions, it's recommended to add the year to the long-tail keywords.

　　How to use these extracted keywords is a complex topic that can't be explained in one go. The most basic method is to embed them into the information content. Other uses will be covered in a future article if there's interest.

　　So, after processing the information, the question becomes: where should we publish it first?

　　If you have access to some information publishing websites, you should now list these websites according to their weight. News sources and high-weight websites should be published first, and low-weight websites later. Please note that “pseudo-original” content should only be published two to three times at most.

For example, the website where I work, China Convention and Exhibition Portal (CNENA.COM), is a news source website for six search engines: Baidu, 360, Google, Microsoft Bing, NetEase Youdao, and China Search. It has high weight, good ranking, and high traffic! Welcome to various organizers for station recruitment!