Steal This Simple Playbook to Turn Any Trade Show Into Wall-to-Wall Press Coverage

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. For many marketing teams, trade shows are a necessary evil. Between the booth costs, travel expenses and staff time away from regular duties, the investment is massive. Ask anyone who’s spent the holidays planning for CES, and they’ll tell you: It’s stressful, expensive and often underwhelming. But the truth is that most companies aren’t maximizing the opportunities in front of them. With the right PR strategy, you can transform your tradeshow presence from a cost center into a coverage-generating machine. Here’s how to make public relations an integral part of your next show. Prior to any show, ensure the entire internal team is aligned on what the key messaging will be. This should be tightly integrated with what the overall brand of the company is, which should ideally already be communicated through all customer-facing marketing touchpoints. Making sure all attendees are briefed on what the top message will be will not only benefit public relations efforts but also sales and marketing. Create a very short brief that reiterates the main message along with no more than three sub-messages that reinforce the main point. Successful marketing relies on repetition, as does successful media relations. Next, request the attending media list from event organizers. Most will provide attendee information in the form of a spreadsheet, and if you’re lucky, email addresses too. Without emails, you’ll need to do some digging. PR agencies often use databases like Muckrack, but a Google search or visit to a publication’s website can work just as well. Highlight the key reporters that are top priority for potential coverage. Remember that reporters at major shows are drowning in pitches. To cut through the noise, you need hard news, such as a product launch, partnership announcement, executive hire or major client signing. Reporters are hunting for what’s new and noteworthy. Without that hook, you’re less likely to convince a reporter to allocate their precious time to visit you. When searching for news to announce, keep in mind that it can be something from the recent past that was not publicly announced. For example, if a new feature was recently released in the past few months, it can be repurposed into a formal press release and used in your outreach to reporters. Lock in specific meeting times and send calendar invites. Follow up with reminders the day before and morning of the event to try and maximize attendance. Ask reporters for their cell numbers, and feel free to send them polite text message reminders during the show. This has a side benefit of getting their cell number for future PR outreach use. Still, brace yourself as no-shows are common due to reporters juggling competing demands. Draft your press release early, have it fully approved and plan to distribute it via a wire service roughly 24 hours before the official start of