Trade shows are an important part of successfully growing a business, particularly at the early stages. They can be an opportunity to interact with people who have a particular interest, either personally or professionally, in some aspect of your industry. Because you can be sure the people who attend a trade show have this prerequisite interest in your market or your niche within a larger market, the people you meet there should be automatically highly valued as potential customers. Whereas so much of traditional marketing involves finding these interested customers, a trade show does this work for you. Trade shows are also interesting marketing opportunities because of the emphasis they place on face-to-face interaction. Increasingly, more and more of a company’s marketing is done online. Many retail businesses conduct the entirety of their commerce online. As a result, many believe a traditional business skills like in-person networking, public speaking and body language have become less important. At a trade show, this is not the case. A trade show is an opportunity to interact face-to-face with prospective customers and industry professionals. While these old school skills are needed, there is new technology available to supplement these skills; recent innovations have automated some aspects of trade shows. Most of the tech involved in trade shows has to do with keeping track of all the people you meet. Because trade shows are so popular and the attendees so focused on getting business done, it can be difficult to keep track of everything. This is a good problem to have, and automation may be the solution.

Badge Scanners

The tradeshow badge scanner is an important recent development in trade show technology. Many people choose to purchase these scanners, while others rent them on an as-needed basis for single use at a particular trade show. Attendees at trade shows are often equipped with barcoded badges; the barcodes in these badges are associated with information about the trade show attendee, such as certain contact information or information about the company they work for. As you can imagine, remembering all of this information—especially for hundreds of people—is impossible for even the best memories among us. That’s where a badge scanner that can quickly scan these barcoded badges comes in handy. If attendees don’t have badges, these scanners may still be useful for trade shows and for business professionals in general. Many people are now embedding barcodes onto their business cards. If you’re interested in purchasing or renting a barcode scanner, make sure it will work with business cards as well.

Lead Retrieval

The purpose of a badge scanner is to collect the information of a prospective customer or an attendee at a trade show and store their information so that it may be used later for business purposes. The act of going back and getting this information is referred to as lead retrieval and it is a process that has been made easier by automation. Older versions of barcode scanners and lead retrieval technology often took days or weeks to actually display the leads that were captured at a trade show. Now, an efficient lead retrieval system will instantly display the leads you have gathered. This makes it possible to follow up with the leads and grow your business more efficiently.

Automated Syncing

Another efficiency in trade show technology involves syncing these leads with your customer relationship management software. As mentioned above, following up with leads quickly is a priority; however, it is also a priority to follow up with leads in an organized fashion. Many people communicate with their customers in ways that are proven to be effective using customer relationship management (CRM) software. Often, these are cloud-based systems like Salesforce. For businesses utilizing these platforms, efficient use of trade show data needs to be quickly incorporated into the platform. Many trade show scanners can automatically collect, store and sync the lead data from trade shows. What used to take pen and paper, personalized follow-up calls and emails and considerable brain power can now be done automatically.