Trade advertising is a marketing tactic used by B2B businesses to effectively reach their target audience. Helping establish brand awareness and relations with other traders by attending trade shows and advertising in trade journals can be a great way to win business and get the phones ringing for B2B businesses.
There are so many benefits to this kind of marketing. The audience you come into contact with are already pre-qualified to be interested in the products or services you have to offer, as more than likely, you’ll be featured at trade shows with a strong industry relevance to yourself. The group of advertisers is also smaller than with other forms of advertising so businesses generally gain more exposure ‘per person’ than other crowded platforms. Actually attending trade shows and representing your business in person will instantly increase your chances of closing deals there and then, with people preferring to engage with humans rather than marketing materials online or on a leaflet.
That’s not to say leaflets aren’t an appropriate way to market your business, because they are. Provided you’re handing them out to the right people. If your trade has a leading journal or magazine then buying adverts or inserts for these can be a quick way to reach targeted users at a predetermined time as magazines are distributed monthly. This will help you forecast potential surges in enquiries and be ready to receive them.
Great Alternatives to trade advertising
If you’re a business that doesn’t quite have the budget to be spending thousands on adverts and attending trade shows then SEO – an internet marketing tactic, can be a great way to utilise your business website and assert your business as a leader online. Billions of searches are conducted every day on search engines like Google and for every industry people will be looking for your products and services.
SEO is more passive than spending on advertising and offers easy discoverability for your business to whoever is searching for you. A website is up 24/7 with a contact form letting people reach you any hour of the day. Your website is also the perfect platform to market a business, with your choice of design, projects to showcase, products to display, and information to show customers that you can optimise the contact a website visitor would have with your business.
