Attract & Inform the audience
The learning program brings visitors to your exhibition, which in turn brings exhibitors and sponsors, who usually provide the lion’s share of the exhibition’s income.
Sessions at exhibitions typically cover ‘evergreen topics’ in the industry or sector that the exhibition serves (e.g. ‘how-to’ sessions for new entrants into the industry), hot topics and latest trends, or they scan the horizon, to explore where the industry may be going, how innovation may affect the sector and so on.
Promote sponsors & exhibitors
Ultimately, exhibitors and sponsors deliver content at exhibitions to sell their products and services. The way they use content to do this is a mixture of indirect (AKA inbound) and direct (AKA outbound) methods.
Inbound: brand positioning / thought leadership
By giving talks on subjects related to the products and services they offer, sponsors and exhibitors can position themselves as experts in their field.
This forms part of an inbound marketing strategy to drive sales by offering the right products and exhibiting the kind of brand behaviour that clients want to do business with.
Outbound: promoting products & services directly
Some exhibitions sell sponsored sessions which exhibitors can use to promote their products or services directly. Such sessions might include product launches, demonstrations and elevator pitches.
There are a number of methods to enable exhibitors to promote their products and services to visitors directly, while protecting visitors from high pressure sales situations.
These methods arguably exist in a grey area between education and sales, between content and promotional activity.
In Summary
The learning program at an exhibition is ultimately about attracting visitors. For exhibitions that are free to attend, you’re attracting them so that exhibitors can sell to them (directly and indirectly), and sponsors can advertise to them. For exhibitions where visitors pay to attend, you’re attracting them to maximise tickets revenue as well.
This article is an excerpt from our ebook: “Event Content Management: An Exhibition Organiser’s Guide”. Available for download here .