Know your audience. It’s a saying that gets tossed around a lot, but what does it actually mean? Why is it so oft repeated? And more importantly, how do you actually do it?

Why You Need to Know Your Trade Show Audience

Planning and preparing for a trade show is a significant investment in both time and money. What happens if nobody shows up at your booth? Or if you get flooded with traffic all day, but nobody is interested in buying? Those are issues that can—and will—arise if you don’t know who your audience is. Because if you don’t know your audience, you don’t know how to market to them.

What does it mean for a business if they don’t see any ROI from the shows they attend? The immediate result is that the time and money spent on that event is wasted because it hasn’t resulted in any new business. In the longer term, it means having to spend even more time and money on further audience research, retuning marketing materials, and perhaps even upgrading the booth. This can be devastating for a company that relies on trade shows to generate leads and even more so for a startup that doesn’t have a lot of money to spread around.

How to Find Your Audience

Your target audience comprises the people who are potentially interested in doing business with you, either now or in the future. In order to be able to successfully capture their interest, you have to know what they find interesting in the first place. And you need to know what their specific problems and concerns are.

That’s where “know your audience” comes in. It’s not just about knowing who your audience is, it’s also about knowing what their interests are, what they like, and how their needs intersect with what your company can provide. What problems do they have, that you can help them with?

If you want to tailor your trade show booth and content to your target audience, you first need to determine who that audience is. Once you know this, you’ll start to have a good idea of what kinds of exhibit content they’ll respond to.

1. Use Demographic Profiling

If you don’t know much about who your intended audience is, then you’re essentially starting with a blank page. With demographic profiling, your objective is to fill in the blanks, so you can create a buying persona—a description of the kind of person who fits in your target audience.

Getting this key demographic data helps you define who your trade show audience is by providing a framework of essential details. Some demographic characteristics that are often useful include:

• Your company may be of interest to people in a range of industries. When you’re attending an event that’s specific to one particular industry, your marketing needs to reflect that.
• Does your company service big employers or small ones? Local companies or national ones?
• Occupation/job title. For instance, are you targeting company buyers, managers, IT specialists?
• When you’re attending small, local trade shows, your lead-in marketing needs to be directed to the people who are in the local area.

Information like this helps you build up a buying persona, a portrait of your ideal attendee. This is the foundation of your event marketing campaign and also helps dictate what your event booth and content should look like.

2. Look to Your Website

The analytics data from your company’s website can provide valuable information about your intended audience. What are the most popular pages on the site? What landing pages are getting the most use, and what blog posts get the most views and comments? The content on the most popular pages is likely to be content that resonates with your audience, so it can give you some insight into what they’re interested in and what they need from your company. Google Analytics can be helpful in finding these answers.

3. And Your Competitors’ Sites

Another simple way to get information about your audience is to look at what your closest competitors are doing in terms of marketing. What kinds of content do they publish on their websites, on social media, and in other media channels? Look at things like:

• Voice and tone
• Brand messaging
• Overall marketing strategy

These will give you a feel for how you might approach your own marketing campaign.

This strategy won’t necessarily tell you who your audience is, but it can help you understand what kinds of content they respond to.

4. Scan Social Media

If your company has any social media accounts, engagement data can provide some valuable information about your audience. Take a look at what kinds of content people are responding to most enthusiastically. What gets the most likes, and what gets the most comments, shares, or retweets? Looking at this data shows you what kinds of information your audience considers valuable and noteworthy. You can then add similar content to beef up your trade show marketing material to make it more attractive to this audience.

Some social media platforms may have additional insights to offer. If your business has a Facebook page, for instance, you can use Facebook Insights to get certain kinds of demographic data. For instance, you can see what countries your followers are from and what states they live in. You can see what other Facebook interests they have, whether they’re on other social media platforms, and sometimes even what items they’ve purchased online.

5. Design a Survey

When it comes to defining your audience, there’s nothing wrong with going right to the source and simply asking them what they want. With a few well-chosen questions, you can get some highly specific and valuable information that comes directly from the source.

This can be especially valuable because you can include demographic questions as well as questions designed to get at the heart of what your audience wants. Then combine your data for a broad overview, or segment it according to different demographic details to get more specific information.

Your Event Success Starts with Finding Your Audience

At any trade show you attend, your success depends on how well you understand your audience. The better you know them, the better you’ll be at attracting them to your booth. With a steady stream of interested visitors, you and your sales team will be collecting leads all day long.