Maximize your trade show success with these key strategies

Trade shows provide great opportunities for growers to do business. But if you don’t go in with a plan, you might spend a few days sitting at an empty booth.

To learn what to do to get the results you want out of a trade show, GIE Media Horticulture Group Editor Matt McClellan spoke with Tim Asimos, chief marketing officer at Timmons Group and previously the vice president and director of digital innovation with Circle S Studio, a strategic marketing and design firm based in Richmond, Virginia.

Don’t just exhibit; be a speaker

Having a booth is great, but the platform that being a speaker provides is tough to beat. Speaking on a topic of expertise to a targeted audience provides instant credibility. It also provides a great opportunity to cross promote your booth happenings, as well as giving your booth staff something to talk to visitors about.

Spread the word in advance of the event

Don’t wait until the trade show to start generating buzz; get buzzing before the event. Host a webinar as a countdown for the show, post on social media or publish a press release online about what your company will be featuring at the show.

Personally invite prospects and customers to meet you at the show. Also, work ahead to schedule appointments with qualified leads for consultations, presentations, demos or other meetings in advance of the event.

Face-to-face meetings are a great way to nurture leads or even close a deal.

Design your booth and messaging to make an impact

 In a sea of booths, you have mere seconds to attract people. Creating a powerful visual impact with simple and clear messaging is very important to lure people in. Your booth is intended to be a backdrop, not a brochure. People walking by should be able to instantly recognize who you are and what you do. It’s your booth staff’s job to take it from there.

Develop an engagement plan

Your booth should be staffed with energetic and enthusiastic employees that connect with trade show attendees and implement the strategy you defined long before they arrived. Working on laptops or tablets, scanning emails on smartphones, and sitting down in chairs is sure to send negative signals to a passerby. Your staff is there to work the booth, so that should be the primary focus.

In addition to having engaging conversations, consider something else to lure in an audience and create some hype. Contests, promotions, giveaways and other creative methods have all been used to help companies achieve their trade show goals.

But it’s more than just swag and iPad giveaways; you need to have a plan of action for generating conversations, identifying legitimate leads and capturing their contact information through a scanner or landing page. This will be helpful when beginning the lead nurturing process after the event.

Create a post-event follow-up strategy

Just because the trade show is over doesn’t mean that your work is done. Follow up with the attendees that visited your booth and gave you their contact information.

However, don’t mistake all these contacts as warm leads and try to immediately sell to them. Send them an email to thank them for stopping by, offer them a free download of your presentation and try to gauge their interest. By the number of unsubscribes you get from your initial email, you’ll pretty quickly know who was interested in your company and who just wanted that iPad you gave away.

For those contacts remaining, set up a lead nurturing campaign. This will help determine which prospects are worth pursuing and save your sales team a lot of time and energy.

2026 horticulture trade shows

Cultivate'26: July 11 to 14; Columbus, Ohio

2026 Perennial Plant Association National Symposium: July 27 to 30, East Lansing, Michigan

2026 Garden Center Conference & Expo: Aug. 18 to 20; Nashville, Tennessee

The Landscape Show (FNGLA): Aug. 19 to 21; Orlando, Florida

2026 Farwest Show: Aug. 26 to 28; Portland, Oregon

Plug & Cutting Conference 2026: Sept. 14 to 16; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

CEA Summit East 2026: Sept. 15 to 16; Danville, Virginia

GreenTech North America 2026: Sept. 23 to 24; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Canadian Greenhouse Conference 2026: Oct. 7 to 8; Niagara Falls, Ontario

The Global Produce & Floral Show 2026: Oct. 14 to 16; Orlando, Florida