Knowledge is power, and while most businesses rightfully view trade shows as a way to grow business, an often overlooked, important aspect of trade shows is the concentrated opportunity to get some valuable research. It’s not just about working with an exhibit house to build an impressive booth; there’s a real opportunity to learn here, but only if you take the right approach.

Conduct Surveys

One of the best things about trade shows is that for a few days, experts, customers, and clients in your particular industry are all gathered in one place. This is one of the best opportunities that your business has during the year to quickly gather a lot of valuable survey data from relevant participants.

If you’d like to know what your customers really want or even just what many peers in the industry see as growing concerns or trends, surveys at trade shows are a great way to get that research data.

Investigate Trends

One of the best things about trade shows is that this is a perfect chance for people in a given industry to see what the near future brings. Trade shows provide businesses with a venue to show off the products or services they believe will help advance the industry and are there to meet specific increasing concerns or demands within the industry.

If you notice a recurring theme at different booths or hear the businesses or customers talking about the same concern repeatedly, you are on the fast track to understanding which direction the business will take, and now you can better position yourself to capitalize on this.

Process

Once a show is done, and you’ve taken surveys, researched trends, or even polled people visiting your booth, it’s time to do something with all that information. This could be as simple as drawing conclusions based on the investigations you conducted or as complex as taking entire sets of collected information and subjecting them to some data analytics processing to see what patterns may emerge.

The important thing to note, however, is that while data acquisition is the first step, it will only become useful once you extract meaning that is relevant to you and your business. Data by itself is just a collection of information, but data that means something to you can be applied. Have a clear-cut strategy in place for what you want to do with the data you’ve accumulated, whether that’s understanding customer needs better or spotting an emerging opportunity that others haven’t yet filled.

If you want to work with an exhibit house for your next trade show venture, contact Lighthouse Exhibits. We can help.