Tradeshow organizers are launching events beyond their native borders to attract new exhibitors, sponsors and attendees – and it’s often a strategy that makes great sense.  While entering a new market creates new opportunities, it also creates new challenges. From a marketing standpoint, extra research is needed to make an international show successful.

Having recently helped a client promote a new tradeshow in Dubai, we learned that you can’t start planning too early. Several of the tried-and-true marketing techniques we use to promote shows in the United States (to predominantly U.S. exhibitors and attendees) don’t work in other countries.

Start with research – the backbone of any effective marketing communication campaign. We typically get much of our demographic information about potential exhibitors and attendees from three sources: the show organizer’s proprietary research –on-site interviews and post-show surveys; business information from media and financial reporting services; and government resources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This type of information is scarce or non-existent in certain parts of the world. Certainly, a show organizer starting a new event would not have research about a past show. Moreover, media and business records in many countries are not as reliable. And many governments are not as willing to provide resources as the U.S.

The availability of reliable research is critical to putting together an effective strategy, so you need to do much more work (and spend more time) gathering critical information. A few things that helped during our recent effort:

1.      Find an expert who knows about the region you are targeting. In the case of the Dubai conference, our client hired international tradeshow expert Cherif Moujabber, former President and CEO of IDG World Expo, and Vice President of the Asia-Pacific region for Cahners Expo Group (now Reed Exhibitions). Cherif helped the show organizer understand the unique landscape in the Middle East and provided invaluable insight about information resources.

2.      Enlist the aid of people in-country. Our client worked closely with the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Dubai Convention Bureau to learn about the key organizations and influencers in our target markets, as well as local resources.

3.      Establish partnerships with key attendee groups. In Dubai, our client worked with major government agencies that controlled the industries they were targeting. This gave them unique insights and access to prospective exhibitor and attendee groups.

All these extra efforts provided the information we needed to develop a strategy for securing exhibitors and attendees, but additional challenges and unknowns still lay ahead, most notably in the areas of list acquisition, direct mail and printing. I will focus on those issues in my next post.

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