How to Get the Most Out of Your Experience at Manufacturing Day

You’re ready for the next manufacturing day event, or are you? You have your sales manager and CFO ready with important data and spreadsheets. You printed off a fresh batch of business cards. What else would you need? Surprisingly, a lot more. If you don’t bring your “A” game, you might walk away empty-handed – or at least with a lot less information than you wanted.

Plan Ahead

When you go to Manufacturing Day, don’t wing it. It’s tempting, because that’s what a lot of companies do. A representative shows up, and meets and greets people. There’s no real organization to it. It’s written off as a business meeting, but a fun one.

But that’s an incredible waste of an opportunity. How so? Because, if you’re there to meet a company representative from, say ISOStainless.com, don’t you think you should have a little bit of an idea of what they do? Shouldn’t you know whether it’s worth your time to even talk with them?

What about setting up meetings with business owners whom you may benefit from? This is an event for manufacturers, and it’s one of the few chances you have to interact with your colleagues and potential future business partners in a casual setting.

Map out the guest list. Make plans to introduce yourself to certain people and ignore others. Only interact with people whom you find interesting or would like to get to know.

Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan for The Event

These events are great for social media. If you have a Twitter account, for example, it’s a great time to set up a live tweet stream to tell your customers and followers what’s happening with the business. If you have a Facebook fan page, it’s a good time to advertise the fact that you’ll be at the event.

It’s also a good time to plan a marketing initiative around Manufacturing Day to try to boost “likes” and  increase your visibility. While you’re at the event, hand out your business card and tell people to visit your Facebook page.

Creating Flyers For The Event

Business cards are great, but flyers might be a better idea. What you want are promotional materials like pens, magnets, flyers, and anything else that you can hand out to people. Pens, magnets, and pins are especially nice because they’re useful in and of themselves.

Flyers could advertise your website, your Facebook page, your Twitter handle, your business location, your hours of operation, where you’re located at the event (i.e. your booth), a quick overview of your products and services, and they can even be used to give away free samples.

Basically, what you’re trying to do is increase your brand awareness. The more you can get your name out to the public, and to other businesses, the higher your probability of making valuable contacts and potentially establishing new business relationship.