As marketers, we’ve all been there. Event season is looming, and you’ve got so many things to think about and get done before time runs out.
Whether you’re a seasoned event marketer, or a marketer that occasionally exhibits, we know you’re a master of spinning plates and keeping the rest of your projects and campaigns running while also preparing for this next event.
We’ve collated the best advice with some examples from Nimlok’s own campaigns to help you develop and action your social strategy before the show, smash your business objectives during the show, and measure the impact of your social performance on your exhibiting ROI!
TL;DR
(Too long; didn’t read. Maybe for us marketers it should be TB;DHTTR – too busy; don’t have time to read!)
Starting with your exhibition objectives allows you to build your social strategy around measurable business outcomes.
Before the show, build anticipation with event-branded announcements, teaser content, and reasons to visit your stand.
During the event, use social content to amplify your campaign beyond the stand and reach people who are not physically in the room.
Design your stand with content in mind: create interactive, visual or memorable moments that encourage visitors to capture and share their experience.
Use QR codes strategically by linking them to valuable actions, such as competitions, meeting bookings, interactive tools, downloads or personalised content.
Capture visitor reactions, behind-the-scenes clips and product or experience demos while the event is live.
Encourage employee advocacy on LinkedIn by giving your team content ideas, visual assets and campaign guidance to amplify your brand reach and support your GEO strategy.
After the show, keep the campaign active by repurposing event content, re-engaging visitors and reaching people who missed the event.
Measure more than likes and impressions: track UTM links, QR code scans, website activity, lead conversions, employee reach and overall contribution to exhibiting ROI.
Nimlok's Additional Resources
Watch the video
In this video, Delia talks about the importance of your social media content before, during and after the show, and the mistake that many marketers make: stopping the campaign too soon after the event ends:
Read the video transcript
Most brands treat exhibition content as an afterthought. But the reality is, some of the most valuable marketing happens during and after the show.
During the event, your content pushes your campaign far beyond the stand itself. Because while your team is engaging people in the hall, your social content is reaching everyone else. This is the people who couldn’t attend, the wider industry audience, and of course, potential customers discovering your brand for the very first time.
Every live update, behind the scenes clips, or visitor interactions, keep your brand active while the event is happening.
You’re not just exhibiting; you’re amplifying the campaign in real time.
Then comes post show. This is where most brands stop too early. Post-show content keeps the momentum going.
It extends reach, re-engages visitors, supports follow-up conversations, and helps the campaign continue performing, long after the stand is gone.
We think beyond the stand itself here at Nimlok, so this is something we do when we exhibit ourselves.
The truth is, we love to get our audience excited and create curiosity for our theme and stand before the show. But during the event and post-show, we continue to stay active across our channels and keep the campaign going.
From emails to social channels, our exhibition environments enable marketing teams to extend the event campaigns beyond the show floor, because we believe that the most successful exhibition campaigns are not built around a few days at an event. They’re designed to create impact before, during, and after the event.
So if you want to see how we did this ourselves, make sure to follow this page, and stay tuned for more exhibiting tips.
Download the infographic
We’ve also created this infographic for you as a visual reminder of the advice for your next event:
Social strategy starts with business objectives
The most successful brands treat exhibition content as an active strategy, not an afterthought. Your social strategy needs to work towards your business’s event objectives.
Exhibiting objectives:
- Reach our target number of promising conversations with prospective new clients on our stand.
- Identify new opportunities to support brands with our exhibition stand design & build services and interactive stand engagement tools.
Social strategy:
- Encourage footfall to our stand by sharing content of real visitor experiences on our stand, sharing how fun our interactive stand games are.
- Increase curiosity about what we’re doing on our stand by creating a buzz online and sharing visitor feedback.
If you need some help defining your exhibiting brief, Nimlok has created a no-nonsense guide that includes a downloadable workbook to help you to create a great exhibition brief that nails your marketing objectives.
The physical experience on your exhibition stand is only part of your customer’s journey. By making the most of your social campaign, you’re giving helping them move through that journey. Your event updates give them an insight into what it would be like to work with your brand or to buy your products/services. At the end of the day, people use social media to be entertained, informed, and express themselves, so your content has to tie back to emotions. What action do I want them to take? So, what do you want them to feel to take that action?
Before the event: build anticipation through your marketing channels
Make your audience feel part of the experience.
Announce where you’ll be and why people should visit
When your target audience is deciding whether to attend the show, they’ll be researching which brands are attending, and what they can gain from the event.
Event organisers usually provide templates to share that you’re exhibiting at their show, with templates that use their brand guidelines with your company name, with things like “Find us on stand N70”. But when all exhibitors use these on socials, it can create a sea of noise of identical-looking posts that make your audiences’ eyes glaze over. You can create your own exhibiting announcements using your brand guidelines and add the event’s logo and details. People already thinking of visiting that show will recognise the event logo and, if they follow you on social, they’ll recognise your branding and put the two together that you’re exhibiting. Don’t forget to use the organiser’s hashtag for the event. Attendees will be searching for posts before the show that give them feedback about whether to attend this event, and they’ll keep checking it during the show, so make the most of that free reach!
PLATFORM TIP: When users tap the countdown sticker in your Instagram story, they get the option to set a reminder. When the clock runs out, they’ll get a push notification. On TikTok, you can add the live countdown sticker to your pre-recorded videos so users can track your upcoming live broadcast and make sure they tune in. Use this to your advantage!
Tease the stand theme, product launch, or experience
Use this as an opportunity to encourage engagement across your company pages while piquing their curiosity.
At Nimlok, we have a reputation of running an annual themed campaign that ties back to our broader company messaging. Before we exhibit, we post teasers for our theme, creating curiosity while our audience wonders what’s going to happen or what to expect at the show.
After exhibiting at our first event of the campaign, the theme is out there and has been fully shared through the first event’s content, so we change tactic and focus more on the interactive stand tools that drive engagement on our stand, as well as providing stand inspiration and useful advice.
During the event: amplify your campaign beyond the stand
Using your social strategy as a guide, prepare your content in advance of the show. Draft the post text in your social media management tool (or even the notes app in your phone!), keep in mind the type of content you want to capture and share, and make sure you’ve got all the tech you need with you.
As part of Nimlok’s social strategy, I post a ‘stand reveal’ video on the first day of the show while the anticipation is still high. This continues the momentum from the teaser posts before the show. I capture the stand footage at the start of the show, then I edit the content straight away – for shorts and reels it’s easy to edit the clips on my phone, but for the stand reveal video I find it easier to edit on my Mac. It’s vital that you step away from your stand to do this – we emphasise this point in our stand staff training.
Turn your stand into a User Generated Content opportunity
During the event, your stand should become more than a physical meeting space. It should create moments people want to capture, share and talk about, transforming physical footfall into scalable UGC.
We’ve talked about how your marketing strategy should support your exhibiting objectives. But your exhibiting strategy should also support your marketing objectives.
Your target audience is found online, and only a portion of it will be at the show. By ensuring your stand design and interactive tools include opportunities for content, you create a holistic strategy that covers all aspects of the customer journey, using as much exposure as possible, which in turn increases your exhibiting ROI – more on that later.
When planning your stand with your exhibition design & build contractor, the focus is on designing the physical customer journey through your stand. By including your marketing content strategy in the stand design, you can give your audience reasons to pull out their phones, capture the moment, and share it online. Whether it’s a product display, interactive tool, or part of your stand design itself.
For our ‘exhibiting space’ campaign, we had an eye-catching astronaut backdrop that was the perfect setting for UGC. Our stand team would encourage this behaviour with our on-stand visitors, which would make passers by stop in their tracks to see what was happening, which then encouraged more conversations and more photos! When attendees share that content on day one, those that are still travelling or attending on day two will see those posts, get a lil’ bit of FOMO, and want to come to your stand to see what all the fuss is about!
Use trackable QR codes strategically to boost UGC
QR codes are now used so much, they become visual clutter. Don’t use them for generic signposting like your website’s homepage. Instead, incorporate them into your exhibition stand’s journey for high-value converting actions, utility, or visitor engagement, such as:
- Online booking systems to book a meeting or register for an event
- Join an interactive game on your stand
- Receive personalised digital content, like a digital copy of their selfie booth printout
- Competition entry with data capture
- Voting in a live poll where results are shown in real-time on a screen on your stand
- The slide deck from your brand’s in-person speaker session
- Submit anonymous questions to be answered in your speaker session
Include your campaign’s UTM tracking parameters within your QR code, to track the reach of your digital content, which will help to measure your event’s ROI.
In our exhibiting space campaign, we used a prominent QR code on the floor in front of the astronaut backdrop. When scanned, it gave you a custom selfie frame that matched out stand theme, giving visitors something unique that encouraged UGC, amplified our presence, and maximised digital visibility of the campaign.
NIMLOK TIP: our award-winning multiplayer game, Connect, allows users to play the interactive stand game by using their own smartphone as the controller. Visitors scan the QR code on the digital screen, enter their details, and join fellow stand visitors in a head-to-head game of skill (and luck!) using their phone’s browser window to connect and control the game. The fact that visitors use their own device means they can likely use autocomplete to input their name and email, and once they have played the game, they can navigate from that browser window to your socials which increases your brand reach even further post-event.
Capture reactions, behind-the-scenes and visitor interactions
Once I’ve shared our ‘stand reveal’ post with our social media audience, I then concentrate on the visitor experience to help drive more traffic to our stand. I showcase how our engagement tools work from the POV of a visitor: how you sign up to play, what the gameplay looks like, and show that reactions of players when they win a little treat. It helps visitors to imagine their experience when they come to our stand, build that excitement, and by showing players real reactions it gets the viewer to think “that looks so good, I need to go and see their stand in person”.
Encourage employee advocacy to magnify your reach and compliment your AI/GEO strategy
The fact is that you can’t share every perspective when exhibiting. Your social strategy can focus on serving the business objectives, and your colleagues can contribute additional viewpoints that compliment the main campaign from a different angle, creating a holistic picture for the viewer, and extending your reach tenfold by reaching your colleagues’ connections that don’t follow your company page (yet!).
Once I’ve shared our ‘stand reveal’ post with our social media audience, I then concentrate on the visitor experience to help drive more traffic to our stand. I showcase how our engagement tools work from the POV of a visitor: how you sign up to play, what the gameplay looks like, and show that reactions of players when they win a little treat. It helps visitors to imagine their experience when they come to our stand, build that excitement, and by showing players real reactions it gets the viewer to think “that looks so good, I need to go and see their stand in person”.
Support your sales team with brand assets and a content framework, not a rigid script. Provide them with guidance on the hashtags and visuals but let them frame their posts for their audience. Train them to think like a marketer 😉 and explain that this strategy ultimately increases your lead generation during and after your event through supporting your SEO/GEO efforts. By sharing website links appended with your campaign’s UTM parameters, you can track the impact of your colleagues’ efforts and share this with them.
FAQ: Does employee advocacy help with AI/GEO?
Absolutely – employee advocacy is more crucial now than ever. AI needs to be trained using reliable sources of information, and as your marketing campaigns are biased towards emphasising your brand’s positives, AI uses social media to monitor unbiased brand sentiment by analysing post copy, comments, and recommendations to determine whether there’s a positive, negative, or neutral public mood towards your brand or industry. So if your colleagues are natural brand advocates but shy on their socials, your marketing team can support them easy-to-use assets and a social media crash course to help them share their expertise and opinions on socials.
After the event: the campaign isn’t over until the marketing team sings
The end of the show should not be the end of your campaign. Once the stand is packed away, your social content can continue to re-engage visitors, reach people who missed the event, and support follow-up conversations with useful reminders of what happened.
After the show, I share a behind-the-scenes event recap that includes interviews with my colleagues, talking about the success of the show. It acts as a reminder for those that visited our stand to draw them back into the customer journey but also brings viewers up to speed that may have missed the event to make them feel like they were part of the experience.
Repurpose show content into follow-up posts to re-engage visitors and non-attendees
Content generated at a 3-day event shouldn’t expire as soon as the event is over. If it’s a useful industry insight, a prospect should be able to find it a month later. If it’s evergreen content, don’t hesitate to reshare your content at a later date as your audience of followers grows.
The same works in reverse: content obtained for your social media calendar during the event can be repurposed across your other marketing channels, to reach audiences across different domains. For example, hosting your campaign resources on YouTube and embedding them onto your website can help increase your YouTube followers.
Track what your audience is posting after the show, whether they are talking about any key insights from the event, or if they mention your brand or show visual content from your brand. Use the event hashtag to your advantage here!
It’s all about brand exposure, continuing your presence, and opening doors for opportunities. Even if your target audience missed the show, or your campaign occurred before they started their buyer journey, if they do some research a few months after your event, they can come across your posts and start a conversation.
Measure social impact beyond vanity metrics
While post engagement metrics and follower growth are important metrics for the marketing team to monitor the campaign in real-time, there are other metrics that event marketers should be using to measure their social strategy’s impact on the exhibiting campaign by shifting from participation to ROI:
UTM parameters in GA4:
Which QR codes and which social posts drove high-value clicks to your website’s conversion pages? If your website houses contact forms, can you capture those UTM parameters to track which of links contributed to your post-event leads?
Reach contribution:
It’s easy to see what your company page posts brought to the campaign in terms of reach, engagement, and new followers. But what did your employee advocacy bring in? Ask your colleagues to share with you the stats from their posts to see the wider reach of this campaign. Sharing the results with your colleagues to demonstrate how their social efforts contributed to the overall campaign can encourage their buy-in and participation in your next event campaign and continue driving those results. You can even encourage a little bit of friendly competition with your colleagues to expand their reach and post engagement!
Exhibiting ROI metrics:
Don’t forget to track and calculate the main exhibiting ROI metrics such as lead conversion rate, average lead value – check out Nimlok’s guide for how to measure exhibition ROI the right way.
And if you need a helping hand with your event leads, Nimlok has a guide for that, too: The post exhibition follow-up strategy that turns leads into ROI.
Your holistic exhibiting strategy
We’ve talked about how to use social media to support an exhibition stand, where digital media supports the physical. But actually, you’re making the physical experience serve your digital audience, empowered by employee networks, live streams, and improved AI visibility.
If your audience is 100x larger than the footfall in the exhibition hall, perhaps your physical exhibition stand’s primary function isn’t to host in-person meetings.
In Nimlok’s exhibition stand staff training sessions, MD James Rook compares exhibiting to a performance.
You’re not just allocating your budget to an event that’s over in a few days.
You’re building a broadcast studio with your marketing messaging, lighting, and in-person interactions that create the perfect backdrop to creating content for your digital social strategy.
While your on-stand colleagues are setting up the conversations to identify opportunities at the top of the sales funnel, you’re building your bank of content to serve your digital audience at the top of the marketing funnel, by building reach and awareness that reaches your target audience at any stage of their buyer’s journey.
FAQs
When should I start posting about my exhibition?
Ideally several weeks before the show, once your stand, message or campaign theme is clear.
What should I post during an exhibition?
Stand reveals, visitor reactions, product demos, behind-the-scenes clips, team updates, UGC moments and practical reasons to visit.
How can I encourage visitors to share content from my stand?
Create visual, interactive or personalised moments that give people a reason to take out their phone.
Are QR codes still useful on exhibition stands?
Yes, but only when they link to something valuable, trackable and relevant.
How do I measure social media success after an exhibition?
Track UTM clicks, QR scans, website activity, leads, employee reach, engagement quality and contribution to ROI.
Should employees post about the event too?
Yes! Employee posts can add authentic perspectives and extend reach beyond the company page.