Note from Jennifer: As part of my focus on the importance of networking, I asked my friend Jean Thilmany to share her tips and experience with finding clients at tradeshows. 

Years ago, I attended my first industry conference. The coatings industry, as it happened. At the time, I wrote about the then-rather-new technique of powder coating. Why yes I can feel your eyes glaze over as you read those previous few sentences. But stick with me; we’re about to enter the exhibition hall.

In case you haven’t been to an industry-related conference (and they’re held across all sectors; I’ve even attended a beer-can collector’s national conference back in the day) here’s a primer. Usually attendees can choose between several speakers on anything from hot-button industry to dead-boring, very detail oriented, subjects. Speakers are often academics or come from highly ranked businesses. Presenters are worth noting, as they can be great sources for you in the months and years to come. But I’ve found the best payout comes in expo area.

Browsing in a Single Location

The expo, or trade show, is a series of booths assembled in the huge expo space, each one rented out by a company seeking conference-goers’ eyeballs. The thought is: all these potential niche-industry buyers will located for the next three days under one roof. Let’s get our own super-useful products in front of them.

Oh, and exhibitors often hand out a bit of swag to passersby, nothing more exciting than a pen branded with their company name, a few pieces of hard candy, or a squishy stress ball. Sometimes I take home one of the latter for myself to squeeze in times of frustration or for my kids to throw around.

Though the trade-show concept may seem a bit outdated in the age of the Internet, exhibit halls, or expos, are still greatly in vogue today.

So how can you make trade shows work for you? Easy. If the exhibitors are looking for sales by gathering in a place where they’re likely to find clients, they’ve also conveniently gathered for your own casting-for-clients purposes as well.

I attend about five industry conferences, now for engineering software industry, each year. I wander throughout the expo hall meeting with representatives and getting cards. I’m also sure to gather as much information as they have at the booth and I keep the conference materials that detail the names of each expo representative and their booth location.

Once back in the safety and anonymity of my home office, I further investigate to determine if the company who displayed is a good fit for my writing talents, then send the marketing person or other appropriate contact a quick letter of introduction.

This has netted me about five new clients over the past two years and about $15,000 in income.

I also save contact information, a short bio, and the expertise profile of the conference speakers I mentioned. I can turn to them (and even to exhibition hall sources I’ve met but not used for finding-work purposes) for interviews for stories I write in the future.

I’ve also gotten several good story ideas from listening to the speakers and chatting with them informally. Think of all the places you could sell these type of stories, not just to the main industry represented at the conference.

If you don’t anticipate using speakers as a future source, send a letter of introduction to their workplace. A speaker at the powder coating conference, for example, was from Dow Corning, which led me into a subspecialty niche—chemicals and chemistry—that naturally branched from my coatings background.

Separate but Equal

A very important note here. Please be sure to keep content marketing and journalism clients very separate. You should never solicit work content-marketing work from a company you plan to write about or use as a source in an article.

But there’s good news. Even if you don’t regularly attend these types of conferences, most conference information, including the expo-hall and speakers’ lineup, are on conference promotional pages these days. If you don’t regularly cover the industry for trade publications, you needn’t be concerned here about keeping source and client very separate.

Search in your niche area or another with “conference” after the name. A quick look yesterday led me to a plastics and composition material conference in my field, held last year in Shanghai and attended by many American and international companies. I plan to send out several letters of introduction today.

You may find a business conference dead boring or exciting and inspiring, depending on the industry and on your perspective. For me, networking, picking the brains of the experts, and doing a little free-association thinking by riffing off speaking topics for future story ideas give me plenty to get revved up about at industry conferences.

Have you attended trade shows? What has your experience been? If not, why not?