Natural Products Expo West is a fantastic way to make business contacts. In 2014 there were more than 2,500 vendors and 65,000 attendees! Making contact in person with potential buyers, bloggers and business partners is a great start, but don’t let your outreach end there. Everybody says they will follow up after a great introduction, but how often does that happen? Between meeting so many new people and forgetting faces, life getting in the way, or being too busy with work, you need a plan for following up!
Since you’ll no doubt have your plate full (sorry, couldn’t resist) during Natural Products Expo West, we’ve gone ahead and created a guide for making sure you maximize your contacts gained from the event. Enjoy, and hope to see you out there!
–Tyler Campbell, CEO of Tytanium Ideas
How to Follow Up With Contacts Gained at Natural Products Expo West
- Take all the business cards and card scans you’ve collected and segment them into categories. The most common categories are buyers, influencers and partners.
- Now, take all your segments of contacts and log into LinkedIn and connect with each one, and be sure to personalize the message to each segment. We’ve tested each script over the years with great success, and they’re all within LinkedIn’s message character limit so you can copy/paste into the message box.
- Add each contact to your CRM or email database. Make sure to tag this email list with “Natural Product Expo West” so you can monitor performance to help calculate the ROI of attending the expo.
- Follow their brand’s social media profiles from your brand on each available platform. The easiest way to make sure you follow the right company is to go to their website and click their social profile icons. They’re usually located at the top or bottom of their site.
- Sign up for HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and look for any reporters looking for sources for articles on the Natural Products Expo West. You never know when your business might be featured in a publication.
- If you have any bites (still couldn’t resist) from the activity above, reach out via personal email, or make a call if you get the feeling they’re more of a phone person. A response to any of the above actions is a signal that the person ‘raised his hand’ and is comfortable being contacted.
We hope these tips help maximize your ROI for the Natural Products Expo West or any large conference you may attend in the future.