Your booth location doesn’t matter. I repeat:  It does not matter. If your company pays a premium to be closer to the entrance of a trade show floor, stop right now. If your company spends thousands of dollars or more sponsoring receptions and speakers so that you can earn “points” and have a better booth location next year, you’re probably wasting money.

You could be in the farthest back corner of the floor, and still generate traffic to your booth using content marketing strategies.

A company that banks its trade show success on the location of its booth hopes that there’s a high amount of attendee traffic. It hopes that the traffic includes qualified prospects. It hopes that those qualified prospects are more likely to enter the booth and talk to a salesperson just because it’s closer to the entrance. And finally, it hopes that those qualified prospects turn into sales either at the show or down the road. This “playing the numbers” strategy is based on luck.

Given the amount of money it costs to exhibit at a trade show, wouldn’t it be more productive if attendees walked into your booth already qualified? If you knew that the majority of people talking to your sales reps already fit the profile of your ideal customer, wouldn’t that justify the expense? It turns out that you can attract the type of customer you want to your booth with content marketing.

Giveaways at trade shows are nothing new. The basic idea of content marketing in a trade show context is this: Give away well-written, well-researched information that your ideal customers must have, and they will actively seek your booth.

Trade show attendees have limited time, and they want the most out of their trip. If they know you’re going to give them a book, white paper, survey data, presentation or some other content-rich product that will help their businesses grow, they will find your booth, even if it’s in the back corner.

Content marketing at trade shows is a great way to bait attendees and give them a reason to come by your booth. For the strategy to work, however, there are four key areas to address:

1. Who are your ideal prospects and what information do they need?
2. Does your content product align with customer needs and still have something to do your company?
3. Is the quality of the content top-notch?
4. Did you market your giveaway to attendees before, during and after the trade show?

Ideal Prospects and Their Needs
You want decision-makers to stop by your booth, whether they’re presidents, owners, CEOs, directors, managers, purchasers, etc. Whoever decides to use your services and whoever is going to sign the contract are ideal prospects. The more difficult part is determining what information you could give away that they would need.

Don’t overthink this part of the process. Start by looking at the expertise within your own company. Do you have access to specialized or proprietary knowledge? Any sort of internal research or customer survey results that you can share?

For example, a manufacturer I knew conducted research on a developing market. The purpose of this research was internal, to decide whether they should get into the market. They decided not to get into the market, but at a trade show, they shared the results of their research with distributor attendees. The research provided valuable insights about the market that allowed distributors to decide whether or not they should get into it themselves. Because the manufacturer wasn’t making or selling these products, sharing the research didn’t help them directly. What it did was attract owners and CEOs interested in business trends. And it gave the manufacturer an opportunity to start a relationship with them based on their leadership and the products they did make and sell.

Aligning Prospect Needs, the Content Product and Your Company
The content you develop for prospects must have value, but ideally it also is related to your industry, market or company. For instance, it might be true that your prospects need high-level business information. You might promise to give away free subscriptions to Harvard Business Review to every CEO that stops by your booth. That would probably drive quite a bit of traffic to your booth, but would probably not qualify your prospects. The more targeted the content to your prospective customers, the more qualified they’ll be.

Take the example of the manufacturer above. Not every CEO in attendance was interested in the manufacturer’s research. It was a group specifically interested in learning about new products and new markets. The manufacturer decided not to get into the market they researched, but by sharing the contents of their research, they attracted an audience willing to learn about their other new products and markets.

Only Quality Content Will Do
Nothing unravels a content marketing strategy quicker than low-quality content. The kind of content that attracts busy, skeptical decision-makers cannot be thrown together at the last minute. Developing quality content doesn’t have to be costly, but someone in your organization has to recognize the difference between doing it right and doing it cheaply. If you produce and package high-quality content, it will be sought out by attendees. It will be passed around, and it will result in qualified leads.

If the information in your content giveaway is old, readily available elsewhere or poorly researched and written, then you’ve undermined your own strategy.

Don’t Expect to Be Found Without Marketing

Don’t leave the amount of your booth traffic up to luck. If you have something valuable to give away, particularly if it’s research or proprietary data, then attendees will make the time to come by your booth, but first they have to know about it. This is where it helps to work closely with the trade show organizers. Advertising in pre-show emails, direct mail and onsite publications will alert attendees to your content giveaway. If you have your own solid list of prospects, then market to them as well. That hard-to-reach prospect may be unwilling to give up his or her time to your salesperson during the regular workweek, but at a trade show they will actively seek you out if they have something valuable to gain.

Keep marketing immediately after the tradeshow ends. Even if prospects on your lists didn’t come by the booth or to the show at all, let them know what they missed. Offer to send the information to them if they’re still interested.