If you’ve ever stood at a beautifully designed booth in a buzzing exhibition hall wondering why the right people aren’t showing up, this blog is for you.
Across industries like life sciences, pharmaceuticals, and agchem, trade shows and exhibitions are not just networking opportunities. They’re high-stakes stages where multimillion-dollar relationships are seeded. And yet, many businesses continue to approach these events as standalone calendar entries, not as part of a full-funnel marketing system.
Trade Shows Are Expensive. And Most Teams Are Leaving Value on the Table.
Each year, hundreds of life sciences and pharma brands descend on events like CPHI, Chemspec, or BIO-Europe, investing heavily in booth design, travel, collateral, and logistics. According to a 2023 UFI report, global trade show expenditures in the life sciences sector alone exceeded $8.3 billion, with individual brands spending upwards of $300K-$500K per show.
Yet, the post-event story is far less promising. Many booths go under-visited. Sales teams report low appointment conversions. Marketing struggles to demonstrate ROI.
And the common thread we’ve observed? Pre-event outreach is either underutilised, late, or not structured at all.
Why Are Brands Still Relying on Generic Emails & Walk-In Luck?
We’ve worked with B2B companies across industries who are brilliant at what they do, but when it comes to events, they often fall back on a familiar routine:
- A single mass email (usually BCC’d) is sent 2-3 weeks before the show.
- A few social media posts in the lead-up.
- A hope that walk-ins will show up and find the right person to speak with.
This approach no longer holds in today’s attention-scarce world. Buyers are overwhelmed. The average decision-maker receives 121 emails per day, and unless your outreach is timely, targeted, and strategic, it’s likely ignored.
The 70% Problem: The Cost of Going in Cold
According to CEIR’s Global Exhibition Research, up to 70% of attendees arrive at trade shows with a fixed plan of which booths they intend to visit. These decisions are often made based on who they’ve heard from, interacted with, or seen content from before they even step onto the exhibition floor.
Now consider this: the average exhibitor in the fine chemicals or pharmaceutical sector spends $50,000 to $500,000 on booth design, travel, team allocation, and logistics for a single global event like CPHI or Chemspec.
So when pre-event outreach is an afterthought, or worse, nonexistent, you’re essentially gambling that footfall will equal engagement.
Spoiler: it won’t.
Pre-Event Strategy Directly Impacts Event ROI
Recent research by Statista shows that 79% of trade show attendees have purchasing influence, but only 35% recall specific booths or brands they interacted with. What bridges this gap?
Pre-event engagement.
Brands that begin outreach 6-8 weeks ahead of an event report up to 2.5x higher qualified booth traffic and 34% better post-event lead conversion rates, according to Bizzabo’s 2023 B2B Event Trends Report.
And yet, most internal teams, particularly in regulated or conservative industries like pharma or fine chemicals, delay activation due to fragmented ownership between marketing and BD, legacy tech systems, or sheer bandwidth limitations.
Email Blasts Don’t Cut It Anymore
Many BD teams still rely on mass email blasts to announce their presence at events, often sent from internal Microsoft Outlook accounts with vague subject lines and no segmentation. The result? Cold emails land in spam folders or get ignored. And even those that get opened rarely drive action.
Outreach without intention is noise. And noise is easy to delete.
What we’ve seen at Thrivemattic is that intentional, segmented communication-delivered through structured, automated cadences- can 3x your pre-event appointment bookings.
This doesn’t mean more emails. It means better-timed, better-crafted emails that move cold contacts into warm conversations before the event begins.
| Need help structuring that cadence?
Download the Event Visibility Optimisation Checklist a tool we’ve designed specifically for regulated B2B industries like yours. |
It’s Not Just BD’s Job; Marketing Has to Show Up Early Too
Here’s where alignment often breaks down: BD teams want appointments. Marketing teams want visibility. But when they operate in silos, leads leak out of the funnel.
Pre-event outreach works best when:
- Messaging is unified across email, landing pages, and social.
- Content builds anticipation around what you’ll showcase at the event.
- Ads and posts warm up ICPs weeks before they ever meet your team in person.
Our internal data from campaigns with B2B brands across verticals like energy and tech shows that when pre-event outreach includes LinkedIn content, targeted emails, and dedicated landing pages, lead conversion from booth traffic increases by up to 60%.
Three Questions to Ask Before Your Next Event
- Have we clearly defined the outcomes we want from this event, beyond “visibility”?
- Do we have a working outreach cadence in place for warm, cold, and current contacts?
- If we paused all social media and email today, would anyone know we’re even attending?
If the answers are uncertain, don’t worry; it’s fixable. Most event marketing underperforms not because the event lacks value, but because the system supporting it is missing or misaligned.
That’s exactly why we built our Event Visibility Optimisation Checklist; to help teams like yours clarify the approach, align efforts across BD and marketing, and implement a process that’s scalable and repeatable, no matter which city or trade show you’re headed to next.
Final Takeaway: ROI Doesn’t Begin at the Booth
Events are about more than presence; they’re about pipeline.
When you see every phase of event participation- before, during, and after- as part of a coordinated system, your outcomes shift dramatically. You stop chasing booth visitors and start engaging decision-makers.
And in our experience, the companies that do that are the ones who walk away from Chemspec or CPHI with more than brochures and business cards. They walk away with momentum.
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Start building your pre-event visibility engine today. |
Or if you’re thinking through your next event strategy, talk to our team. Let’s co-design something that works for your business.