Trade shows can wear on you.  Sore legs and feet, irritating tchotchke chasers, and long days followed by short nights can make for a true test of your mettle.

There’s one undeniable fact, though:  Trade shows build brand loyalty and interpersonal relationships with your customers. All too often, in our ever-wired and online business environment, we forget the value of face-2-face at trade shows.

The relationship that a customer has to your brand needs to be deep if it is to be lasting.  Perusing your website, maybe talking to a sales rep over the phone, or even a series of purchases can all be valuable steps towards developing this relationship, but to make it lasting and committed takes a depth of interaction that can only be achieved through direct, personally-tailored interaction.  Motista has been learning this since 2007.  Having collected more than 500,000 survey responses about what makes consumers behave they way they do, Motista understands that to build the emotional component of a long-standing relationship, marketers need to cut through the noise.

And let’s face it, there’s a lot more noise today than there used to be.

Trade shows are a very efficient way to facilitate this interpersonal interaction, because you can touch a number of customers and prospects in one place in a short period of time, you can learn and react in real-time to the brand messages that are most important to each individual with whom you come in contact, and you can control the connection environment, so you get the opportunity to slow the pace down enough to deliver your message effectively.

When it comes to business, value is about improving business impact and increasing the return on your marketing investment.  When it comes to maximizing the social and networking shows is undeniable.