Pre-show marketing checklist: the six-week run-up

Six weeks before a Gulf show, most exhibitors have a stand design, a flight booking and no list. A pre-show marketing checklist earns its place only if it forces decisions in an order that still leaves time to act on them. Below: the six-week sequence, the arithmetic that sizes your target list, a four-touch outreach set you can lift, and the deadlines that stop being moveable once build-up starts.

Why the run-up is six weeks, not two

The window is set by the organiser, not by you. Exhibitor manuals, contractor approvals, badge allocations and the online exhibitor directory all close in the month before the doors open. Miss them and the recovery options cost money rather than time.

Six weeks is also the point where your buyer's diary is still open. A procurement lead at a Riyadh contractor books their show week when the agenda drops, not when your email lands. Reach them later and you are bidding for a slot someone else already holds.

Work backwards from the opening date. Big 5 Global runs 23 to 26 November 2026 at Dubai World Trade Centre (Big 5 Global), putting the six-week mark in mid-October. GITEX Global sits a fortnight later: the summit on 7 December, the expo 8 to 11 December (GITEX GLOBAL). If you are doing both, the run-ups overlap and the second show gets whatever attention the first leaves behind. Decide now which one gets the real effort.

Weeks six and five: build the list before you write anything

Most pre-show outreach fails on the list, not the copy. Fix the list first.

Start from the exhibitor directory and the visitor registration categories, both published by the organiser. Those two sources tell you which sectors are in the hall this year rather than which ones you wish were.

Then size it. The arithmetic is worth doing on paper:

1. Count your meeting slots. Two meeting tables, 20-minute meetings, 10-minute resets, a realistic 11:00 to 17:45 floor day: 26 slots a day.
2. Multiply by show days. Four days at Big 5 Global gives 104 slots.
3. Assume a single-digit reply rate on cold pre-show outreach and a partial show-up rate. You need a target list in the high hundreds, not the dozens, to fill that.
4. Cut the list to the sectors you can actually serve, then rank it. Tier one gets a named sender and a phone call. Tier two gets email. Tier three gets nothing until the floor.

If the sum says your list cannot fill your slots, you have found the problem six weeks early, which is the entire point.

What to record for each target

• Company, sector, and which hall they are exhibiting or likely visiting
• Whether they are an exhibitor, a visitor or a delegate, because the approach differs
• The named role you want, not a generic inbox
• The one thing you want to ask them, written down before you meet

Week four: treat the floor plan as a marketing asset

The hall layout decides who walks past you and who never will. DWTC lists The Big 5 across Halls 1 to 8, Sheikh Maktoum, Sheikh Rashid, Sheikh Saeed 1 to 3, the Trade Centre Arena and Za'abeel 1 to 3 (Dubai World Trade Centre). Thirteen-plus spaces. Your stand sits in one.

GITEX now runs at Dubai Exhibition Centre in Expo City, across the North and South Halls (Dubai Exhibition Centre). A venue change resets everything a returning exhibitor thought they knew about walking routes, parking and where buyers cluster at lunch.

Open the published floor plan and mark three things:

• Your catchment. The aisles a visitor must walk to reach you. This is the only footfall your stand earns passively.
• Your blind spots. Halls holding buyers you want, which no one at your stand will ever see.
• Your anchors. Keynote theatres, catering and the main entrance. Traffic pulses around these, and the pulse is predictable.

The blind spots are the decision. Either you accept you will not meet those buyers, or you put people in those halls. Pretending a good stand solves it is how exhibitors finish a show with a full scanner and an empty pipeline.

Week three: four touches, not one blast

CEIR research found 81% of exhibitors run their own pre-event marketing. The effectiveness split is the interesting part: phone calls were used by 29% of exhibitors and rated effective by 68%, while email lists were used by 60% and rated effective by 60% (Trade Show Executive, 22 August 2024). The underused channel outperformed the popular one.

Read that as an instruction. Phone your tier one. Email everyone else.

A four-touch set, sent from a named person, not a brand address:

1. Touch one, week three. Two sentences. You are at the show, this is the stand number, here is the one thing you do for their sector. No attachment, no deck.
2. Touch two, week two. A specific offer of time: two named slots, with dates, in their timezone. Never "let us know what suits."
3. Touch three, week one. Confirmation to anyone who replied. Stand number, hall, a landmark, and a mobile number that someone will actually answer on the floor.
4. Touch four, the evening before day one. One line to the unanswered: you are on stand from 11:00, walk-ins welcome.

Write touch three before you need it. In the last week nobody has time to write anything well. And confirm the working week with each contact rather than assuming it matches yours.

Week two: decide coverage, then brief the people

By now the floor plan has told you whether your stand alone covers the hall. If it does not, this is the week you commit to how you close the gap. Anything decided later is decided badly.

Whoever works the floor needs a brief that fits on one page:

• The qualifying questions, in order, with the disqualifying answer for each
• What a lead is, defined tightly enough that two people would agree on the same conversation. Our post on what a qualified lead in B2B actually means sets out a definition worth copying.
• The three sectors that matter and the ones to walk past
• Where captured leads go, and who reads them that evening
• The rotation, so nobody stands for nine hours. Booth staffing best practices covers why rotation beats headcount.

Rehearse the opening question out loud with every person who will use it. Written scripts survive contact with a real buyer only if someone has said them first. How to qualify leads at a trade show in 90 seconds has a version you can adapt.

The final week: what actually breaks

• Badge and access passes. Staff passes close earlier than most exhibitors expect. Count your people, including anyone joining mid-show.
• Lead capture. Test the scanner or app with a real badge, not a demo. Check what it records and what it drops.
• Follow-up, written in advance. Draft the sequences before you fly. Leads go cold in the handover, not on the floor. Our trade show follow up email templates are built to be sent within 48 hours.
• A single owner for the lead file. Named person, checked nightly.
• The debrief slot. Twenty minutes at the end of each day, in the diary now.

What do exhibitors get wrong in the run-up?

How early should pre-show outreach start?

Six weeks before the doors open for the first touch, so the final confirmation lands in the week of the show. Earlier than that and your message arrives before the buyer has planned their visit. Later and their diary is already committed. Sequence matters more than start date: four spaced touches beat one blast.

Is it worth emailing exhibitors as well as visitors?

Often, yes. At a show with 1,800-plus exhibitors from 165-plus countries, a meaningful share of the people in the hall are standing behind their own stands. They are reachable, they are qualified by the fact they paid to be there, and most of your competitors are ignoring them entirely.

What if the organiser will not share the attendee list?

Assume they will not. Build from the published exhibitor directory, the conference agenda, the speaker list and your own CRM instead. Never buy or publish harvested contact data. Aggregate sector counts are useful for planning; scraped names and phone numbers create a compliance problem and a reputation one.

How many meetings should we aim to book in advance?

Book enough to make day one productive, not enough to fill it. A floor day with every slot pre-booked leaves no room for the buyer who walks up unannounced, and those are often the better conversations. Pre-booking roughly half your capacity is a reasonable planning position, though the right split depends on your sector and stand position.

Where Event BDR fits

Most of this checklist is work only you can do: your list, your offer, your stand. The part that breaks under a six-week deadline is coverage, because putting trained people into the halls your stand cannot reach means hiring, vetting and briefing in a window already tight. Event BDR places vetted, trained BDR reps on UAE and Saudi exhibition floors, booked per event day against a specific show. You pick the reps, brief them against your own qualifying criteria, and see leads land in a live feed with a daily recap. If you are sizing coverage this season, start with the upcoming show list.