Blockbuster Booth or Bust

Does your trade show exhibit grab someone’s attention within half a second? If not, you could be missing out on hundreds of leads that walk right on by your booth to one that not only dazzles within that split-second timeframe but also quickly makes clear what the company or organization is all about. And, if you’ve spent thousands of dollars for all the expenses related to the trade show, that half second equals money gained or lost.

Fortunately, experience shows that if you follow a few simple tips, you’ll be on the path to achieving trade show success.

Plan Ahead

Gather information about the trade show venue, the entrances, food concessions and traffic flow. Try for a booth location in an active, non-dead-end aisle and, if possible, pay the extra money to secure a corner booth. That will give you more visibility as people approach from two different directions. Then, capitalize on your increased visibility by creating a booth that snaps up people’s attention.

Color and Lighting

Create a colorful and well-lit backdrop, since that’s usually the first thing people notice as they wander the aisles. A lot of color and minimal text help present your company’s products or services clearly.

If you’ve been to a lot of trade shows, you know that companies with their own booth lighting get noticed much more quickly, as everything in the booth is sharper, brighter and more inviting. Consort Display Group’s standard booth lighting, for example, uses low-voltage halogen lamps, which clamp to the top of our banner displays.

At the trade show venue, you may also rent theater-style lighting where lights attached to a catwalk will light up your whole space, whether it’s 10-foot by 10-foot or 10-foot by 30-foot. Those overhead lights can be expensive — but they’re extremely effective.

Seeing is Believing

If possible, display your actual product. If your product is new and exciting and can be handheld, well, you’ve got it made! Cheerful attention-getting is easy in this situation.

However, if you don’t have a physical product to display, you’ll need to give yourself plenty of pre-show planning time to noodle ideas for obtaining interest.

If your company provides a service rather than a product, then you’ll need to be even more creative, perhaps with the use of large-format digital images of successful customers, locations and so on.

Whatever you do, don’t use a lot of words. Instead, use striking graphics and minimal text to draw the clients into your booth, where you can talk to them about your services and give them support materials, whether it’s providing statistical analyses or doing annual reports.

People Skills

All the colorful graphics, creative text and lighting will go to waste if you don’t have trained staff in the booth. Before our staff members are sent to a trade show, for instance, they go through role-playing situations with our marketing director.

She has them practice how to approach people, what their opening line is going to be and then has them work with demonstrating each of our products. This way, the first time they do a show they have experince.

Also, let the trade show staff know how much the event costs and how important it is to generate leads to offset the cost of the show.

Training needs to be geared toward the special etiquette of the trade show world. Arrive on time and stay until the show closes. Don’t start taking down your booth early. Be sure someone is in your booth at all times — attendees tend to just walk on by booths that appear abandoned. And, of course, don’t eat in the booth if you can possibly avoid it.

More People Skills

Make your booth approachable. At Consort Display Group, we like our booths to be more open, so we get rid of those tables that many companies have right at the aisles, which can prevent people from walking into the booth for a chat about your products or services.

Use a pedestal or podium for writing things down, to display your business cards and for the requisite bowl of candy (hard candy is better than sticky chocolate!).

Keep track of your leads. You need to view this trade show opportunity as a small franchise business away from the main headquarters. At larger shows, you can rent a lead generator to swipe participants’ badges and record contact information for later follow-up.

Smaller shows may not offer those, so you’ll have to employ another tactic to encourage attendees to provide their information. At a Council for Support and Advancement of Education show in Chicago, for example, we offered a giveaway: a $650 package of one of our products. All the participants had to do was give us their business card to be entered in the drawing.

While other booths were giving away teddy bears or gift baskets, the people who stopped by our booth appreciated that we were giving away something they could use (and that we would ship to them!).

View the trade show booth as part of a process that starts long before the show and continues well after the show is over. Tie together under one theme all pre-show mailings, booth literature and follow-up literature, which helps potential clients remember the booth and — more importantly — the products or services.

Colorful, informative, inviting and follow-up — incorporating these key elements into your trade show booth and the overall process can create a return on your investment that can only be described as “priceless.”