Jazz Up Your Trade Show Booth

Maybe you don’t have the budget for a wild, audio-visually enhanced, top-of-the-line trade show display booth. Maybe you have an old pop up booth and some graphics and that’s it. What can you do to stand out from the many display booths that had a bigger budget than you do? It’s a two step process. One, prioritize. Two, get creative.

Even if you cannot afford expensive graphics, make sure your signage is clean, clear, and easy to read. Don’t get a bunch of stick-on letters and put them on poster board. Use what little budget you have to get the best quality signage you can. That, with a well-maintained but modest booth, can preserve your brand integrity, and you can jazz up your space with a few inexpensive, but powerful tools.

One tool is light. Exhibit halls can seem dark, and the well-placed spot light or table lamp will brighten up your booth and make it more inviting to visitors. You do not have to spend a lot of money to make a big impact and set your booth apart from the booths of other companies.

Another tool is to green up your booth space. If you bring in some flowers or plants to liven up your trade show booth, it will draw the eye of potential customers, as well as adding some much-needed oxygen into the dry exhibit hall. Plus, people are attracted to living things, and you’re sending an ecological message to potential customers.

Finally, you can offer a great giveaway. If your promotional item is different and special, nobody is going to remember what your booth looked like. Granted, a good promotional item will cost money, but people take it home, while they don’t take home a picture of your booth, so it might be a good investment.

Creating and Maintaining Trade Show Focus

Trade show effectiveness and success depends on achieving a focus on your strategies and executing them. There is a natural tendency for trade show exhibitors to either attempt to do far too much, or they fail to do enough. What you really need is to understand what is going to happen on the day well in advance of the event itself. The issue is how do you know what is going to happen in the first instance?

We know we cannot predict the future, but by carefully planning and preparing we can gain an increased understanding of the possible opportunities or pitfalls. In order to establish focus we should first determine what goals and objectives you are looking to achieve. You need to be specific when setting your targets because this will help you when it comes to measuring how well you are succeeding in meeting them. Being specific will also help you when you are working with your trade show team and allocating responsibility to individual members; a specific target is undeniable and unarguable.

Thinking through your goals will help you to create a strategy which is creative and able to identify problems and choke points in your plans. Specific goal setting will also help you in motivating your team, both in the planning phase and on the day of the show. You will also find that establishing goals in “hard terms” will also help you with budgeting and deciding on what is an absolute priority and what is an optional extra that can be dispensed with if budgetary considerations require.

The first step to creating focus is to create a short list of your objectives. Once you have half a dozen or so, then you should proceed to ascertain which of them will generate the greatest ROI. It is these objectives which should dominate your resources, investment, time and energy.

First of all, make sure your company name and logo are prominent on your gift – the larger the better.

In this instance, big is definitely GOOD.

Choose colors which stand out and get noticed.  I like big, vibrant colors such as red, yellow and metallic tints and hues.  The whole point is to get the gift noticed when you are displaying what you have on offer at your booth and when the gift is being carried around by a happy attendee who has already visited you so other people at the show see what they have and inquire where to go get one themselves; trust me they do this all the time!

The gift should satisfy some practical function for the recipient; corkscrews for opening wine are great; multi tools are a favorite; baseball caps and t-shirts are always on offer – the simple fact is you are looking for something that will carry on gaining the attention of your recipient.

Make sure the gift has sufficiently high perceived value; by perceived value I mean, how much the attendee is going to value the gift and in this I remember something my grandmother told me about giving presents.  The ideal present is something someone wants but will not necessarily go out and buy for themselves; I follow this when it comes to choosing gifts for attendees; I constantly strive to think of something that my prospects are going to want but they will not particularly think of making a trip to the store to get it for themselves.

Underlining everything is your ROI; your Return On Investment.

Promotional gifts cost you money, they are therefore not “free” in the sense that you simply are not going to empty the company bank account and stand on the street corner giving dollar bills away.  You buy in promotional gifts and hand them out in expectation of a return; in the case of attendees, you are looking for interest leading on to discussion about your product or service and follow up calls and orders; in simple terms, SALES!

If the promotional gift cost does not add up, don’t buy it but you will need to monitor carefully how your giveaways are performing in their role in order to assess what they are worth to you.