Trade Show Marketing Blog

If you’ve ever attended a trade show, you know that popup displays tend to dominate the landscape. Exhibitors love popup displays because they are easy to set up, affordable, lightweight, and provide a large graphic backdrop. As more and more exhibitors have began to incorporate multimedia into their trade show booths, popup exhibits became less popular. With the release of the Standard 10ft Popup with Kiosk, MODdisplays has devised a system that allows exhibitors to have the convenience of a popup display with the flexibility of a modular hybrid exhibit.

The foot of the kiosk slides neatly under the frame of the popup, allowing the kiosk to fit flush against the back wall of your popup exhibit. Monitors, literature holders, product shelves, counters, and clothing racks can be added to the kiosk to create a custom look that meets the needs of your company. Thanks to the modular nature of the kiosk, accessories can be added long after your exhibit is purchased, which means your company will have plenty of room to grow into a full-featured exhibit in the years to come.

The Standard 10ft Popup Display with Arc is another modular popup booth that has quickly become on of our best-selling products. This unit uses two kiosks connected by a stylish section of curved aluminum. Despite the stylish appearance of our unique popup systems (you won’t find these units anywhere else on the market), they can be set up in as little as 20 minutes, and they can be shipped via UPS or FedEx. Like every trade show display from MODdisplays, these units are designed with style and portability in mind.

The woman on the left is making a huge mistake (aside from the poorly designed exhibit she is using). When you’re exhibiting with a table top display, you should never stand behind your exhibit. Doing so reflects a lack of understanding about how trade shows actually work. When you exhibit at a trade show, your display serves only as a reference point, and should not carry your entire message. Trade shows exist to allow business professionals with similar interests to get together and network, and you’ll never meet any new people standing behind your booth. My advice: Stand as close as you can to the aisle, and use your exhibit as a reference point only. This will drastically increase your visibility and will almost always result in a more successful event.

News spreads like wildfire on the trade show floor. Unfortunately for many exhibitors, bad news travels just as fast as good news. If you can generate a positive buzz about your booth, you are very likely to increase your traffic and improve the return on your investment. So what can you do to make it more likely that good news about your company’s booth travels by word of mouth throughout the convention center? Here are a few suggestions:

-Offer rewards to attendees who send potential clients your way. If your product/service is interesting or unique and it is directly related to the theme of the event, chances are good that attendees will meet at least a few people who are interested in what you have to offer. You can encourage them to refer these people to your exhibit space by offering them something of value.

-Instead of giving away huge quantities of promotional products (e.g. pens, stress balls), try giving away less quantity and more quality. If you hold a drawing every few hours for a high-end consumer product (iPod works well), attendees will certainly spread the word. Since your goal is to draw attention to your booth, the constant flow of visitors stopping by to drop their business cards into the drawing will provide you with ample opportunity to market your products and services. If possible, give away prizes that relate directly to what you sell (e.g. give away a new cell phone if you are a cellular service provider), as this strategy will help to solidify your brand.

-If you can avoid coming across as gimicky, using prize wheels and cash cubes is a great way to incite conversation among attendees about your booth. Who wouldn’t want to see a professional business man or woman grasping helplessly for dollar bills? These attractions are especially powerful if you can convince a major figure in your industry to participate in your game. If the keynote speaker at your event is willing to get in your cash cube or spin your prize wheel, you have a great opportunity to attract a big crowd.

Trade shows are all about communication. If you can generate positive word of mouth about your company at your next event, you’re well on your way to a successful marketing program.

Exhibiting at a trade show can be a daunting challenge, but through the application of a few basic principles, the process can be very manageable. Even seasoned trade show marketing professionals struggle to manage every aspect of their program, and every veteran will tell you that there is no such thing as a perfect event. If you are in charge of the exhibiting program for your company, you should be focused on increasing the return on your investment through best practices in exhibiting, and some of those practices are listed below:

1- Plan well in advance. Flights, hotel rooms, and exhibit space are all less expensive when you book early. In addition to the huge savings, planning out your exhibiting program well in advance will allow you more time to detect and fix mistakes. The number of exhibitors who wait until the last minute to purchase their trade show display or promotional products is astounding, especially considering the fact that those who plan well in advance usually have a more successful exhibiting experience.

2- Work to attract attendees long before the trade show begins. A good part of trade show marketing occurs even before the event begins through pre-show mailers and press releases. It is important to let your potential clients know that you will be exhibiting as well as what products and/or services you will be marketing. Many attendees only visit booths that are on their itinerary (which they create before the show even begins). If you’re not on that list, even the best exhibit on earth won’t help you make a sale.

3- Train your booth staffers well. Your people will always be the focal point of your trade show booth from the perspective of potential clients, so you need to have knowledgeable staffers who understand your products and your brand. Many successful marketing programs have been ruined when booth staffers unwittingly sabotage relationships with potential clients. Carefully review the basics of your company’s marketing program including your best selling points, competitive advantages, and your branding basics.

4- Invest in a hybrid display with a clean, modern look. If you’ve ever been to a trade show, you know that curved popup displays dominate the landscape. Although popup displays are very affordable and easy to setup, they virtually guarantee that you will blend in with the crowd at your next conference, which is usually not the best idea. Most companies work hard to stand out and differentiate themselves from other exhibitors to attract the maximum amount of attendees.

5- Develop a strategy to collect and follow up on leads you generate at the conference. According to the Center for Exhibition Industry Research, almost 90% of leads generated at trade shows are never followed up on. This means that by developing an effective strategy for following up on the leads you generate, you will increase the return on your investment by over 900% when compared with your competitors. A simple, focused approach to trade show marketing will take you further than the flashiest literature or the most well configured trade show exhibit.

Trade show marketing is challenging, but it doesn’t have to be impossible. Through the application of these simple tips, you should see a drastic increase in the return on your investment at your next event.

If you have ever attended a trade show, chances are good that you have found yourself stuck listening to a boring sales pitch from an unqualified sponsored trade show speaker. At conferences across the country, more and more attendees have been using Twitter to quickly and quietly communicate with other attendees during speeches and panels. When a discussion panel gets off track and ventures onto topics that are not interesting for the majority of listeners, attendees working together can redirect the course of the discussion by collaborative “tweeting” to get things back on track.

According to a Fortune article, attendees have taken drastic steps to redirect boring discussion panels and speakers. In one specific case, conversation in a chat room (during the conference) caused a revolution against the discussion panel. “One person finally stood and requested permission to ask a question. They said ‘No’, and he said, ‘The whole room is behind me. I’m going to ask it anyway’.” When attendees are able to take control of the topics of discussion at conferences, both sides win. The goal (at least in part) of discussion panels and speakers is to relay valuable information to attendees, and when attendees can choose what they want to hear, this only gets easier.

How many times have you found yourself bored out of your mind listening to a speaker at a conference? If so, you’re not alone. Over the past 5 - 10 years, more and more speaking positions at conferences have been given to “sponsors” (exhibitors who pay a premium to have time in front of visitors and attendees to the show). This is a great way for trade show organizers to make an extra buck, but it detracts from the overall experience for attendees. In the long run, I would argue that this practice will drastically decrease attendance and devalue the primary focus of any trade show, which is the marketing efforts of exhibitors put into their trade show booths and literature.

Event sponsors may pay $1,000 - $10,000 for the opportunity to speak to attendees, and they will certainly be looking for a return on that investment. As a result, speeches look more and more like live commercials. Attendees are interested in hearing informative speeches that relay information about the health of the industry, current industry trends, and what to expect in the near future. If you subject attendees to sponsor after sponsor who are relentlessly pushing their own products and/or services, they will quickly become bored and annoyed.

In order to solve this problem and keep attendees interested in hearing the speeches at conferences, it will take a concerted, collective effort on the part of show organizers to prohibit exhibitors from buying their way up to the podium. Speakers should be chosen on the basis of merit alone, not on the basis of how much money they are willing to shell out for a 10 minute long commercial. When speakers are chosen in this way, trade shows will be much more interesting for attendees. This may upset a few exhibitors out there who were used to buying an audience for their company, but they’ll get over it.

Before you take your first steps in the world of trade show marketing, you need to have a clear idea about what you want your company and your brand to represent to potential clients. Flashy graphics and slick marketing material won’t help you grow your customer base unless you have something to offer. Before you waste any energy designing marketing material or graphics, here are some things that should already be decided:

• Type of products and/or services you offer.
• Where you fit into the market (high-end or low-end, consumer sales or business sales, etc).
• A slogan that describes your company in a clear but concise way.

Trade shows are crowded, confusing environments, and it is very important that you set yourself apart from the rest of the exhibitors and leave a memorable impression. However, many exhibitors remember to be unique but forget to tell potential clients anything about what they actually do. Potential clients are not interested in your eye-catching exhibit, they are interested in your products.

With years of experience in exhibit design and graphic design, the professionals at MODdisplays know what it takes to solidify your branding efforts.  Our professional design teams make sure that you end up with an eye-catching booth, but we also make sure that important information about your company is relayed to your potential clients.

Reports suggest that almost 90% of leads generated at trade shows are never followed up. This astounding statistic makes it clear that lead management should be a priority in your trade show marketing program. Many exhibitors focus heavily on their trade show display system and their promotional products, leaving little or no capital or energy to be spend on lead management training and tools.

According to Dave Bailey at TechTarget, the definition of lead management is “to increase the likelihood that a lead will convert into a new, satisfied customer”. This definition highlights an important idea about lead management, which is that every lead must be managed individually. There is no cookie cutter way to manage every lead that will come your way, your company needs to take a personal interest in every qualified lead you receive.

Lead management on the trade show floor should amount to more than business card swapping. Business cards contain contact information, not lead information. In order to collect leads, you need to know what the potential client is interested in, the nature of their business, their timeframe for purchasing, their budget, and some objective measure of the likelihood that they will make a purchase from your company. Without this information, your sales staff back at the office will be starting cold, which appears unprofessional to potential clients. When you have recorded all the information in an accessable way, your sales staff will have no trouble prioritizing which leads they follow up on and picking up where you left off at the conference.

In a recent article in Entrepreneur Magazine, Nichole Torres highlighted a few of the exhibiting practices of Anna Sabino on behalf of Lucid New York Jewelry. According to the article, Sabino spent a good deal of time investigating effective trade show marketing techniques by walking other trade shows as an attendee. This experience gave her insight into what works and what doesn’t with regards to exhibiting and allowed her to make a big impression at her event.

According to the article, simple and clean exhibit design will help your company stand out in the clutter as opposed to busy and confusing exhibit design. Sabino “used mirrors and warm colors to create a pleasant and welcoming atmosphere” according to the article, which is textbook exhibiting practice. It is always important to make visitors to your booth feel welcomed and comfortable before you begin your sales pitch.

On top of all her efforts, Sabino offered a valuable service to her potential clients. She took the time to do the work for her distributors by creating an attractive display case and picking only her most popular and best-selling products so that her potential clients could easily imagine what it would be like to sell her products in their retail environment. According to the article, her sales exceeded $600,000 this year, which is great for a three-year-old startup company.

If you exhibit regularly, you’ve probably experienced at least a few poorly planned trade shows. Given the amount of money typically spent to exhibit at a trade show, feeling trapped at a poorly planned event can be a frustrating and embittering experience. In order to avoid this event marketing nightmare, you need to know what to look for. Here are some common problems with events and conferences:

• Attendance is too low. This is usually caused by an underfunded or ill advised marketing campaign on the part of the show coordinator. For a trade show to be worthwhile for your business, it needs to draw a large portion of your target market.
• Attendance is as expected, but the demographics are not as advertised. This can also be the result of a poorly designed marketing campaign, but more often than not it is caused by outright deception on the part of show coordinators to attract more exhibitors to the event.
• The show floor is overcrowded with disinterested attendees. When event planners and coordinators promise freebies and door prizes, of course attendance will increase, but it may not be the type of attendee you’re interested in. In order for the show to be successful, it needs to attract attendees that are legitimately interested in what the exhibitors have to offer.
• Poor scheduling results in a well-attended conference but a poorly attended trade show. This is the most common problem with modern trade shows, and thankfully it’s the most avoidable. If the conference is focused largely on a few speeches, event planners may schedule the trade show floor to be open at the same time lunch is being served in another area of the convention hall. Before deciding to exhibit at a conference, check the show schedule for obvious conflicts that will draw attendees away from the show floor during prime exhibiting times.

Over 90% of trade shows are both profitable and enjoyable for exhibitors and attendees. Avoiding the “duds” can save you a lot of time and energy, which in turn will save your company a lot of money.