Before exhibiting at a trade show, you should analyze your competition for strengths and weaknesses in order to maximize your effectiveness. If you take the time to understand what your clients perceive and what they are looking for, your trade show marketing program will be much more effective. When you start thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors, ask yourself this question: What do your clients experience when they compare you to your competition? The client’s perspective is the only perspective that matters, which is why competitive analysis should be done from this vantage point. It’s easy to get stuck thinking about your company from the inside looking out, which will reduce your appeal with potential clients. So what do potential clients see that could affect their perception of your company?

• The first thing potential clients see is your brand. If you have a well-designed logo and a eye-catching slogan, you immediately have a leg up on a competitor with a poorly designed brand.
• Your marketing materials are another important component of your overall image. If you have a poorly designed website, ugly brochures, and outdated copy, you’ll never survive in a competitive environment.
• Potential clients are also interested in the type of people who work for your company. If your employees are intelligent, well-spoken, and courteous, your company will be that much better than your competition.
• Finally, potential clients want to know that you are good at what you actually do as a company. If you can deliver a high-quality product on time at the right price, you can overcome almost any obstacle that lies in your path toward dominating your industry.

It’s important not to get too hung up on your competitive analysis, especially if you’re looking to generate good will among potential clients. Many companies waste valuable energy attacking their competitors products and/or services instead of focusing their efforts on improving their own offerings, and as a result, they become marginalized. If you find yourself analyzing your competitors too much, refocus your efforts on more productive endeavors. Competitive analysis should be used only to find ways to improve your own offerings, not do bad mouth your competition. Here’s an example of what I mean:

In the 1990′s, McDonald’s invested millions of dollars to provide cleaner restrooms to their customers. After doing competitive analysis, they realized that cleaner restrooms was one way they could improve their business and improve customer service when compared with their competition. Most customers never noticed their efforts, but the results were monumental according to consumer analysis specialists. They never bothered to bad mouth the lack of cleanliness of their competitors restrooms, they simply allowed the results to speak for themselves. Take the McDonald’s approach.

Exhibitors invest huge sums of money every year in their trade show marketing programs, but it is important to remember that attendees (and the businesses they represent) also invest a great deal in trade shows. Plane tickets, hotel rooms, and meals are just a few of the expenses that a typical attendee will need to pay in order to visit an event. When a company has invested thousands of dollars to have its employees attend a trade show, the best thing you can do as an exhibitors is to give them what they want. So what do attendees want?

• Attendees want to find products and/or services that they are interested in. If you are exhibiting at the wrong event, chances are you will probably have to deal with a lot of frustrated attendees. Conferences are usually targeted at a particular industry, so visitors typically come with a game plan in mind. This game plan may only consist of a few simple goals, but more often than not attendees come with a fully-loaded itinerary. If your booth is out of place at the show, you are going to have trouble attracting qualified visitors.
• Attendees want a clear, concise description of who you are and what you do. Even if you have beautiful graphics, your trade show display will fail in its purpose if it does not clearly relay your company name and a short positioning statement. Your exhibit should serve as a jumping off point that starts a discussion between your booth staffers and attendees. Attendees want just the right amount of relevant text.
• Attendees want promotional products and free giveaways. Everyone loves to get things for free, and attendees are no different. Be sure to brand your trade show giveaways clearly with your company name and positioning statement, and be sure you have a virtually unlimited supply on hand (giveaways always vanish much faster than you expect).
• Attendees want a place to sit down. After 8 – 10 hours on the trade show floor, visitors to your booth may be exhausted and frustrated. If you can provide them with a comfortable place to sit, they’re much more likely to stick around in your booth and hear about your products and/or services. Plan to purchase at least a few pieces of trade show furniture if you have the space, as this will make your exhibit area more inviting to tired attendees.

Pleasing attendees is not complicated once you know what they’re looking for. Remember that the typical attendee has spent almost as much time, money, and energy as an exhibitor to get to the event, so do your best to make it worth the investment.

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.

The goal of every exhibitor is to initiate contact with potential clients and continue to build relationships with existing clients. Offering a few of your non-core products at or below cost will attract the interest of potential clients who may not have otherwise been interested in your company. The concept of selling a product at or below cost to attract more new customers is foreign to many business-owners, and it certainly won’t work for everyone, but using a loss leader can be a great trade show marketing strategy.

When you sell a non-core product at cost, you leave your client with the impression that your company is price competitive in every area of business. When they suddenly find themselves in need of your core products, they will assume that you are the cheapest because your loss leader was so cheap. This perception needs to be reinforced in reality (i.e. you need to actually sell your core products at competitive prices) in order to keep the client happy with your company.

Here are some things to consider when selling products as a loss leader:

• Your products should be related to what your business actually does. If you primarily sell office furniture, you could offer a few office accessories at or below cost. You want to avoid selling your core products at or below cost so that you do not confuse your customers and devalue your brand.
• Your loss leader product should require little or no customer support after the sale. If you’re already selling a product below cost, the last thing you want is a customer service nightmare when the products break or become damaged weeks after the sale.
• If your company does not keep detailed financial records, you will never be able to make an educated decision about when and if you can use a loss leader in your trade show marketing program.

If you choose to integrate a loss leader into your program, make sure it is well advertised at your event both on your trade show display and in your exhibit literature. If you forget to let people know about your special, you cannot properly evaluate its effectiveness on your target market.

Electricity at trade shows is billed based on your actual usage. Many exhibitors are shocked to learn the cost of electricity, even if it was advertised in the exhibiting agreement. Personally, I don’t know the difference between a watt and a volt, but typically exhibit electricity is billed by wattage, and here is the wattage used for a number of common power consuming appliances (thank you Exhibitor Magazine):

• TV: ~50 watts
• Sound System: ~75 watts
• Computer: ~400 watts
• Fax Machine: ~60 watts
• LCD Projector: ~300 watts
• DVD Player: ~50 watts
• 50-inch Plasma: ~500 watts

If you have to pre-order your electricity, always order more than you need. It would be disastrous if you ran out in the middle of your event.