Your next trade show is coming up and you’re out of new ideas. Maybe the ideas you’ve relied upon in the past are coming off as more than a bit stale now. Either way, anyone who’s spent five minutes at a trade show understands the value of standing out amongst the fray.
Your booth is only as successful as the time, effort, and creativity that you put into it. Pop up displays, giveaways, and knowledgeable personnel are only going to get you so far without a specific vision in mind for the design and functionality of your booth.
They say you only get one chance to make a first impression and when it comes to trade shows, that initial interaction is imperative to form a relationship with a potential future client. So it’s important to stand out, but too many folks make that critical error of mistaking flash and complexity for standing out.
In reality, the most successful booths manage to stand out because they provided the visitor with some amount of value for their time spent in that particular booth. It’s not even about having the best swag (although that does help to some small extent), the goal is to make the interaction memorable enough for the visitor that he or she wants to do business with you at a future date.
But how does a brand or business go about doing that? Let’s examine what works best with these five smart ways to stand out at your next trade show:
1. Designing Your Booth
It all starts with the booth, the place where you will be spending the majority of your time speaking with attendees and promoting your product or service. Remember, yours will be just one of a hundred or more booths in the building. That means you need to stand out.
Creative aesthetics will be useful for luring them in so put some real time and effort into the design of the visual presentation that your booth will convey. That includes selecting the right colors, fonts, images, everything necessary to tell the story of who you are and what you offer.
Be sure to stock your booth with all of the proper promotional materials that will give your visitors the information they are seeking about the brand, the product, the service, whatever it is you’ve come to the show to promote. Make these things valuable and educational and, above all, get people excited!
2. Stay on Brand
Your brand or product has a message, a story, something that it represents or wishes to convey to the public. Keep your booth connected to that idea or meaning at all times.
That means avoiding flashy spectacle if it doesn’t fit in with your brand. Simplicity will always be remembered longer than crazy lighting, loud music, and aggressive attitude. In fact, those are things are typically remembered for all of the wrong reasons.
3. Great Giveaways
As we’ve stated, it helps to give your visitors something fun to take home with them. Whatever you decide to select as your giveaway, approach it in the same way as you did with the design of the booth. Be sure it’s memorable and enticing. Be clever; make that visitor think of your booth and your brand fondly when he or she gets back to the hotel room that night.
Just remember, all the other guys are handing out free stuff too. So whether it’s a sample of your product or an everyday item they will use repeatedly, think about how you want to remind potential customers of your name when they see your swag.
4. Bring Extra
That goes for everything you’ll be handing out at your booth. Business cards, one-sheets, brochures, pamphlets, giveaways, you want to be sure you don’t run out of these things before the show ends. So order more than you think you’ll need because you don’t want to disappoint that visitor who may be your biggest client later on.
5. Hire Good People
If you want your booth to stand out, be sure you have the right people operating it. That means hiring people who have strong communication skills and are knowledgeable about your brand. They will be representing it throughout the trade show and one negative interaction can have repercussions that you won’t even realize are echoing throughout the show.
So be sure your people are the best at conveying your message clearly, concisely, and thoroughly. Your visitors will have questions. Your staff should be able to answer them with confidence and excitement.
