4 Tips to Run a Successful Trade Show

Guest Post By Steve McMains

Trade shows are great ways to promote a product or the brand identity of the company. Apart from that, you can also use a trade show to measure your competitors, there marketing tactics and their latest product development trends. Many companies that cannot afford to go for extensive market research or those who cannot directly communicate with the target market on a regular basis should go for different trade shows.

However, it is not enough to participate in a trade show to get the most out of it. You must prepare well in advance to end the show successfully. Here are some common mistakes done by many new companies along with tips to avoid them for better result.

Open your booth to visitors: Do you really think setting up a great looking booth is enough if the visitors do not feel comfortable? Many trade show participants often sit tight behind a 6 ft table and wait for the visitors to get in. However,smart marketers remove the table and try to get the visitors inside. In this process, you are actually walking a few steps ahead your competitors. This makes your booth more approachable to a prospective customer. If you really need some tables,get some bar-height pedestal tables so that your representatives can communicate or demonstrate the product in a one to one environment.

Keep enough space for visitors: Many new trade show participants often keep the booth crowded with their own representatives. They keep them to tackle heave traffic in the booth. However, there is hardly any need to do so. There is no need to put as many representatives as you can. It is always great to put smart people who can easily identify prospective customers from a crowd and can attend the visitors accordingly. You must remember that you have a very limited period and thus, there is no need to entertain the whole crowd. If you find that a very particular time of the day, you will get huge traffic, you can arrange for more work force. However, once the situation is over, it is better to remove the excess.

Polite, smart and ready to solve problems: This subheading tells all about the quality of your representatives. If the visitors do not feel that the representatives are warm and approachable, there are high chances that your trade show will turn out to be a failure. So make sure that they greet visitors with a warm smile and ask your representatives to keep their cell phones switched-off. While selecting your representatives make sure that they are well dressed and have a good sense of decency.

Company and Product knowledge: We often see that companies hire people from different agencies to represent them in a trade show. These people often do not have enough information about the company or the product. If they are your first line for interaction with the visitors, this is not a problem. However, if they are the only people representing your company in the trade show, there is a problem. If you hire these people, make sure that they know whatever they are supposed to know and put a person of your company present there so that people can approach him or her for further information on anything.

Event marketing can be very profitable. It just needs some more attention from you.

Steve is a media professional and writes for different online publications on media and advertising industry. For more information on event marketing, he recommends you to visit http://www.adweekmedia.com/

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photo credit: Charles & Hudson