You’ve decided it’s time for a new booth. Time to start from scratch. For whatever reason, your current booth no longer effectively represents the company brand, so you’re hiring a new exhibit designer.
Once you’ve chosen a designer and/or exhibit house, it’s time to get off to a good start with your new 3D designer. You’ll want to keep a few things in mind:
First, if you’re working with a graphic designer to come up with a booth design, you may be starting with the wrong person. Graphic designers aren’t necessarily trained in 3D exhibit design, and 3D exhibit designers are necessarily adept at graphic design. Chances are you’ll want both.
Start by creating a design brief that details your overall marketing goals, and then details the specific tradeshow marketing goals. In fact, if you can detail the show-by-show goals, that will be even better. Define the objectives: branding awareness, lead generation, media and PR outreach, product sales and more. Not everything will be directly applicable to the 3D design, but your designer can absorb the information anyway.
Next, explain from your perspective, the company’s brand and how you’d like to represent it to the world. If you have information on how the brand is seen by consumers and clients, add that in too, especially if it’s different from your perspective.
Now, list your products and services. Sometimes, in the case where a company has hundreds of products, listing them all is probably unnecessary. However, a good description of the main product areas is important. Create a list of issues and problems that your products and services address: what do they solve? How do they help customers solve a problem, achieve a goal or satisfy a need?
Detail your target market. Are they young, old? Consumers or businesses? Men, women? Or some combination?
Next, write a paragraph or two on the look and feel of your new booth. Detail size, materials, and how the booth should make people feel when they see it. Is it traditional, cutting edge, modern? Space age, funky, unusual? What colors are in your brand?
Include your budget, booth size, note if it will be set up in different configurations, and the functional needs, such as storage, product display, meeting areas, demo counters, video monitors, greeting counters and other items such as banner stands, iPad kiosks, etc.
Include a few comments on how and where will the booth be stored and whether you expect your staff to set up the booth or if you plan to hire show labor.
Working with an experienced designer and exhibit house can save you money in the long run, especially if you exhibit multiple times a year. You’ll have a professional team working with you at each step to craft a creative and effective design and bring that design to life.
Need to get your hands on your next great tradeshow exhibit but don’t know where to start? Here’s a place that will give you so many choices your head will spin. However, the great thing is that once you narrow your choices down, it’s easy to share with your colleagues and team members. Check out this video:
It appears that our first webinar of 2016 went off with a hitch or a hiccup. At least that’s what it felt like! Here’s a replay in case you missed it:
Sign up for future webinars at TradeshowGuyWebinars.com. Our next one is set for February 16 at 10 am Pacific, and will feature Hiett Ives of Show Dynamics, Inc. of Houston Texas. The title of his presentation is “Tradeshow Leads Guaranteed” so you’ll want to make sure to attend!
If you want some food for thought, check out Inc.com’s The Death of Tradeshows by Dev Aujla, the Founder of DreamNow.
In the news, the White House has announced that President Obama is going to attend the world’s largest tradeshow for industrial technology. Here’s the Associated Press with the story.
TechCrunch believes that the recently completed 2016 Consumer Electronics Show is now a show for start-ups. Here’s their take.
Tradeshows are a great opportunity to promote your company. Yeah, we all knew that already.
But are you promoting the company’s brand away from the tradeshow floor?
If you have branded shirts, wear them as you travel. Put the shirt on prior to leaving for the airport. There’s a good chance someone will be on the same flight going to the same show. If they’re familiar with your brand, it might prompt them to strike up a conversation with you. If not, maybe they’ll remember the logo when they walk the floor and see your booth.
At the show, you’ll have your show badge, but what if you had a personal name tag as well? Something like that would stand out a little, too, giving people another chance to remember your name and company name. Getting a name badge with your company name and your name costs only a few bucks, and you can wear it at all public events.
If your company throws parties for clients and prospects at the show, there’s another opportunity to show off the brand with embroidered shirts and name tags, not to mention some other item, such as a kiosk in the corner of the room that allows people to charge cell phones. If you have one of those branded charging stations for the booth, there might be other opportunities to use that away from the tradeshow floor. Think where you might find that opportunity.
Tradeshows are full of competing companies, all vying to get their name out in front of their competition and in front of your eyeballs. Finding other opportunities to brand your company away from the tradeshow floor might give you that edge you’ve been looking for.
Yes, I occasionally post an absolutely blatant product placement. But let’s face it – when it’s a cool customizable charging station like this one, it’s worth plugging. Classic Exhibits just posted this video on their blog, and since we are a distributor and work with Classic all of the time, I wanted to share. Here’s Mel from Classic Exhibits explaining what’s going on with this:
With all of the moving parts in your tradeshow marketing program, there is one area that stands out above all the rest as being critical to your success – how to break the ice and engage tradeshow visitors.
And since this is a compelling question that needs concrete answers, I thought it worthwhile to bring in one of the pros at tradeshow engagement, Andy Saks of Spark Presentations. Andy has been training company booth staff in the art and science of engagement for years. I thought it would be an easy thing to have him share a few questions that he teaches his clients about how to engage, but it’s much more complicated than that! Of course it is.
As Andy describes it, booth staffers often walk into a booth shortly before the show begins, seeing it for the first time, and it’s a beautiful piece of branding that the company obviously spent a lot of time and money on. The booth is MUY IMPORTANTE, which immediately makes the staffers feel like they’re there to support this awesome booth and company. But it’s not necessarily the way it should be.
“The booth is there to support you, not the other way around,” said Andy. Without training, a booth staffer often feels like they are there to field questions and direct traffic. But a properly trained staffer who understands the situation – fully understands the entire scope of appearing at a tradeshow to gather leads and convert them into a customer – has a better understanding of how to approach engagement. Which will result in more leads and more business.
ATTRACT THE PROSPECT
When you’re standing in a tradeshow booth, everything you do or do not do is reflecting your company back to the attendee. You’re representing them in everything you do. Something that’s minor and innocuous in any other situation is seen in a much different light at a tradeshow. If you’re eating food, for instance, in that moment a potential client sees that act of you gulping down a hotdog, the underlying message is ‘it appears they are not ready for me to engage with them; they’re not ready for me to be their customer.’
Everything you do in a booth, from eating, talking on a cell phone, standing with your arms folded, sitting in the back of the booth is sending a message to prospective clients that you’re trying to reach, and the message is: we’re not ready for you, please go somewhere else. So all that money spent on the booth and on staff travel and lodging is then wasted on that prospect.
DOs and DON’Ts
DO Stand around the edge of the booth, within a couple of feet of the edge of the booth.
DO Stand alone, not in a group of people (which is intimidating).
DON’T be holding anything that the attendee might consider a potential distraction.
DON’T be drinking coffee, which sends a message that you’re not at 100%.
DO be smiling, and really making a concerted effort to smile and put on your best face.
DO wear your badge high on your chest, preferably on your right shoulder, so that it’s easy to see and read and sends a signal that ‘it’s important to me that you know my name.’
QUALIFYING
Now that you’ve made yourself the most appealing thing at that moment, you move to the QUALIFYING stage. The goal is to ask smart, qualifying questions to build a personal rapport of trust and also reveals their pain.
Some of the questions that Andy recommends revolve around the idea of connecting with somebody, including this one:
“How’d you get started in your job or this industry?” The attendee will regard this question as a sign of your interest in them. Most people, as adults, are not doing what they thought they’d like to do as a kid. By asking this question, it recognizes that somewhere along the way, they took a left turn from their intended or desired career to get where they are now. People like to talk about themselves, and a question like this will reveal a lot of things that may be important. Other staffers in other booths tend to focus on product benefits, company marketing bullet points – in other words, it’s all ME ME ME, and if you ask about THEM you have made an impact. You have made yourself memorable.
engaging with visitors
As you get a couple of minutes into the conversation and you’ve uncovered that they may be using a competiting product, ask a COLLECTION question, such as, “What would you change about your current product if you could?” The tradeshow floor is a tremendous opportunity for market research, and if you’re in the midst of a one on one engagement, you can uncover elements of how they use that product. In fact, they might list the top three or four things about that product that they’d like to change – stuff they don’t like.
In this instant, you have someone who is a user of your competitor’s products, telling you specific things that they don’t like about that product. Can you imagine having that conversation 10, 15, 20 times a day and what market research would come from that?
That’s when you can say, “Well, just so you know, our product does such and such and solves those problems, so if you’re ever in the position to switch, we’d be glad to talk to you.” You’ve planted a seed that may help them grow into a client.
CONFIRMATION QUESTION
Now it’s time to wrap up the qualifying stage of the conversation. Take the information they’ve given you and feed it back to them: “Let me see if I have this correct: you’re looking for a product or service that has this feature and this feature, so that you can reach this goal of doing this and as a result you get this benefit and this benefit. Do I have that right?”
As Andy put it, when you’re saying this to the attendee, you’ll hear your voice and all of the noise of the tradeshow floor, but the attendee will hear angels. Because somebody on a tradeshow floor listened to them!
The sale is nearly 90% complete in this moment. All other details, like size, delivery options and so on can be worked out.
Your tradeshow booth staff is the front line. They represent your company from sunup to sundown in every moment on the tradeshow floor. How they represent you may be the difference between winning that big client or distributor for your product. If they don’t know how to engage attendees properly, you may not even know what you missed.
Andy Saks, Spark Presentations, excels in tradeshow presentations and tradeshow training for booth staff. Check out his page and the fun video. You’ll no doubt learn something very worthwhile!
“…Still, a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest.”
That’s a line from a Paul Simon song, The Boxer, recorded by Simon and Garfunkel.
And it happens all the time. “Selective hearing,” according to my wife, and perhaps many other spouses.
But does that sort of thing happen on the tradeshow floor? Do people see what they want to see and disregard the rest?
Do people see that cool, shiny new product and disregard the great support that your team offers for every purchase?
Do your visitors see the famous author in your booth, wait in line for a free autographed copy of her new book, and yet fail to see the great products that you’re selling?
Do attendees see the giant spinning logo above your booth but fail to see how your company’s story relates to them?
Of course, there’s no way that everybody at a show will see every aspect of your (or other) booths.
So what are they missing that you might do a better job at communicating to them?
