Looking to save money on a tradeshow exhibit? Of course you are! And chances are, throughout the course of the next year, you’ll have a want or need for something that shows up on our regularly updated pages on our Exhibit Design Search. Whether it’s an Exhibit Special or a Lightning Deal, it might be just what you’re looking for.
These are no “close-out” specials that are collecting dust in the warehouse. Nope, these are regular items – either custom or “off the shelf” – that typically sell for full retail price. But on occasion, we grab some of the items and put them into one or of the categories and drop the price.
For example, you might see a custom hybrid 10×20 exhibit that sells for around $30,000. But if it lands in the Lightning Deal, the price might drop ten percent to around $27,000. A $3,000 savings to your bottom line, just like that. Lightning Deals generally last a couple of weeks, so if you see something that is a great fit, grab it fast!
The Exhibit Specials, on the other hand, are more general savings that span a category, such as a specific style (Gravitee or Segue), or a type (light boxes or EcoSmart inlines). On occasion there might be discounts on discontinued models as well.
Saying all of this, it behooves you to visit these categories and return. That means returning to the Lightning Deals every couple of weeks, and visiting the Exhibit Specials every month or so. Even if you’re not currently looking for a new exhibit, you might find great deals on accessories such as lights, counters, shipping cases and so on.
Let’s face it, when you’re shopping for a custom tradeshow exhibit, the dollar signs can often start spinning so much your head soon follows. Things can get expensive in the tradeshow world, so it makes sense to figure out ways to save money along the way.
Start with the premise that the reason custom tradeshow exhibits
can be expensive for any number of reasons. First, there are a lot of people
involved: designers, account executives, fabricators, detailers, crate builders
and so on. Things are usually hand-crafted in the exhibit world in the sense
that each piece has human hands on it several times. Even if a CNC machine is
programmed to cut metal or wood, a human still has to make it happen. Building an
exhibit is not mass manufacturing. Its individually crafted items designed and
built to look spectacular.
How to keep the costs down? Here are six ways:
Consider starting with a kit. Many exhibit builders offer a number of kits to keep costs lower. With a kit, the design is generally pre-determined. But with a good kit, there are always opportunities to customize the kit. In a sense, you’re creating a hybrid between custom and ‘catalog’ designs. Shop the company’s website for kits that might give you a good starting point.
Know exactly what you want and get nothing more. A custom exhibit is great in that, as part of the design process, you can identify what you need – exactly. If you need just three shelves for product display, don’t go for four or five or six. Those can usually be added later. Need a charging table? There are always low budget options that are not custom but can be custom-branded.
Work with lightweight materials. While there still are many heavy wood-built exhibits that appear at shows – usually for a great reason because it’s part of the brand – more exhibits are moving to lightweight materials such as aluminum frames and fabric graphics. Not only are the materials lighter, which means they ship for less, but fabric graphics fold up and ship in a smaller space.
Rent furniture. If you rent the same thing show after show, it’ll add up and eventually you’ll end up paying more for the furniture than it you owned it. But keep in mind, but owning it, you have to pay to ship it, pay to store it, and pay to replace it. And furniture that you own will get scuffed, nicked and damaged over time. With rental furniture, you get brand new or like-new items, you get to choose from the latest styles, and you don’t have to worry about shipping or storing.
Don’t rush it. By planning ahead for a custom designed and fabricated exhibit, you’re avoiding rush fees, last minute glitches and a calendar that is rushing at you like a runaway train. Once you’ve decided on a new exhibit, sit down with your exhibit provider and work out a realistic timeline so that all parties know what’s expected of them and when.
Preview the exhibit. It’s pretty common to do this, but I have seen occasions where it’s not done, and it’s led to having to make expensive fixes on the show floor or have revised graphics printed at a rush fee and shipped using an expensive overnight service. Previews are generally designed to make sure everything works like it’s supposed to, to make sure all the graphics fit, and nothing is left out. Even if you can’t be there, make sure you have lots of photos of the preview.
Whether you’re looking for a custom exhibit, a modular exhibit from a catalog or something in between, most exhibit houses are willing to discuss your budget and what you can realistically expect to get for your money.
This is a guest article by Halle Summers of Fastenation.
If you are planning on attending or setting up a booth at a tradeshow for the first time, you probably already know how valuable these events are for growing a business. They offer numerous opportunities for increasing awareness of your brand, making sales, and networking with prospective customers and clients. While business is increasingly being conducted online, trade shows provide an opportunity for business owners and consumers to meet face to face, forge relationships, and learn about new products.
If you have ever attended a tradeshow, it should come as no surprise that exhibiting at one requires a lot of work and careful planning. It’s often necessary to start planning several months in advance to ensure that you have everything you need by the time the event makes its way into town. There is a massive amount of competition at these events, and, if you just show up and hope for the best, your booth will likely get lost and be overlooked by most attendees. If you are gearing up to be an exhibitor for the first time, here are a few essential tools and tips to ensure the success of your first trade show event.
Make Assembling an Eye-Catching Display
Your Top Priority
The human attention span tends to be pretty short. When
people are surrounded by all sorts of exciting things to see and do, it can be
even shorter. This means that you only have a few seconds to capture the
attention of event attendees and draw them into your booth. If your display
isn’t eye-catching, a lot of people will likely pass by your booth without even
stopping.
The good news is that assembling an eye-catching tradeshow display doesn’t have to be difficult. Use attention-grabbing images instead of words. Make use of bright (but appealing) colors. Have products on display. Make your booth feel welcoming. There are all sorts of things that you can do to put together an amazing display. When you’re packing up to head to the event, make sure you have the right tools and supplies for setting up your display. Things like gaffers tape and VELCRO® brand hook and loop tape are lifesavers when it comes to hanging banners, putting up signs, and assembling the various parts of trade show booths. Table skirting clips are great for trade shows, too, as are cable hangers. Trust us; few things are worse than showing up at a tradeshow with an awesome display but lacking the tools and supplies needed to set it up!
Prepare Your “A” Team
The people you have working at your booth can have a
huge impact on how well the trade show goes for your business. There are a few
different options when it comes to staffing. You can bring your own employees,
or you can work with an event staffing agency. The downside to working with an
agency, though, is that you will need to put a lot of effort into training your
team and ensuring that they know all of the ins and outs of your business. When
you have your own employees working the booth, they already have a lot of
knowledge about your products and services.
Make sure that the team you assemble is made of people
who are friendly, motivated, professional, and outgoing. You don’t want someone
who is going to sulk behind the table and make zero effort to engage with
attendees! Choose team members who work well together and complement each
other’s knowledge and skills. Ensure that everyone is prepared to handle
questions. Trade show attendees tend to have a lot of questions about
businesses and their products and services. Every single person who is working
the booth and acting as a representative of your company needs to be an expert
on your product and business, and they need to be able to handle inquiries with
confidence and ease.
If your business sells a product, your team needs to be prepared to give product demos, too. Tradeshow attendees want to be able to experience products for themselves before committing to buy, so doing product demos and allowing potential customers to try out your merchandise is a great way to build relationships and make sales. If your company provides a service, you should figure out a way to demonstrate that, too. Show event attendees what you do. Don’t just tell them about it.
Give Stuff Away When you set up a booth at a tradeshow, making money is probably one of your ultimate goals. That doesn’t mean, though, that you shouldn’t give away some freebies. For event attendees, free swag is one of the best parts about going to a trade show. People love free stuff, and they expect to get a lot of it at tradeshows. Promotional items, such as branded notebooks, pens, hats, tote bags, or water bottles, are always big hits. Any type of freebie works, though. You can draw a pretty big crowd by simply handing out some tasty fresh-baked cookies. Get creative and be generous. Doing so gets people talking about your booth and entices attendees to stop by.
Conclusion
Setting up a booth at a tradeshow offers numerous benefits for business owners. If you want to make the most of the event, though, you need to be prepared. Start planning several months in advance to ensure that you have time to order banners, tools, and other supplies, assemble your event team, and provide adequate training. The more you put into planning for your first trade show, the more you will likely get out of it.
When the big day arrives, stick to your game plan, and have fun! Exhibiting at a tradeshow requires a lot of hard work, but there is no reason why it can’t be enjoyable, too.
Halle Summers is a Marketing Coordinator for FASTENation Inc., a premier global manufacturer, technical converter, distributor, and designer of adhesive based fasteners and tapes. Halle enjoys sharing her unique perspective and knowledge through her blog writing. When she isn’t writing articles, she enjoys spending time in downtown Charleston, South Carolina and all the amazing food her hometown has to offer.
Let’s say your company is looking ahead about six months to a show in March and you’re considering a new custom exhibit for the show. If the show is in the early part of March, you have less than six months before seeing the new exhibit leave the loading docks.
So what has to be done between now and then to ensure that you have the exhibit you want for the price you can pay?
First Questions
There are many things that have to be done in the next few months to make the process work well. Let’s start with the basic questions:
What size booth space are you going to need?
What is a realistic budget for the exhibit you want?
What company is going to guide you through the process and earn the business?
The first question, about booth size, is already set. Unless you’re upsizing from last year’s show, it’ll be the same as it was.
The budget question is a more difficult question, and there are any number of ways to look at it. First, when you say “realistic,” does that number come from what the accounting department told you? Does it come from a thorough research into what exhibit properties cost all the way through concept, design and fabrication? And does the budget figure include everything, or only the exhibit itself?
Industry Average Pricing
A couple of good places to start would be to understand what the industry, on average, charges for the various items. Do your research and find out what a typical custom exhibit costs. For example, recent figures show that inline construction can average about $1,340 per linear foot, give or take 10-15%. Which means a typical 10×20 custom inline booth will land somewhere close to $26,000 – $28,000. Could be more, could be less, but that’s a good number to start the discussion.
A recent industry average for custom island construction comes in a bit more – around $160 – $180 per square foot. If you’re looking at a 20×20, multiply 20×20 (400 sf) by $160 and you’ll get a rough budget of about $64,000. At least you’ll have a number in mind when you start getting prices back from exhibit houses.
Exhibit Function Needs
Next, look at the other factors that affect price, the pieces you want in the exhibit. What exactly do you need for the exhibit to function well to show off your products and services? Do you need demo stations? A stage for a professional presenter? Sample tables? Meeting spaces? All those will push the final price one way or another.
Choosing an Exhibit Company
The last question – what company you should work with – is a big one. After all, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of exhibit houses ready, willing and able to do the job. Unless you’re a huge exhibitor (think Microsoft or Nike), you don’t need one of those big exhibit houses. If your company is a small or medium-sized company, going to a big exhibit house has some benefits – and some drawbacks. The benefits are that they are more than capable of handling your job, and they may offer you some very creative designers as part of the mix. The drawbacks might be that if you’re a small client, it’s easy to get lost among all their big clients, which demand a lot of attention. Another drawback is that a larger company has a lot more overhead than a smaller company. They have to pay for a larger space, they have more employees, and so on. It’s a bigger business that they have to keep going.
Smaller exhibit houses also have tradeoffs, but in my experience, the smaller houses – with fewer clients – value those clients like gold and work hard to keep them. They make sure nothing goes wrong, or if something does, they will fix it as quickly as possible. Any business is built on relationships, but with fewer relationships, the importance of each client is paramount. Which would you rather work with? No wrong answers.
Another aspect to consider about which exhibit house to work with: location. Some exhibitors want to be able to stop by and see the progress on a new build. Or once the exhibit has been built, to be able to have the staff nearby to do any repairs or upgrades, or even store the exhibit. But many exhibitors don’t see not having the exhibit house nearby as a negative thing. We do much of our business online and via email and phone that distance is irrelevant. Again, no wrong answers – different people have different needs and priorities.
Timeline from Design to Fabrication
The next question to ask is how long will this take? Hence the title of the blog post.
Again, there are general guidelines, but each exhibit house will have their own schedule and availabilities. Fabrication is often the most straightforward part of the process. In other words, once everything has been decided, there are few surprises. But getting to the final design is what can take time. But it’s time well-spent. The sooner you start the conversation with a 3D exhibit designer, the better off you’ll be.
A good 3D exhibit designer is the key. She’ll know what questions to ask, how to draw out more details of what you want, and finally produce a mockup design for review and revision. This process can take what you might think is a lot of time. Prior to going into the first meeting, make a list of all of the items you need: meeting space, demo space, demo stations, stage, graphic display areas, etc. I’ve had clients bring us 2D “flat” graphic representations of what they wanted in an exhibit and it was a simple matter to convert that to a 3D rendering. I’ve had clients start with nothing, which meant we talked everything through in detail and let the designer take the lead and produce the first rendering, or a couple of options to choose from.
Different sized exhibits take varying amounts of time, as you might imagine. Custom takes longer than something “off the shelf.” If you want something simple, it’s often a matter of picking something from an online catalog, doing a little customizing and getting it in-hand in a month or two, not the five or size months you’d like for a larger custom island exhibit.
But if you’ve got a show on your calendar that’s six months out, no matter what size exhibit you have, if you’re targeting the show for a new one, it’s time to schedule that first conversation!
It seems like almost every tradeshow exhibit has a big video screen these days. But what about the content? How do you create content that is actually seen and delivers a message that’s critical to your brand amidst the chaos of a tradeshow floor? On this week’s TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee, I chat with Holly Paige of Wave One Films in the Portland area about how to approach creating video for tradeshows:
Sometimes it makes sense to visualize everything you are planning to do in your next tradeshow appearance. I thought it might fun to put the mindmapping to video and see how it went:
No doubt there are moments in your life where something happened that lead to something else quite unexpected. Taking a look back can you see how you might now be able to connect the dots?
TradeshowGuy Tim Patterson connects several dots in this episode of TradeshowGuy Monday Morning Coffee:
You might think that designing graphics for a tradeshow
exhibit is hardly any different from designing graphics for a brochure or a
website. But you’d be wrong. There are a number of differences, and an
experienced tradeshow graphic designer is an invaluable asset if you’re facing
the prospect of doing it alone.
First things first. What’s different? The most obvious is
that graphics are much bigger on a tradeshow exhibit than a website or brochure
or sales sheet.
Second thing is that people will interact differently with tradeshow
graphics than they will with a brochure or a website, which means your approach
to crafting a design with an impactful message must be different.
Your message must be clear
And third, and perhaps the most important, the resolution of
the tradeshow graphic file will by its very nature be much higher than a web
design or print design.
High resolution is a must for tradeshow graphics
Since graphics are much bigger, and since people interact
with tradeshow graphics differently than with websites and printed material,
the design and messaging have to reflect that difference. Thousands of people
walk by a typical tradeshow on any given day. They glance but often don’t see
the graphic messaging. If their brain stops for anything, it’s for either a
familiar logo or a bold question or statement. A supporting image such as a
photograph can also be a factor in keeping someone attention for another few
seconds if you’re lucky. Great care and decision making must go into the
design: what image resonates with your brand and attracts attention? What
message is important and can be communicated in a few short words?
File preparation is critical to keeping things on schedule
Finally, the crafting of the digital graphic files is
critical to ensure high resolution in the output. I’m not a designer or a graphic
printing technician, but I can pass along some of the general guidelines on how
to prepare the files.
File Formats
Each printing facility and tradeshow exhibit house will vary
slightly, but the main things to keep in mind are to make sure the graphics are
submitted in an acceptable format. Typically, most printers accept Photoshop,
Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign or high-resolution PDFs. Other programs such
as Quark, FreeHand, CorelDraw and Publisher are typically not acceptable.
Neither are files such as Microsoft Word, or low-resolution JPEG, GIF, PICT or BMPs.
Font Specifications
Fonts are typically converted to outlines. If not, you’ll
need to provide Macintosh of TruType fonts with the files.
Resolution
This differs from shop to shop, but I generally see
requirements of setting up files at 100-120 pixels per inch at 100%. Anything
smaller and the final print will show pixelization.
Color Specifications
Again, varies from shop to shop, but most ask for vector
files in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black), and raster artwork in RGB (Red,
Green, Blue). If this is over your head, speak to your graphic designer. An
experienced designer can address these issues.
Uploading and Sharing Files
Given than tradeshow graphics are high resolution and cover
a lot of square feet, the graphic production files are going to be big. We just
did a set of banner stands this week where the graphic files for five stands
amounted to about a gigabyte. Too big to email, so it’s got to be transferred.
We typically create a sharable file on DropBox, but there are other tools to
share big files, such as HighTail, Google Drive, SendSpace and others. Again,
pretty easy to do. In fact, many companies have dedicated FTP sites where you can
upload directly to them.
Final Thoughts
The topic of tradeshow graphic design, file creation and
production can take up several books, and no doubt it has. This short blog post
barely scratches the surface. Need to know more? Speak with experienced
designers and production people that do it every day. They’re happy to share
their knowledge and make sure you get the highest quality graphic you can.
One of the easiest ways to identify possible exhibits is to browse our Exhibit Design Search (go to TradeshowBuy.com) and add them to ‘My Gallery’ and then share that unique link with your colleagues.
