6 Ways to Blow Your Competitor’s Expo Displays Out of the Water
Trade shows are hectic, manic, busy bustling centers filled with overwhelming display lights and sounds. How are you supposed to make your pop up display stand out among your competitors and earn the attention of all those potential customers?
The answer is planning. Take your time to develop some great trade show booth ideas and fill your expo displays with motivated employees armed with an awesome presentation.
There are ways to save money on your convention displays, but you’ll also need to make room in the budget to splurge where it counts too.
1. Look Better Than Everyone Else
Your booth needs to command attention from across the room. What would make you want to cross a hall full of people and noise to see what it’s about?
This starts with an attractive exhibit booth design, but it doesn’t end there. Add video, music, lights, or other attention grabbers. Spark curiosity, but answer enough of their questions so visitors aren’t confused about your message.
Though you want your booth to exude energy and catch attention, you don’t want it to intimidate people or drive them away. Avoid blaring music, upsetting visuals, or other things that could be off-putting to more sensitive attendees. Make it bold and daring, but not offensive.
2. Make Your Presentation Sensory
What makes people remember your message in the midst of hundreds of conflicting or competitive messages? Their emotions do. Use some of the newly available multi-media and interactive display tools to engage their senses. Make people see, feel, hear, and experience what your message is about.
Tell them stories and make them laugh or cry. Be memorable. Can you find a creative way to make people feel strongly about your message? Give them some emotion to tie to your business and products or services.
Make them sad over a missed opportunity, or get them excited about an opportunity to come. Get people angry over injustices, or thrill them with new possibilities.
Let them taste the difference between you and your competitors, and hear the difference between users of your product and those without it.
Bottom line, make people remember you. Do use caution when using sensory devices and engaging emotion. There’s a fine line between engaging and alienating.
3. Use Social Media to the Max
Of course you’ll be promoting your trade show attendance on all your social media accounts, but take this a few steps further.
Hold contests to generate excitement and encourage attendance. Include check in buttons so visitors can share their experiences with others. Get visitors invested in the event with YouTube Videos of all your activities.
Social media promotions start well ahead of the event to generate attendance. Then use your social media and blog to keep people up on the action: who is attending, how many people are enjoying the event, prizes won, freebies given away, and other encouragement to show up and find the booth.
Afterward, thank the attendees and keep those who couldn’t attend updated with
follow-up posts, videos, photos, and other tidbits collected during the show.
4. Stay Fresh
Tired employees working the booth who show up at the crack of dawn and who are too worn out to be enthusiastic and engaging by lunchtime are one of the obstacles to a successful trade show booth. If these workers are left on their own, they won’t be able to capitalize on people who come to the trade show after work that afternoon or evening. Since many of the bosses and decision-makers wait until after work to come, this might mean missing your
best opportunities.
Give workers short four to five-hour shifts, or offer one-hour breaks throughout the day for workers to refresh and get their game faces back on. Encourage and refresh them by supplying snacks, drinks, and even a light meal. Keep them motivated by encouraging them and praising their hard work publicly, such as on the social media feeds. Make sure every person who attends the show gets the same enthusiastic welcome and heartfelt presentation as those who came before.
5. Know Your Stuff
Staff your booth with workers who are intimately familiar with your business, your products and services, your motto, and your methods. Train and practice with them before the event, if necessary. The last thing you want is to put workers in your expensive, well-designed booth who can’t answer questions about your company or explain the benefits of your product in a way that makes people want it.
If your employees in the booth truly love and believe in the company and in the product, it shows. Carefully choose the workers, make sure they’re thoroughly prepped for the task, and keep them refreshed during the trade show with treats and breaks.
Always have a couple of extra employees trained and ready to work the booth, just in case an emergency sickness or injury sidelines your front line. If Charlie’s daughter is going to get sick once this year, luck would ordinarily have that happen on the day he’s scheduled to be the star attraction at your booth.
6. Ditch the Papers
Fortunately, trade shows aren’t usually evaluated on the number of trees killed to make one happen, but if they were, there would be trouble. After a trade show, about 99 percent of the brochures, business cards, pamphlets, newsletters, and other print materials end up in the trash. Printing expenses can be put to better use.
Instead of filling your booth with printed materials, invest in a state-of-the-art interactive media display and a few ipad kiosks instead. Populate the screens with well written information, presented in a visually appealing way. This encourages visitors to linger, and doesn’t lead to them forgetting you when they empty their goodie bags at the end of the day.They’ll leave with a firm impression of who you are as a company and what you have to offer, and it won’t be forgotten when the trash goes out.
Ready to blow your competition away at the next trade show? Start planning your booth, presentation, and workers now. The guy in the next booth won’t know what hit him after you get set up.