Tips to Communicate Effectively With Your Trade Show Display
Perhaps it’s stating the obvious, but trade show displays are all about communication. Whatever else you’re there for, you have a message and you’re trying to get it across to everyone who sees your booth.
Now, sometimes this is easy enough. If you’ve built a better vacuum cleaner, you pour stuff all over your expo booth and start vacuuming. If you’re looking to hire people, you’re going to have banners up clearly stating the basics of the job and the needed skills. At the end of the day, variations on “Eat at Joe’s!” or “Buy Acme!” are simple messages to communicate.
But… what if you don’t have an idea that can’t be encapsulated on a roadside sign? After all, simple messages are also commonplace. “Buy Pencils From Us!” isn’t going to do much unless you’ve got more backing it up. In the end, one of the main indicators of a trade show display’s success lies in how much of your message you can get through to your visitors.
We wanted to talk a bit about how to break down complex ideas, so that they’re suitable for an exposition display. Now, it’s a bit abstract. The problems involved in describing innovations in biomass gasification plants would be rather different than creating a trade show booth that advertises a new online distributed currency model.
That said, however, breaking down complex ideas can be much easier than it would seem, no matter what you’re doing. Let’s start with a pretty general scheme that could be used for anything from trade show booths to classroom teaching.
7 General Steps Towards Explaining Complex Topics
1 – Have someone involved who understands this stuff. It’s sad, but sometimes we see trade show booths where the marketing department clearly had no access to technical materials. Your expo booth should be occupied by staff who truly do know the product or process under discussion. Don’t try to wing it – that will almost always come back to haunt you.
2 – Break the idea down to its component parts. Sort of like IKEA instructions – document all the bits that go into building your idea or new product. No, you won’t necessarily talk about all of them, but this gives you raw materials to discuss or display. When discussing ideas rather than physical products, you could focus on historical innovations, or discuss problems with existing approaches to lay the groundwork for your new ideas.
3 – When making a claim, start with the facts and build upwards. After your headline, don’t immediately launch into too many claims without first setting thing up. Start with easily agreed-upon facts and other components from Step 2 that most people will agree with. Remember: most people are laymen and may have to be informed about basic processes that are common in your industry.
4 – Find common ground. This goes alongside Step 3. The more radical your idea or product, the harder you’ll have to try to get people to listen to you. There’s marketing in a nutshell. If you can find common ground between yourself and your audience while laying down the “establishing facts”, you’ll go a long way towards convincing them to listen. Remember, some won’t “get it” or will have a reason to dislike it, but building bridges sometimes helps bring them around.
5 – Lay interrelationships gradually. Here’s one Facebook gets right:“It’s complex!” tends to be the answer when someone’s trying to describe any situation with more than two bodies interacting. If your business strategy lies at the intersection of a five-point interconnected plan of action, hold back on talking about the Big Picture until you’ve firmly established what the five points are and how each would have influence on the others. Basically, it’s like every conspiracy theory movie where the hero babbles incomprehensibly at the authorities rather than laying out his case rationally. Don’t do that.
6 – Dense material calls for a lighter tone. Your expo displays can’t look like a law school book, even if you specialize in handling online damage claims while navigating 50 states’ worth of precedents. While there are obviously a few boundaries of taste to consider, try to spice things up with jokes or anything else to keep it from being a drag. Besides keeping people entertained, it also aids memory development and retention as well!
7 – Use visuals! A good infographic, chart, cartoon, or potentially even animated clip can be perfect for illustrating ideas that have several different angles to consider. Don’t forget the possibilities involved in using computer-created graphic aids. 3D visualizations are also perfect for any discussion where you need to show complex changes over time.
Building Communications Strategies Into Your Trade Show Booth
So, what can you do to work these ideas into your actual expo displays? Here are a few thoughts:
- Keep the most accessible materials on the outside, and the more detailed information further within. Don’t hammer people with too much information all at once.
- If a process is key to your presentation, consider setting up your expo display with a walk-through path where visitors experience it in a linear, point-by-point fashion.
- Use as many mediums as you can. Remember: some learn by seeing, some by hearing, and some by doing. Address all three primary learning styles, and you’ll have messages that get through to a lot more people.
- Interactive displays, such as on iPad kiosks, are great for allowing visitors to explore your concepts on their own. You could create 3D visualizations that allow people to see your model from all sides, or ‘explode’ it and then reform it.
- One station per point: If you have the resources, set up one station for each major point someone needs to understand to get the whole picture. Vary up the presentation styles – some games, some informative, some video, etc.
- Cohesion in your sign design also helps. Graphics like arrows or text excerpts on the walls can clarify connections between different points you’re making or stations at the expo display. Try to tie everything together, as much as possible.
- Oh, and the people who understand the whole process? Have them onhand at your trade show display, or at least available via voice in case a question comes up you can’t answer.
Finally, the more complex the idea you’re trying to get across at your trade show booth, the more critical it is that you get multiple eyeballs on everything before it goes live. Look for input from the staff – you may find someone who knows how to explain a part of it more clearly.
Above all, always look for new and more effective ways to communicate the big ideas or the radical new products coming out of your company. That’s the backbone of great trade show booth ideas.