trade show activities
Samuel J. Smith
May 14, 2019
After all the planning, investment and hard work, imagine standing in an empty trade show booth while attendees simply walk on by.
If you’ve been in that situation, chances are you were frustrated, while your bored booth staffers wished they were somewhere else.
Trade shows are too expensive to do without having a consistent flow of traffic in your booth. Here are 4 reasons your booth traffic is too small – reasons you can fix to turn that trickle of booth traffic into a flood.
Trade show attendees have changed in two major ways, that make it harder to get them out of the aisle and into your booth. And both of those causes are from technology.
With all the logistics you have to manage for your company’s trade show program, you might feel justified in skipping trade show promotional activities. But that would be like planning a party, and not sending out all the invitations.
Sure, the show organizer will get people to the show floor. But it’s up to you to get them to your booth space.
Here are 7 reasons why trade show promotional activities are so worth your effort:
As attendees wander down the aisles, their eyes are bombarded by structures, images and words from all sides. What wins in that sensory battle? Motion and sound – which you can do best with activities. Activities in your booth catch and hold their attention, and if enticing enough, bring them into your space, leaving your neighboring exhibitors staring at you in envy.
Over the past few years, our company has increasingly partnered with leading Exhibit Houses to create interactive trade show game activations for their exhibiting clients. We have been impressed by the commitment, care, and expertise they bring to their clients’ trade show marketing.
We also wanted to uncover their vast experience creating effective trade show marketing campaigns, especially with technology. So we asked them to share with a survey. Survey respondents were all either Exhibit House Account Executives or senior management, all with client-facing responsibilities.
Exhibiting at trade shows – how hard can it be? You just show up and talk to people, right?
Actually, exhibiting is surprisingly harder than it looks. That said, trade shows still remain very popular (and even keep growing) because they can produce great results when done right.
If you’re exhibiting for the first time, we want to help shorten your learning curve with these 8 tips you need to succeed:
Everything you do at trade shows should support your main sales and marketing goal. So if you don’t know why you’re exhibiting, there’s no way to succeed. Discover or decide if your trade show goals are (most likely) to boost brand awareness, generate sales leads, or strengthen key relationships, or something else. (This advice is good, even if you are not first time trade show exhibitors.)
