The Exhibitor's Resource – Trade Show Marketing Blog

Plan early to avoid overnight shipments and the accompanying drayage costs for each individual shipment. Consolidate your shipments as much as possible and avoid the high costs of minimum material handling fees, typically set at 200lbs. Get all of that literature on a single pallet and pay just one fee.

Try to ship to the advance warehouse rather than direct to the show. You’ll avoid the hidden costs of your truck waiting in the marshaling yard (charging you by the hour), your labor waiting on the display in your booth space, and the worst nightmare, your shipment getting delayed en route.

Reduce weight. Obviously, the more your exhibit properties weigh, the higher the cost to ship and receive them. Work with your exhibit design agency to investigate how you can leverage emerging trends in lightweight, fabric-based graphics and architecture, modular aluminum structural systems, and other design techniques to reduce the weight of your display.

Palletize when appropriate. If your shipping situation enables you to palletize some of your properties, do so by pad-wrapping items and working with your transit company to ensure safe delivery. Again, palletize that literature, those giveaways, and your demo products and avoid the high costs of several individual shipments.

Popularity: 10% [?]

As an event marketing manager, you may be asked to justify the costs of face-to-face marketing. Here is a quick list of the benefits of event marketing that no other marketing effort can offer:

Start a dialogue. A two-way conversation is better than mono-directional broadcasts, and face-to-face marketing on the trade show floor, or at other events is the best way to begin that communication. Of course you’ll want your booth staff to be on-message, but because it’s a conversation, they will be able to give the visitor best-targeted message.
A personal connection builds trust. Meeting face-to-face, with your company’s brand and message on display around your, a prospect is likely to be comfortable being approached and learning about what your offer is. A trade show exhibit space is one of the few places today where a “sales pitch” isn’t taboo.
Access to a receptive audience for your message (they are likely there to learn about emerging trends in their industry).
Immediate fulfillment of prospect requests. Booth staff can answer questions, provide information, deliver catalogs, and set up accounts on the expo floor. The interested client doesn’t need to wait for a returned call, a sample to ship, or a sales person to schedule a meeting in order to get the process started.
Establish or reinforce brand awareness and industry prominence. Even if your company is lucky enough to enjoy a dominant position in your market, it’s wise to reinforce that lead position and stay top-of-mind for your existing clients in addition to maintaining or enhancing your brand awareness to those who haven’t yet joined the majority.

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While there are a lot of variables to consider when selecting a trade show booth space, a basic thing to realize is that all trade show booth spaces are not created equal. Here are some ideas on how to select the best trade show space you can.

One factor to consider is trade show space proximity to compatible brands or products, and this is particularly important at larger trade shows, where one expo attracts a wide range of attendees looking for a wide range of products. If, for instance, a software developer exhibits at an electronics show, they might want to position themselves either near the hardware that their software runs on. Each situation is different and may require an alternative strategy, but understanding what “neighborhood” a given space is in is crucial.

Spaces that don’t work as well include some that would initially seem to be prime real estate, but research has proven to be less desirable. An example would be those spaces in the “decompression zone” up front near the entrance. Retail store planners have for some time designed store layouts to place lower-margin merchandise in this dead zone. Just like a shopper, a trade show attendee tends to miss the displays front and center and is ready to absorb more of what they see a little further into their journey on the trade show floor.

And that journey most often starts to the right of the entrance, which is why exhibit planners talk about “left side lethargy” – by the time exhibitors make it to that far left side, they are often starting to tire, and at the minimum, exhibitors with spaces on that side might want to consider a seating or lounge area to ensure they do everything they can to capture this traffic.

Exhibitors should look for spaces away from columns, corner spaces for inline displays, and any space that offers a way to stand out. Although spaces against the convention hall walls might not have as high traffic as others, once advantage is the potential for an exhibitor to make an inline display taller. Depending on the particular trade show’s rules and regulations, an exhibitor might be able to go as high as 14′ or higher and stand up and above the typical 8′ display height for most inline trade show displays.

Another area to potentially avoid would be spaces near restrooms and other facilities. Sure, there will be a lot of traffic moving past those booth spaces, but attendees might have a more urgent task on their mind and won’t necessarily be interested in slowing down to speak with your booth staff. Some trade show displays might do well near food court seating, but a good plan needs to be put into place for how to draw attention for those taking a snack break. Particularly for smaller booth spaces, being close to tables and chairs means that they might be able to move a conversation to a more private location without the expense of an in-booth seating area or lounge.

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Exhibit Resources has been notified that we will be receiving a National ADDY Award at the AAF National Conference in Washington, D.C. at the Crystal Gateway Marriott. The award is for the trade show exhibit we designed and produced for Burt’s Bees. Erin Snow from Burt’s Bees will be on hand, along with Exhibit Resources representatives, to accept the award at the ADDY Dinner, Show and Gala on Saturday, June 6. The annual event wraps up the four day conference, which also includes seminars, workshops, forums and an expo for the advertising industry.

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Exhibitors benefit in many ways from the shows that they exhibit at, but their post-show process can really be a factor in success, now and for future events.

Here are some of the post-show activities that should be planned to maximize the effectiveness of the show:

• Has a daily debriefing meeting among booth staff been planned?
• How will show leads be processed and followed-up on?
• Has a system been put into place to handle the fulfillment of visitor requests for literature, samples and other follow-up materials?
• How will conversions and sales resulting from the show be tracked?

• Did the show expenses stay within the budget?
• Does the budget need to be adjusted for the remaining show calendar, or for the same show next year?
• Based on the show results, what other shows should you consider exhibiting at?
• What recognition will the booth staff receive for meeting show goals?
• How will the success of each show be determined?

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A significant and potentially hidden expense of exhibiting at trade shows may not seem like a big deal until you run the numbers after a show. That’s right, I’m talking about the costs associated with producing, shipping and dealing with promotional literature, whether it’s company brochures, product catalogs, or white papers. In the planning stages, little thought may be paid to this traditionally mandatory element of exhibiting at trade shows. However, that lack of planning early on might double, triple or quadruple your costs for this increasingly altogether unnecessary expense. Last minute copy or design changes to literature can delay getting your files to the printer, and force you to pay rushed printing fees, and then rush shipping and handling fees to get the literature to your booth before the show starts. Depending on how much literature you’re bringing in, you may be subject to convention hall drayage fees, and “late surcharges” to boot.

These literature-related costs make you wonder where where all of it ends up. Some estimates say that over half of printed literature handed out at trade shows never even makes it back to the attendee’s office.

So what are some strategies for minimizing this expense?
Exhibitors could bring some literature with them on the plane, but smaller pieces that just hit the highlights but still give the visitor something to remind them of them later. Or exhibitors could bring individual sell sheets so that booth staff can provide info on the specific thing that the visitor was interested in, rather than providing an entire catalog.

Exhibitors could bring a small supply of literature, and replenish only what they start running out of with a quick electronic order via a national quick-print chain (you know some popular options). You can even leave your home city while the final tweaks to the design of the new brochure are being made, and have the digital files electronically sent over to the print center in the city your show is in and have them fulfill small batch orders from there.

Or you can be a savvy exhibitor and bring none, but be set up to print on-demand inside your exhibit on the show floor. On-demand printing gives you an extra advantage because it allows for custom-tailored information to be added to the documents being printed. Not only can you provide information specific to the products or services that the prospect is interested in, but you can even include their name for a personalized touch, and the name of their regional representative or local dealer office.

But you could be a real maverick and not just send no literature, but offer digital-only versions of everything. Depending on your industry and how your company does business, this might not be as out-there as it might have once seemed. The literature you once thought to be a requirement might actually be a burden that your contact doesn’t want to carry around the show the rest of the day or weigh their luggage down with. And what better way to follow up with your prospect or client after a show than to email them the product catalog they requested and you promised? Even mailing out select pieces of literature can be a smarter move than providing it on the trade show floor.

Need another good reason to consider alternative lit printing strategies? Here’s one: reduction of your company’s carbon footprint. The less literature you print and ship (especially air ship), the better for the environment it is. Reduce the number of trees required to produce the paper. Reduce the amount of fossil fuels it takes to not only ship bulk literature out to the show, but to ship the left overs back to your home city.

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Trade show marketing requires a lot of preparation, coordination, and imagination. To make trade shows pay off in this new, over-saturated marketing world, an exhibitor must change the way they define their goals and how they execute their plan. As mentioned in previous posts, pre-show communication with prospects AND clients to get them to stop by your trade show booth is essential, as is having something to show them when they ultimately show up.

But an exhibitor can extend the payoff of their trade show investment into the future in the form of press releases, blog posts, photos, video footage and other buzz created while at the show. A trade show presence is an irreplaceable venue for interaction with key industry players, but it’s also a wonderful place to get in front of the media. Reporters from media outlets throughout the country, and indeed the world, attend trade shows looking for trends to report on. The better prepared you and your staff are, and the better your trade show display looks, the more likely you’ll be featured in a news story from the trade show floor.

And you can create your own media splash from the event yourself. An emerging trend in trade show marketing is for companies to launch a new product, announce a new service, or feature exciting demos within their trade show booth space, and document it all with photos and video footage. They then use the content they captured from that blitz across all the media formats and outlets they can. They immediately add posts to their blogs, send out press releases, and distribute the video. The trade show display acts as the stage in many cases, making sure their name, their brand, and their unique offer is seen and understood by whoever sees the photos and watches the clips.

Pulling that sort of coordinated marketing effort together may seem a daunting task, but have no fear, there are resources available to help you. A trade show consultant from an exhibit design firm is a great start, and can help exhibitors develop a strategy, create a design that supports your show activities and goals, establish a budget and help you stick to it, and handle all of the logistical details of the show itself. Because a seasoned trade show consultant has managed many exhibiting programs, they can suggest best practices to save time and money and help exhibitors catch potentially disastrous problems before the show. Exhibitors that work with trade show consultants have more time to devote to other planning for the show, such as rehearsing that demo presentation or energizing the sales professionals that will be staffing your exhibit.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Although the West Coast is home to the lion’s share of computer gaming industry, the Triangle is becoming a strong East Coast rival. And last week’s first annual Triangle Game Conference at the new Marriott City Center in downtown Raleigh is proof. Exhibit Resources was pleased to be the exclusive exhibit sponsor of the conference, attended by more than 300, and provide all event signage and the furnishings for the EA Sports Career Lounge. We also enjoyed working with Epic Games and Lenovo on the exhibit spaces they set up for the event.

There are now more than 30 game development and related software companies in the Triangle, including Emergent Game Technologies of Chapel Hill, Vicious Cycle in Morrisville, and Virtual Heroes in Durham, making it the 5th largest game development community in the nation, and the top spot for game engine development.

Our installation of a floating Vikuiti screen to showcase trailers from upcoming video game releases was a big hit. Exhibit Resources has been installing more of this type of integrated AV for clients as video and interactive media become more prominently featured in exhibits and displays.

Popularity: 15% [?]