The Exhibitor's Resource – Trade Show Marketing Blog

When experienced trade show coordinators hear the words “Custom Trade Show Display,” they may think of the heavy wood construction of traditional trade show display designs. Similarly, when they hear the phrase “Portable Display” they no doubt think of the convenient, but generic looking curved pop-up trade show display that has become a staple on the show floor. Although each of those still has its place in the broad trade show marketing world, there are exciting new alternatives that are combining the benefits of each type of display into new options for exhibitors.

Case in point: the Custom Portable trade show display. “But wait,” you may say “how can a display be custom AND portable?” Great question. It starts with the foundation – a new innovation from Nomadic Displays. The foundation platform is what elevates a basic pop-up display into a custom solution and supports the shelving, monitor mounts, demo stations and other accessories that give exhibitors the custom functionality they need. Custom portable trade show displays are easy to reconfigure from show to show and allow for a custom-tailored style depending on the audience and the floor space. They pack down small, avoiding the need to ship in crates, and require no tools or a simple allen key for setup. They provide the same wonderful graphic impact of pop-up back walls plus the scalability of a custom modular hybrid display.

Check out what you can do with a portable display, customized by Exhibit Resources:

Popularity: 25% [?]

Exhibit Resources hosted another ICA (Independent Communicator’s Alliance) meeting Wednesday night at our showroom in Raleigh. And this time, in addition to providing the venue, we also offered the insight by presenting our talk “The Value of Face-To-Face Marketing.”

The trend in recent years has been for marketers with tight budgets to allocate their limited dollars to customer-facing and lead-generating efforts, including trade show and event marketing. At Wednesdays talk, I provided an overview of what it takes to create successful trade show displays and face-to-face marketing programs. I discussed how exhibiting benefits the broader marketing effort, how exhibitors can realize the greatest return on their event marketing investment, and I gave a sneak peek at emerging trade show display design trends.

Highlights from the talk were mentioned in a press release written about the talk by ICA member Cindy Turner.

Popularity: 8% [?]

As a trade show display designer, and now as a trade show marketing consultant, I have been an advocate of having an initial meeting with a client to learn their specific marketing objectives, understand their unique place in their market, and establish the budget, time line and other factors that affect a new trade show display, before the design process is started.

But there is another approach: giving exhibitors the resources to develop trade show display ideas along with their agency. One of the most popular and effective resources is a gallery of work that the exhibit design agency has done for other clients that the new exhibitor can browse through in order stimulate creativity. Not only can a trade show display portfolio provide ideas to discuss, it can also help instill trust in the exhibitor that the exhibit house has the experience to pull off the project.

Another way to generate trade show display ideas and establish the overall direction of the design is for an exhibitor to flip through a set of images that represent different – often contrasting – design styles, and identify the look and feel that is most congruent with their brand, their corporate aesthetic, and their message. This type of process can ensure that both the exhibitor and their exhibit design firm understand what subjective words, such as “high-tech” or “established,” look like when translated into a trade show display design.

An additional resource is the case study, which can help fill in the functional or engineering details behind the visual impact of the trade show display. An explanation of why or how a designer’s ideas met an exhibitor’s marketing goals or solved a shipping logistics problem can trigger new ideas and ways of thinking about the trade show display design process.

Popularity: 25% [?]