For many businesses trade shows represent the greatest opportunities of the year to make impressions, collect prospects, and close sales. This is especially true for smaller companies and startups that lack big marketing budgets and need exposure and publicity.
With so much on the line, it is crucial that small companies hit the ground running and have a clear understanding of how to best transmit their organization’s identity and message in the trade show environment, generate tangible results, and stay within their budget. And yet every year countless custom trade show booths are put together on the fly, filled with headlines and banners and logos that don’t create a unifying theme or successfully convey the company’s message to the passing crowds.
Common problems include:
Clutter
Trade show floors are overwhelming environments, and packing information like logos, pictures, and text onto every square inch of the booth contributes to this information overload, limiting customer engagement and preventing the formations of lasting impressions.
When it comes to good booth design, less should be more, giving prospects’ eyes clean focal points to transmit a simpler message and identity. When it comes to banners, backdrops, TVs, boards, and the rest, sometimes less serves as more.
Unnecessary Giveaways
Giveaways can be a powerful draw for prospects and one that often contributes to an arms race between different exhibitors as they compete to provide the best swag. However, this expense is often completely unjustified and leaves small exhibitors deeper in the hole than they would be otherwise.
Instead, exhibitors should stick to giveaways that are conditional on involvement (collecting business cards, emails, or Facebook likes), or which have a direct thematic connection to their company’s service or identity.
Forgetting Day to Day Maintenance
Before the first morning of the trade show each booth is clean, organized, and welcoming. By the second or third day, however, things have been thoroughly smudged, bent, scattered, littered, and trampled. It is up to presenters to resist this entropy and dedicate time every day to picking up and preparing the booth for new first-time impressions.
Over/Under Designing the Booth
Designing a booth that has the size and features a company needs to be successful (and none that they don’t) requires experience, knowledge, and background. Build too large, and budgets suffer. Build too small and crowding interferes with interaction. If you or your organization would like to develop a rightly sized custom trade show booth or event display, contact the expert designers here at ELDS, Inc. and let our e
Common Small Business Trade Show Booth Mistakes
