Mike Thimmesch
Mike is director of industry relations for Skyline Exhibits, designer and builder of custom modular exhibits and portable displays.
Don’t Just Stand There in Your Trade Show Booth, Do Something!
November 16, 2014
Do you want to stand out in your trade show exhibit? Then don’t just stand there, do something!
Gone are the days when you could just stand in your booth and enough people would walk in. Now, while a few will, it won’t be enough to make your trade shows profitable.
To get more people into your booth, you’ve got to do something. You need to do something that catches their eye, stops them in their tracks, and draws them in. Here are 4 suggestions:
1. Get on Your Feet and Talk to Attendees
For most booth staffers this is a big challenge. Talking to strangers as they pass by their booth is simply outside their comfort zone. So they unfortunately stay deep inside their booth, waiting for the select few attendees who walk in on their own accord. Exceed your peers by standing at the edge of your booth, and engaging people with a good opening line, such as “What are you looking for at the show?”, “Have you seen our newest product?”, or “Where are you from?” If you want more booth staffing ideas, click here.
2. Demonstrate Your Products
By demonstrating your product, you create movement that gets attention, and you intrigue prospects so that they will discover a better solution to their problems. So, demonstrate why your product is better than your competitors’ products. Make the benefits as clear as possible so that attendees walking by your booth will instantly understand how you can help them. You can start your demo before there is anyone in your booth – eventually they will stop, and if they don’t, you didn’t lose anything for your time. Demos are one of the best promotion ideas – for more, click here.
If your product is so big you can’t afford to bring it to the show, then find a way to demo the key aspect that clients will grasp and see your competitive advantage. If it is too small, then use a movie camera to project an enlarged live video image onto a big monitor near your demo. If you don’t have a physical product to demo, then find a way to communicate your message, such as a presentation – the next point:
3. Host a Presentation
Give a live presentation that makes explicit why prospects would benefit from working with you. Tell them stories about how you have solved your clients problems, how your product makes them money, lowers their expenses, and reduces risk. Put chairs for them to sit in, and ask your most extroverted booth staffers or hired crowd gatherers to help fill the seats. Just be sure to have your staffers trained and ready to convert presentation attendees into leads once the presentation ends.
4. Entertain Trade Show Attendees
If you are targeting most of the show’s attendees, then hire an entertainer to gather a crowd. It can be a magician, an artist, dancers, and musicians – anything that will cause attendees to pause and smile. Entertainers who are familiar with trade shows will work your company messages into their routine. If they are drawing a crowd, then it’s up to your booth staffers to qualify them and turn them into leads, rather than letting them watch and leave.
Creating movement in your booth is hard work (my physics teacher defined work as moving a weight through a distance, and you will be moving your body the entire show). But your company has invested a lot for every minute you are at that show. Keep moving, and make the most of it.
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