How-to Guide: Making a Trade Show Really Benefit Your Business

Last Updated on January 20, 2024 by Work In My Pajamas

Trade show exhibiting is only effective if you take the time to plan your marketing technique. If you’re an entrepreneur and you have ever handled your own marketing, you know that marketing is definitely a game of trial and error. You’ll need to do research, browse the tactics your competitors are using, plan a campaign, assess how you’re campaign is performing, and tweak your strategy based on what you find to come up with a successful mix. If you’re planning on attending an upcoming trade show, here are some valuable tips to keep in mind so that you’re booth is an investment and not an expense.

1. In This Post:

   • Define What You Want to Accomplish
   • Start With Your Planning Early
   • Make Sure You have Signage
   • Give People an Incentive

   Define What You Want to Accomplish

How are you going to know how successful your event was if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish? There could be a number of different purposes for participating in a trade show. These purposes may include:

• increasing your market share

• expanding your book-of-business

• increasing customer retention

• increasing brand awareness and recognition

• introducing new product launches

• introducing existing products to a new targeted market

2. Start With Your Planning Early

Promotional planning can’t be done last minute. Without promotional planning, there’s no way to develop a strategy for who you’re going to target and how you’ll do this. If you fail to plan, you can’t expect your exhibit to be a success. The primary goal of your planning should be to get people to come to your booth and spend time there. Design your materials, inform your clients of the event, come up with demos, decide which technologies you’ll be using, order your custom promotional items, and even design your display.

3. Make Sure You have Signage

A trade show event is one of the only promotional events where you’re directly competing with hundreds of other booths in a single location. One way that you can compete is to take time when designing your signage. Between all of the other signage, yours needs to stand out among the crowd if you want visitors. Have your signage tell your story, choose a backdrop, and give your visitors a reason to give you a chance.

4. Give People an Incentive

There are plenty of different promotional vehicles that you can use as incentives. If you have the budget, avoid using the same pens and pads of paper as others, and choose a promotional gift that people will keep for a longer time period. If your trade show audience is over the age of 21, promotional beer mugs might be appropriate and appreciated because they have a high perceived value.  Think of the audience as a whole, and choose gifts that have value to them so they keep the gifts. That way you’ll be promoting your business for as much as a year after the event without doing anything else.

Always use press effectively and take your time to network. If you can find a way to differentiate your products or even your company, you’ll be able to use the trade show as a tool to make a strong statement about your company as a whole.