While precise costs vary based on the size of your exhibit space, industry, travel expenses, and other factors, the price of a single tradeshow can easily climb well beyond $10,000.
For that kind of money, you’d better be doing everything you can to maximize your investment.
The key to tradeshow success is your booth space, which will generally be your largest expense. So, to ensure you maximize your tradeshow budget, here are 5 best practices that’ll fill your booth with potential customers.
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Define an Objective
When it comes time for a tradeshow, you should have a clearly defined objective. For example, if your company is brand new and needs to establish itself in the industry, your main focus might be building awareness rather than making sales.
Either way, that objective needs to be clearly defined because it will impact the decisions you make about the layout, location, and design of your booth.
Ask yourself: Do you want to attract prospects to your booth? Do you just want to be seen and remembered? Or are sales the first priority?
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Align Booth Layout, Location and Design with Objectives
As you design your booth and choose its location and layout, you have many important decisions to make. The sheer number of these choices can be overwhelming, especially if you haven’t done many tradeshows, and there’s not always a clear, correct answer.
In a subtle but powerful way, though, decisions about the booth’s layout, location, and design will ultimately affect the behavior of visitors. To affect that behavior in a way that supports your goals, it’s critical to keep the objective in mind during each one of these decisions.
For example, if your goal is to maximize the number of interactions your salespeople have with prospects, you might consider a layout and design that allows for your salespeople to be positioned upfront at the booth rather than behind a table.
Similarly, screens with a video playing can help draw in more visitors. But, if you’d like to use this tactic, you need a layout and location that can accommodate the design elements you choose.
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Don’t Forget About Your Booth’s Flooring
If you’ve been to a few tradeshows you’ve probably never been blown away by their flooring. Often it’s not much more than a worn-out carpet. But with the variety of flooring options you can use in your booth, there’s no reason that shabby carpet should be a part of your display.
Instead, use vinyl flooring or high-quality floor mats as flooring for the booth. That way, you create your own, well-defined space that is separate and apart from the rest of the tradeshow floor which allows visitors to the booth to be more engrossed in the experience of your brand.
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Choose Colors Wisely
Believe it or not, color has a huge impact on how customers interact with products and salespeople. In fact, one study found that between 62 and 90 percent of a customer’s assessment of a person or product is based on colors.
For this reason, you’ll want to be very careful about choosing colors that catch the eye and strike the right mood. However, these vibrant colors should also align with your existing brand assets.
Otherwise, even though you may attract visitors to your booth, it’ll be hard for them to remember the brand if your booth’s colors bear no similarity to any of your other marketing assets like a brochure or website.
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Use Quality Materials and Construction
As we mentioned, the key to filling your booth with customers is all in the details. One of the most critical of those details is the quality of your booth’s materials and construction. Poor quality and materials make your booth—and your brand—look cheap and unappealing.
One way to ensure quality materials and construction is to work with a reputable partner with experience creating high-quality tradeshow graphics and signage. The marginal, additional cost of using quality materials is far less than the cost of the damage to your brand that a lackluster booth will cause.
Plus, quality materials help ensure that your booth’s graphics, textures, and colors look exactly the way they should.
Want to Learn More?
If you’d like to drill further down into best practices that’ll fill your tradeshow booth with potential customers, read this post about choosing your booth and its layout.
Or, if you need hands-on help from a reputable, one-stop-shop for all types of exhibit and display solutions, check out Riot’s tradeshow products and services.
