Trade Shows Part 4: Good Booth is Good Planning, Not Good Luck

It’s not enough to put good people who know what they are doing at your booth. The booth itself requires a lot of thought and planning if you’re going to make the best use of their time.

One of the mistakes a lot of companies make is trying to say too many things with their booth, particularly small booths. We’ve all seen those ten-foot pop-up jobs absolutely crammed with images, words, flashy bits and screens. I think they’re scary, personally. I don’t know where to look, I haven’t got the slightest idea what they sell and I’m a little terrified to ask. This is the PT Barnum Approach and it says “We can’t be bothered to think about our audience or this event so we’ll put everything out there and see what sticks.”

At the other end of the spectrum we have the Pathetic Mininmalist School. This is a basically empty spot with a small show-provided sign stuck to the pipe and drape, a six-foot table with a cloth and a bowl of stale candy. Usually the sales people are too embarrassed to sit there. This says: “We just booked this show last week and the marketing department refused to help us with it.”

Landing somewhere in the middle is really not that difficult; you need only spend an hour or two discussing it and a few weeks pulling it together. Here are seven planning elements for giving good booth.

1. Have a theme:
That makes it easier to plan and stops sales from putting random bits of tinsel in your booth. If you can tie the theme to your current campaign or product focus, that’s cool. People will think you are a marketing machine. If not, it’s still helpful because it tells the story for you. One of the best theme executions I have seen was years ago at a computer show, probably Comdex or Internet World, and it was pulled off brilliantly by a large distribution company. Distributors do a lot of business at these shows, but since they are basically agnostic box-movers, it’s difficult for them to do anything visually arresting. So this company used Planet Hollywood as its theme. It did up an enormous booth to look like one of the famed bars and it hired local acting students to dress up as the celebrity look-alikes, work the booth and roam the show floor. It was brilliant, memorable and drew people to the booth just to have their photos taken. It also tied beautifully with the company’s message about international expansion and breadth of inventory.

If you don’t have six figures to throw at the effort, here’s one I used on a shoe string a few years ago at a show for car dealers. We had a 10×20 spot, so only slightly bigger than minimum, and we were waaaaay back in the cheap seats in terms of location. So we did a basketball theme called Drive the Lane (the company sold CRM tools to car dealers). We put fake hardwood on the floor (over a generous underpad), hired a former NBA star turned car dealer to hang about the booth and sign autographs, and we rented one of those basketball throwing games from an arcade company.  We themed our handouts around Driving the Lane and did selective room drops to our top customers with NBA merchandise. We did door-hangers for all attendees inviting them to the booth to meet our star. We also had a draw for a prize pack of autographed basketball stuff to encourage attendees to let us scan their badges. Total cost was maybe $5,000 more than we would have spent on just the counters, screens and carpet. We had about 70% of all attendees scan their badges.

2. Get the Best Spot You Can:
The earlier you book, the better your choice of spots. Assuming you’re doing a smaller booth, have to make sure you stay off the walls or even off the aisles near the walls. In a big event, many attendees simply never get there so your traffic will suck. I like to find a small spot near a big draw, ideally at an intersection of aisles so I have two frontages. If you are a smaller player or a newer one in a market, see if you can get close to some of the big guys and benefit from their booth traffic. If you can make friends with the show organizers and let them know you’re interested in moving up should a spot become available, you might find you get a call when another vendor drops out.

3. Go Bigger (but just a little):
Sometimes jumping from a 10×10 space to a 10×20 or a 20×20 gets you a much, much better spot on the floor. And it needn’t cost a huge amount more to set up your booth. Just rent some furniture and set up a little meeting area to fill the space. Or bring two 10×10 popup frames and use them together. If you theme it well, nobody will notice.

4. Hire an Exhibit Company:
It seems like a gobsmacking amount of money to hire an exhibit company to put up and take down your display, and it is. But if you are doing anything larger than a 10×10, I think it’s money well spent. They ship your stuff, set it up, argue with the show people about power, carpet, Internet access, sign height and all that. Good ones will even clean the booth each night. They stay up all night, not you, waiting for the crates to be delivered by the drayage company. They figure out what to do if something is broken in transit. And, when it’s all done, they tear it down and ship it back. The good ones will also help you design a custom booth and give you lots of tricks to save money.

5. Pay extra for underpad:
The standard underpad at a show is the thickness of a cracker and provides about as much support. For just a few dollars per foot extra, you can ask for the good stuff, the thick stuff, the stuff that makes tired feet very, very grateful. Your sales people will thank you, and you may just find your afternoon booth traffic increases as people linger on your lovely carpet. Make sure you sell them something.

6. Accept that the Internet will break:
Or at least your corner of it. Most exhibit halls were built in the middle of the last century with more attention to nuclear blast-proofing than to anything else. Which means that most of them are a nightmare for any kind of wireless access and that pulling cable to wire up an event is, itself, an event. Many of them have upgraded and offer wifi or highspeed wired access, but even that is flaky at best and seldom accommodates the peak traffic a show can generate. So my advice is figure out how to do it all offline at the booth. Save your demos as little Flash or .wmv files, have a local copy of your application and demo files, and basically don’t count on having a decent connection ever.

7. Bring a separate computer for demos:
This still amazes me. Every single show I attend has a problem with the demo. It’s on Frank’s machine and Frank:
a)left it at home, forgetting he would need it;
b)broke it or is in the process of breaking it; or,
c) lacks some critical driver/cable/switch to make it work.

Go buy a freaking laptop and stick it in a bag and use it for your demos.

BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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