Many first-time exhibitors assume that exhibiting at a trade fair is a simple enough deal. You just show up a day before with some materials on hand, cobble together a small pavilion, and during the expo, give out brochures to potential customers passing by! It couldn’t be simpler, right? Except… Not a single word of that is true. In reality, if you go in with a stand that’s anything short of impressive and without a solid plan of what you’ll do there, you might as well shred all that money right away and not waste your time attending the fair. And while you can hire people to build you a great, professional-looking booth, the business you’ll be doing at it is something that you’ll have to figure out by yourself… Or at least almost by yourself. We’re here to offer you a few valuable pieces of advice on how to make the most out of your exhibit!

Decide the Exact Purpose of Your Attendance

So why exactly are you attending this particular trade fair? Hopefully, a thought instantly popped into your mind, such as “Obviously it’s to get some deals with clients and sell products”, or perhaps “It’s clearly to increase our public presence and brand recognition” Great! The first step is to determine exactly what you want to get out of your attendance. Exhibiting is very expensive, and you need to make every attempt to achieve your goals. Write them down on a whiteboard during the planning stages and ask yourself: “Does this bring us closer to our purpose?” whenever a new suggestion is made.

Create and Update an Expo Planner

Luckily, there’s plenty of programmes that will help you create a schedule table. Chances are you have some installed on your computer already. Use them to create an expo planner and then update it regularly. It’s a good idea to build it on an online platform or place it in a shared folder on your office server so that everyone involved can monitor it and make changes in real-time. Fill out and update that schedule like your life depends on it – confirmed meetings, potential clients, even smoke or lunch breaks. If you’re uncertain where to start, there are several expo planner templates online, so be sure to have one! This is your war plan, and filling out as much of your schedule as possible with activities that will directly contribute to your goal is the only way you’ll achieve it.

Organise Your Travel and Stay

If you want to have a highly motivated and focused staff for the entire duration of the event, you need to ensure everybody is well-rested. That said, finding the ideal accommodation is essential. You don’t want to torture your colleagues with long car rides, several connecting flights or dull waits at the metro station. Your hotel needs to be conveniently positioned, after all, everybody will travel from and to it at least two times a day. Finding such well-located business accommodation can be a difficult and time-consuming task by itself. We advise you to hire a professional travel company that can arrange all for you. This approach is especially beneficial when you are preparing to travel in a large group, and you need to book several rooms. If the expo you are preparing to attend has a high attendance rate, finding two or three rooms at the same place can be hard. However, companies like Fair Point can help you find suits in convenient locations ensuring that even if all of your team isn’t sleeping at the same building, you will all arrive on time at the trade fair. The only thing you have to do is put the final information in the schedule, so everybody knows where they are going.

The Guests’ Directory Is the Best Assistant You Can Have

When you sign up to be an exhibitor, most trade shows will let you access a list of attendants who have already signed up – just like how guests get to browse a list of exhibitors. This is less common for events that are open to the public. However, if the fair is directed primarily at industry experts (like, for example, Medica, which is aimed exclusively at medical professionals), a guests directory is practically guaranteed. It will include names, businesses and contact information of every specialist who has already purchased a ticket. Use that knowledge to its full effect! Single out the attendants most likely to make a big purchase or cut a deal with you and personally contact them, briefly explaining your product or service, how their business will benefit from it before arranging a meeting at your booth at a particular time. For everyone else – organise a mass mail campaign to let them know of your business and invite them to browse further.

Organize Games, Giveaways and Events

This works particularly well when you’re attending an expo that’s open to the public with the purpose of just raising brand awareness and attracting clients and partners. Give the guests of the trade show a good reason to stop by your expo booth in particular – perhaps you can have a giveaway with a good prize (such as a brand-new piece of technology or a vacation), or bring in some catering and special treats. A great way to make sure the visitors keep your brochures is to use the pamphlets as an entry ticket to the giveaway. You can collect some personal info from participants and rely on it for your future campaigns. Remember to add all events to the expo planner, ensuring they don’t overlap with any meetings or other large gatherings organised by your competitors.

Ensure There Is Always Someone at Your Stand

We didn’t keep it a secret that most of your contacts at the expo will be from meetings and events you have scheduled in advance. But that doesn’t exclude the occasional walk-in, especially if you’re also collecting sign-ups for a giveaway. Leaving your stand unattended because all your employees are in private meetings is a great way to lose out on potential business and make your company appear unprofessional. Ensure there’s always someone there who has been properly trained to answer questions and close a deal or sale. Oh, and… Make sure someone isn’t constantly sitting down or looking at their phone, as a distracted and disinterested rep can be offputting to clients, especially in an environment with so much competition. If your staff is having difficulty standing for prolonged periods, consider making a rotating schedule, so everybody can be both well-rested and focused.

If your teammates feel comfortable and less stressed out, it will show in the manner in which they approach and communicate with your potential clients and partners.

Explore the Competition

You’ve prepared as much as you can, you are bringing your all to the convention, it’s all perfect, right? Except just because you did everything perfectly by your own standards, it doesn’t mean somebody else didn’t implement your idea in a much more satisfying way, had cooler brochures, or just did something crazy that you didn’t even imagine. That is actually a positive thing believe it or not. It means you can borrow their concepts and implement them in your brand next year with your own voice. So be sure to add designated times for you and your employees to browse the expo, speak with competitors and learn what they’re doing. Investigating your top rivals will surely provide you with a lot of valuable insight and cool ideas. As always, add it to the expo planner.

Of course, this is all just general advice. Like we mentioned earlier, no one can plan your exhibit except for you. Every company will have their own ideas on scheduling its time at a trade fair, and every business will have its own needs and goals to take into account. We hope we could present you with a couple of tips that you may not have considered beforehand. Now go out there and make that trade show your most successful one yet! And don’t forget your expo planner!