When exhibiting at a business expo, making sure your exhibition stand attracts the right visitors is a challenging commission, especially for exhibitor virgins who are new to trade shows and business events.
One of the first things you need to consider as an exhibitor is the look and feel of your stand. Your stand is your shop window and it needs to reflect your brand personality. It is vital to make sure you achieve your aims and objectives for the event – whether it be lead generation, marketing, local awareness or a database building exercise.
One2create, headline sponsors for the Portsmouth Business Expo 2012 organised by Hampshire-based exhibitions company, Memo Events, have managed to create the right balance when exhibiting and sponsoring at such business expos. The creative team came up with the idea to use live art illustrations on their purpose built stands to pull in the punters, attracting the audiences’ attention whilst showcasing their brand imagery, products and services.
Another thing to remember when designing your exhibition stand is to have huge ambitions and not huge budgets. You can achieve great things without ridiculous investment – as long as you are original in your planning and your stand stands out from your competitors and fellow exhibitors – you can safely say that visitors will stop and look.
And when visitors do ‘stop and look’ that is your opportunity to start conversation and forge new relationships with potential clients. There is no benefit in investing in your exhibition stand, pulling your hair out to come up with the best and initiative idea for your space, unless you fully utilise the opportunities to interact with delegates.
All exhibitors, at all events, face the same challenge in coming up with fresh ideas on how they can showcase their brand. Just remember that business events are live and it is all people – so try to use senses to draw delegates in, including sound, sight, touch, taste and smell. These will naturally create a buzz around your stand, making it a little more unique and attracting visitors like bees to honey.
