Trade Show Booth Design Strategies

May 17

Exhibit Booth Design Strategies

This is the initial post on creating winning exhibit design strategies that will be ongoing and added to on a continuing basis and will even embrace how phygital marketing is influencing Trade Show Booth Design. This particular blog post is designed to share ideas on how to create a better trade show booth or exhibit display that will help any organization increase its trade show success rates and build new customer relationships in what has become a necessary sales channel for many organizations.

Have A Trade Show Booth Target

When designing a new trade show booth or exhibit, everyone involved must be on the same page in terms of desired goals in order to achieve targets. Having our design team working directly with your sales and marketing teams that sets objectives for the trade show or exhibit as well and your management team responsible for running the exhibit ensures that intent will be translated into design. When our team works with your team, ideas flow, goals are understood and success results.

Bring Some WOW Using Custom Booth Design

The impact of image. Visual impact creates a first impression from a distance, often a couple hundred feet or more before you even get to say hello at a trade show. By the time you do greet your potential customer, decisions and judgments about your organization have already been made by the design, quality, and presentation of your exhibit. We can ensure it has some wow factor and that it reflects well on you and your brand so that your staff start off one step ahead when you say your first hello.

Make Your Trade Show Exhibit Welcoming

We know how to make sure your custom booth design is welcoming and inviting. People should know why they are walking into your exhibit immediately. It is imperative that guests never wondering why they are there; this is especially important for start up organizations. Attracting targeted visitors that want to know about the products and services your organization supplies is an important goal. This demands that a key design feature be that the product or service is clear from the start. When using technology to assist in welcoming guests, the design of the trade booth should integrate visual media organically, not be tacked on after initial design. Read how to prepare for a Trade Show.

Make Complexity Simple

Almost every product or service sold today is many times more complex that it was even 10 years ago because most of today’s products and services have become more capable and more integrated while some didn’t even exist a decade or two ago. Trying to explain complex concepts in an exhibit display or trade show booth design can be a difficult proposition. However, making complexity simple is a design achievement that our exceptional design teams can accomplish.

Look no further than Apple as an example. Has anyone else done a better design job at taking a very complex and feature rich product like a cell phone and simplified the user interface in a manner that lets anyone use it effectively? Probably not. That process of making complexity simple is a design skill we have introduced in exhibit displays that is extremely successful for our customers.

Keep Your Exhibition Design True To Brand

Having your brand team work closely with out design team on the big details as well as the small details ensures that the brand is respected and leveraged. Our skills and resources ensure that everything related to brand integrity is reproduced accurately including colours, fonts, audio, visual, even touch and scent.

Be Remembered

People remember exceptional design. People also remember the feeling they had when they were in your exhibit booth. If they were informed and comfortable, they will remember that good experience. If they were confused or did not feel they found what they were looking for they will remember that feeling as well and attach it to your brand. One way or the other you will be remembered, put your best foot forward by utilizing our design teams knowledge of User Experience and foot traffic into your next trade show booth.

Updated with more info May 24th 2019

Approach Duties At The Exhibit Booth With Gusto

Ensure that your entire team are familiar with all products and services and are excited to be there. If they understand the dollar volume and success that this sales channel brings to organization, they may step up their game. The difference in defeat or victory is often attitude fill your trade show booth with winners.

Add To Your Network

The reason you invested in an exhibit booth or trade show booth and the purpose of attending a trade show, fair or exhibition is to show off your products and services. This can be newly launched products, existing products, improved products or even future products and the direction your organization is pursuing. The one thing this activity demands is that you meet people. Many of the people you meet will be new to your staff, this is the ultimate opportunity to build your contact database with people that are either in your industry or use your products.

Meet new people and adding them to your network increases one of your sales and marketing assets exponentially because of the sheer numbers in a compacted time frame. There is no other place that you can meet so many potential customers, competitors and suppliers in the industry and product area that you operate within in such a short time. This new network can add to an existing client base, provide opportunities to evaluate new suppliers, and even be an effective knowledge base for future recruitment projects. Meet & greet has never been a more appropriate thing to do. Make sure all your trade show staff are information collectors and that the exhibit booth design encores the correct traffic flow to make that happen.

Plan Your Time Away From The Trade Show Booth

Weeks before the day you find yourselves manning your trade show booth, you should be planning your time and events with target meetings that you want to take. You must research which existing customers will be there, which new potential customers, which suppliers, and which competitors. Book meetings with those individuals you want to meet well in advance of the show to ensure that 1) competitors have less time to hit on your existing customers and new targeted customers already have guaranteed meetings and 2) you will not waste time chasing down meetings. The time in the trade both should be dedicated to time in the booth meeting and greeting new contacts, not worrying about whether you can gain a meeting with someone you should have contacted 3 weeks prior. Make sure you have “off-floor” space booked for quite or confidential meetings where you can control the environment such as a meeting room or hotel suite.

Make Sure Visitors Leave Your Exhibit Booth With Something

Bring items to give away that ensures potential clients remember your organization and that it relates in some way to your organization and of course has your brand on it. Sporting show often have golf balls for instance. Massive organizations like Google used to give out their latest phones for free at developer conferences to encourage new app development and might have worked, today Google’s Android cell phones dominate the cell phone world with an 88% market share and have more apps than any other platform at 2.1 million apps vs Apple’s 1.8 million iOS apps.

Be creative, choose something they’ll keep but that won’t cost an arm and a leg.

Phygital Marketing – Embrace New Technologies

What is phygital marketing? The merging of digital and physical worlds has forced together marketing tools and partnerships that never existed before when it comes to trades shows. Leading technology companies such as apple and google have merged these resources for us and companies like Amazon and Uber have implemented them into business practice changes that affect everything form ordering socks to meeting arrangements and what and where and with who we eat.

How many of your customs arrived at your trade show booth via Uber? How many made plans to meet at your booth using WhatsApp? How are you communicating with them? At your booth you have the advantage of an in-person meeting and the ability to show off your product or services in a very tactile manner. But did you use all the digital marketing tools to get them there? Did you send them map directions to their mobile device, confirm with an app such as WhatsApp, send them an Uber if required.

Communicating with each client the way they themselves prefer to communicate in is a smart choice. Utilize voice calls with those who prefer that communication mode and social and digital apps for those who see that as their most efficient tool.

As you can see a Phygital strategy can help your business. Digital experiences that integrate seamlessly with the physical world are sought after from consumers at every level. The integration of digital and physical exists because your customer operate in both a physical and digital world.

Your Trade Show Booth Should Incorporate Phygital Marketing Tools

Your trades show booth is the main tools relied upon by your staff to attract, invite and influence your potential trade show customers. Everyone knows its design must be welcoming, appealing and reflective of your brand. But have you asked yourself if it is utilizing your Phygital strategies to best effect? Can visitors download brochures, contact information direct to their phones via clearly marked tap points? Or make appointments to book a meeting? Can they tap to request immediate assistance if all the staff are currently in conversations and get queued up without having to appear rude? You will have these features if you are truly interested in engaging with them while you have them right there in your trade show booth and avoid having them wander off to another exhibit. Here is some more insight on this merging of technology and the customer experience .

To learn more about how we can help you increase sales and develop customers at any trade show or exhibit in the world call: 905-470-0205 or contact us today.

Read more about all our Exhibit & Trade Show Services and view some examples of our work for world-class international brands.

This article on winning trade show booth design strategies will be continued and updated.

Raymond Lai