Every single year, thousands of trade shows and exhibitions take place in the U.S., allowing businesses, inventors, entrepreneurs, and startups to showcase their products or services to potential investors, partners, and consumers. It’s a great way to launch a new product or service (or a franchise) into international success. It all starts with an educational and interactive display that gets the exhibit hall attendees excited.
However, there is a lot that goes into trade show etiquette, which is why you want to ensure the next time you show up to an exhibit hall, you won’t make these mistakes.
Here are the top 5 trade show blunders to seriously avoid:
1) Lack of Sufficient Staff
Nothing is more unprofessional to conference attendees than your exhibit booth not having sufficient staff present. People have questions they want to ask, information they want to know, and demonstrations they want to see. If you send one person to represent your business and 2 or more people want to learn about it, the remaining bystanders are going to end up walking away and passing up your business. Remember: they want intimate, one-on-one attention.
2) Last-Second Preparedness
A lot goes into the coordination and presentation of a trade show exhibition, which is why it is not something you will want to put off until the 11th hour. From the banners and pop-up displays, to the digital tools and handouts, if you wait until the last second, you’re going to end up paying thousands in rush-order fees. It’s just not worth it!
3) Overwhelming Displays
People are inundated with information from the moment they wake up — they don’t want to show up to your exhibit booth and feel overwhelmed by the displays. If there is text everywhere, plastered all over every piece of content, where are they to focus their attention? What is the ultimate point of the product? Keep it on-point, on-message, and digestible for the average person.
4) Lack of Passion from Temp / For-Hire Staff
More businesses are considering outsourcing the representation of their trade show to a staffing company. However, one of the worst things you can do is have individuals with no industry experience or passion representing your product. Only you and your team can do that, and, yes — the people at these trade shows can spot passion (or lack-there-of).
5) Repeat Materials
Many trade show attendees attend a given trade show multiple years in a row. They will start to notice if you recycle your materials; not to mention, the styles and designs will begin to appear aged. You don’t want to come off as cheap, which is why it’s worth sprucing content up for each new trade show.
ExhibitDay: Trade Show Management
We know that preparing for a trade show, measuring its effectiveness, and organizing the whole event can be stressful. ExhibitDay provides the free tools you need to track and manage all of your exhibits, and focus on results.