How To Make Trade Show Booths Successful

Yesterday we took a look at why booth babes are a bad decision for technology companies at a trade show. So what advice would I give to a company which is considering having a booth at a trade show?

1. Consider whether you really need a booth at all? Many leading firms in the ad industry did not have booths at ad:tech, instead they would send a large number of senior employees to the conference and proactively set up many meetings for their sales and business development staff. The cost of full conference badges, a meeting room or two (either from the conference or at a nearby hotel) and perhaps a small, private party, is likely in many cases less than the cost of a trade show booth and very likely the business value is as high or likely higher. However there may be other value from a booth, PR value for example.
2. Know your message and target audience(s) cold. Everyone at your booth (whether an employee or hired for the occasion, though try to avoid that if possible) should know not just your key messages but who you are seeking to reach and for each type of person or business what you are hoping to leave them with. Have a clear message and goal for engaging with the press (perhaps further defined by the audience of a given press outlet). Know who your potential customers are. Know who you are looking for as partners. Know who else you hope to meet with and engage with over the course of the show. I think fewer than 10% (far fewer in fact) of the probably 100+ companies exhibiting at ad:tech San Francisco (or New York) presented a clear message about who they were hoping to meet while at the show. i.e. had a simple, clear answer to WHY they were exhibiting.
3. Rotate your staff through the booth frequently. Ideally no one employee should be manning the trade show booth for more than four hours at a time (and even that may be a bit much). And yes, if you are a small company this may be very hard, may in fact suggest you should think twice about exhibiting. A booth without anyone in it gets very little traffic or value for your company. A booth with one staffer who can barely stay on her or his feet isn’t much better (may be worse in fact in many cases). Working a trade show booth is exhausting, but it can also be very beneficial, in a few hours you can have more conversations with people than in weeks of meetings. And all it takes is the right key conversations to justify the cost of the booth, from a training standpoint the direct feedback from customers (if they are among the attendees), partners, clients, and the press can be invaluable. But as an attendee I can tell when someone has been working the booth for 16 hours and no longer cares. Avoid that at all costs.
4. Have great signage and displays but minimal yet thoughtful giveaways. The right balance here is tricky and is different for everyone. Personally I find glossy handouts or bulky brochures if I even take them more times than not end up recycled having never been looked at even once. Only about 1 in 100 pieces of schwag I receive do I keep and use on any regular basis, and it is the rare piece indeed that I both keep and remember or note the company from whom I got it. Typically when I do the item is very smartly linked to the company’s products (I got a flickr lens cleaning cloth I carried around with me for years for example). One exception here being high quality t-shirts which, when from brands I actually use and would endorse, I do indeed occasionally wear (brands I don’t endorse I might use as rags, for housecleaning, or donate).
5. Be smart about how you capture leads while at the show. Sure, the temptation is to scan everyone’s badge with the bribe of a beer. But better, most likely, is a more filtered cause to capture information. But wherever possible do leverage the electronic tools provided by the conference. I was frankly shocked by how rarely (almost never) someone asked to scan my badge. Ideally at good conferences scanning a badge should generate all the information you need (however badge sharing, fake information for "free" expo passes and the like do lower the utility of scanning badges).
6. Follow up almost immediately. At a multiday show you should try to even process the first day’s leads and send out some follow ups that evening. Done well you could take a lead and transform it into a meeting later that very week, instead of weeks later. A simple, short but relevent follow up email – such as "would you like to meet with our sales person at our private meeting space on …" could do wonders.

Trade shows are tricky things. At conferences which I organize I have avoided having any exhibit hall at all in most cases but my events are usually single track and focused on networking opportunities. As an entrepreneur while I anticipate needing to have select trade show booths in the future, I am also planning on putting off that day as long as possible, instead I plan on concentrating on supporting events in other ways and focusing my sales people’s time and efforts. The exception would be for a conference which was highly vetted where nearly every attendee was a real prospect and where the schedule was such that all the attendees would be spending a lot of time in the exhibit hall (a show with no competing sessions for example and with a membership or other fairly strong requirement on attendance. I could also see a trade show booth at a show geared more towards recruiting employees than on selling.

Which leaves me with the final point always keep in mind your business goals for your booth and make sure that all aspects of your presence at the show support that. And yes, there is often a temptation to have many, competing goals (recruiting, sales, business development, investor relations, press outreach etc) but often you can achieve more of your goals by presenting a clearly focused message and having a clear (but not always part of your booth design) plan for engaging with the rare other lead. For example, have a booth at ad:tech entirely focused on selling, if a potential business partner, investor, or member of the press stops by get that person’s information and set up a meeting with the appropriate person who is at the show (ideally).

But please, think long and hard before considering using booth babes.

Here’s a brief video I took showing the ad:tech expo floor:

Shannon Clark is a founding partner at Nearness Function, a new ad network for the publishers of dynamic content which will launch in a few months. He is the organizer of MeshForum – an annual conference on the study of networks and the one day MeshWalk series of walking conferences. He has been blogging for many years at Searching for the Moon where he covers technology, economics, food, and the life of an entrepreneur.