Author: Exhibition Stands

Top Tips for Exhibition Networking

Top Tips for Exhibition Networking

Exhibitions are a great place to start networking with likeminded individuals and with people who are looking for your services. But, even the best of us can get a few networking nerves, especially when you’re in a hall full of people.

So, here are a few top tips to make you a networking pro at your next exhibition.

Business Cards

They have been around for hundreds of years, and they aren’t going anywhere, these little cards are the backbone to networking, they make the whole process worthwhile.

Make an impact with an amazing design but remember to try and tell your company’s story through this card. This card will be the face for your business when everyone goes back to their offices; you want to make them want to get in touch with you.

If you want to make the process of someone getting hold of you easier, you could use a barcode which when scanned will input your contact details.

However, if you do decide to take this approach, include a written version of contact details as well.

Possibly the most important thing to remember with business cards is to have enough of them!

Interesting Questions and Memorable Answers

Don’t get caught in the trap of asking mundane, repetitive questions with boring answers. These are going to make you forgettable.

Researching who will be at the exhibition before the event allows you to find out about what their business is and come up with relevant and interesting questions about their industry or job role.

In return, you do not want to give boring and generic answers – you want to stand out! So, it is always best that you have a few answers stored for the typical questions you receive at a networking event. Think of fun or interesting answers to these.

Body Language

Body language will get you far when it comes to networking, and even if you’re terrified, if you look relaxed everyone will think that you are.

Think confident and relaxed, emitting this kind of body language will, in turn, make your companion relax in your company as well allowing for some great networking to take place!

Remember always to smile and shake everyone’s hand when greeting and saying goodbye; it is also important to keep the appropriate amount of eye contact – think interested, not obsessed.

If you act the part, it will make the whole process easier for everyone involved and you will get into the flow of your conversation much quicker, which means more time for networking properly and building working relationships.

Follow Up!

This could potentially be the most important part of the whole networking process, and it’s the easiest to forget as well.

Developing a relationship takes more than just a 15-minute chat at an exhibition. Connect with your leads via email, social media and you could even give them a call.

Build a working relationship where you could refer clients to each other and in turn convert this individual to use your services.

It’s important to keep this relationship going past leaving the exhibition hall doors!

Ensure that Your Exhibition Results are Measurable

Ensure that Your Exhibition Results are Measurable

It’s important to create measurable actions in order to determine your success and ROI at an exhibition or event.

What you want to achieve from your next exhibition will determine what factor you want to track and how you will ensure this is measurable.

Generating Sales

An exhibition can also be an opportunity to sell to a whole new audience, however, this may only be relevant to a few businesses with physical products to sell or simple services.

But, if you are one of the lucky few businesses to be able to physically sell at an exhibition, it is a great way to track and measure the success of that show.

You can do this by tracking the number of sales you make, the profit made and then ultimately what your return on investment is for the day.

Use a similar, if not the same, system that you use day to day in your office, whether this is your tablet or a written document. Ensure you record all of this data appropriately.

Lead Generation

An exhibition is a perfect opportunity for a spot of lead generation, whether it’s for marketing purposes or even direct sales, it is always useful.

Lead Generation can take many different forms, you could collect business cards, ask visitors to fill out a survey on your tablet, or ask them to enter competitions.

This is a really simple way to measure the success of an event. Every business knows the worth of one of their customers, so you should be able to decide how much you would be willing to pay for one new prospect.

Once you know the cost you’re willing to pay for one prospect, you can then work out how many prospects you want to get from that one event. You’re then able to work out your success and importantly your ROI.

Social Media Activity

Social Media is a great tool to raise brand awareness and build connections at an exhibition, it can also provide you with a means to measure that brand awareness.

This is notably the most difficult factor to track as brand awareness has no generic metrics in order to track. However, you can track social media hashtags, mentions of your business name or any phrase of your choice. This can help determine whether there has been an increase in conjunction with the event.

Tips for Making Your Next Exhibition Stand Sustainable

Tips for Making Your Next Exhibition Stand Sustainable

Sustainability is something that is on a lot of peoples’ minds at the moment and for a good reason. It seems to be the top headline of most news outlets and a real concern to many of us.

We all want to do our bit to help the environment and make everything a little bit more sustainable. So, what can you do at your next exhibition?

Avoid Single Use

We’re used to hearing about single-use plastics, but we’re actually talking about exhibition stands. Single-use stands are not only an expensive way of doing exhibitions, but they’re also not great for the environment.

They may seem useful but investing in a stand which is made to last is a much better investment in the long run. In addition to this, invest in some metal fasteners for your banners to avoid using copious amounts of cable ties at every event.

When designing your stand, think about the information which will be timeless and something modular which can be customised depending on your exhibition space.

Not only will it cut down on your plastic and material waste every show but once you have made the investment, your costs will plummet for every exhibition.

Paperless is Best

Nowadays there are so many great alternatives to using paper for marketing. You no longer need to print hundreds of leaflets and brochures to give out – in fact, most of these get thrown away anyway, so this isn’t a cost-efficient way to market your business.

Stationery is a great alternative to paper leaflets and is far less likely to be thrown away compared to a piece of paper. Print your branding and contact details on pens, pencils or coasters.

Use digital marketing strategies to follow up on any exhibition leads, and you can even use tablets or laptops to collect visitor information. This will make following up on the expo quicker, easier and much more effective.

Cutting out paper from your exhibition day prep will reduce your costs on production, transport and waste as well as the environmental impacts which come alongside this.

Think About Your Gifts

You by no means have to give out gifts or ‘freebies’ when you’re exhibiting at a show, but some stalls do like to give branded gifts to help visitors remember their conversation.

If you do want to give these gifts, avoid plastics and paper gifts and sway more for the bamboo or hemp-based gifts, for example, pencils, rulers or wooden coasters.

Not only will this help them to remember conversations that they have had with your team, but it will also help to reinforce your sustainable values as a business. Sharing the message of sustainability is a selling point for many customers.

Reusable water bottles and coffee cups are extremely popular at the moment, and there has been a huge push to increase the number of people using these reusable products. These are really useful products, and the people will use them every day.

Setting Objectives for Exhibition Success

Setting Objectives for Exhibition Success

Setting objectives before your exhibition will benefit your business and your stand hugely on the road to exhibition success.

What is an Objective for Exhibitions?

Your objectives could be related to sales, lead generation, building brand awareness or networking. These categories will allow you to define what you want to achieve and therefore what your objective should be.

Here are some good and commonly used examples of exhibition objectives:

  • The number of leads which you want to collect.
  • The number of people you want to talk to in order to increase brand awareness.
  • The number of completed surveys.

These are just a few of the topics on which you could base your objective around.

It’s important to make sure all of your objectives are based around the SMART target theory; this means that your objective must be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely.

How to Decide Which Objectives to Set

Ultimately, your exhibition objective should reflect and reinforce your businesses marketing goals and plan.

An easy way to decide which objectives to set is to ask yourself a few questions. The main one being, what do you want to get out of this event? There will be a reason for you to be exhibiting so use this to work out your objective.

Another way you can determine your objective is to write down all of the goals you have for this event. Goals can be smaller or be broader than an objective, for example: sell your product, collect business cards or attend a networking event.

Once you have all of these goals written down, hopefully, there will be a pattern of what you want to achieve and the relation they have to each other. Your goals help you to achieve your objective, so use these to determine your main objective.  

What are the Benefits?

The main benefit of setting objectives is that you and your team have something to aim for on the day of the show. This is proven to produce better results than if you go to an exhibition with no objective.

Having something to aim for that can be measured will motivate your team and mean that you will have something to measure your success against.

Not only this but you will be able to determine your ROI of the exhibition a lot easier than you would without goals and objectives, this is important to determine whether that event is worth you taking part in again.

Tips for Planning for Your Next Exhibition

Tips for Planning for Your Next Exhibition

Planning for an exhibition is so important for the success of your day, it can really benefit your experience. However, a lot of people don’t know where to start when it comes to planning for an exhibition. This is why we have compiled a few of the things you need to be thinking about before your next show.

Stand Location

As soon as you know which exhibitions you will be attending it is a good idea to try and book your stand space. This can be the make or break for any exhibition stand. It doesn’t matter if you have the best exhibition stand in the world – if nobody is walking past you will not be attracting the attention that you want.

Most exhibition venues will allow you to reserve your space as soon as you book as an exhibitor, but this will need to be done well in advance in order to reserve the best spot. You will need to reserve your spot at least six months in advance to get one of the prime, high traffic spots.

Being in the middle of the room is not always a good thing, people tend to congregate here meaning there will be a lot of distraction which will impact your stand. Try picking the spots near coffee and food places or toilets, people will always be heading to these places throughout the day, and you will have a chance to catch them on their way in or out.

WiFi

It is a good idea to check whether your venue has wifi before you go even if you weren’t planning on using it. If there is wifi you may want to take advantage of this feature by using online videos or features, however, you do need to be prepared in case the connection is extremely slow due to everyone using it.

One of the main reasons you will need wifi is for social media updates throughout the day – many people forget about this. You will want to be posting on all social channels throughout the day, so if the venue has no wifi, you will need to ensure that you have some sort of data connection on a phone or similar device.

If there is no obvious sign as to whether there is wifi, get in touch with the event organiser on social media or email. They will be able to tell you.

On Your Stand

You need to know exactly what will be on your stand at the event. Will you be running competitions, have branded goods, need a computer for a presentation? Knowing all of this well in advance will keep the stress levels low closer to the time.

If you are running a competition, you will need to plan the prizes and how it will work before you get to the venue. Similarly, you will need to order any branded goods that you do not already have, for example, another batch of business cards or branded pens.

A presentation or a slideshow of images is sometimes a nice idea to catch people’s attention or for you to use in your conversation for examples. This will mean creating a presentation and ensuring that you have a working laptop for your stand on the day.

Transport and Accommodation

This is the first step of attending an exhibition but is usually the last thing that you think about. If you are taking a team with you, you need to ensure that everyone can get to the venue whether that is all together or separately. Next, you need to ensure that you can get your stand there, this may mean renting a larger car to fit your team and stand in.

Some of the larger exhibitions run over multiple days – if this is the case you will probably need to book accommodation for you and your team. Be quick when booking your accommodation because all the other exhibitors will have the same idea.

These are just a few things to think about before you attend your next show. Planning should start months in advance for each show in order to be completely prepared. If you want some help with planning your next exhibition, get in touch to talk about our exhibition management services.