Is Your Business Finding Trade Shows Unproductive?
All businesses need to promote themselves in order to find new customers to increase their order books and make better profits for their owners or shareholders. Advertising and good sales and marketing techniques are the tools used to both attract new customers and to hold on to them.
Trade Shows
Taking a booth at a suitable trade show should be a good way to attract more customers to your business. However, it is not quite as simple as accepting the organizers invitation and paying the appearance fees. This simply places you within the trade show area; it does not even guarantee that a single visitor will stop by your exhibition booth.
Maximizing Your Appearance At A Trade Show
Appearing at almost any of the numerous trade shows available for your type of business is going to be expensive. Expenses will go far beyond the organizers basic fees. First, there is the cost of making your basic shell booth attractive and relevant to your companys specialities. This is followed by the cost of the trade show displays that you will place within your booth. Probably you will have some entertaining and refreshment costs for your visitors; plus any freebies and give-aways that you place on your booth. Finally there are the manning costs (people away from their normal jobs; maybe with travel and overnight stay costs added in). This will all add up to a tidy sum.
To have a reasonable chance of getting a return on all this investment you not only have to strive to get as many visitors onto your stand as possible you also have to sift the visitors into those who could become your new customers and those who are little more than time wasters. Assuming that you have made a wise decision over the choice of which show at which location is going to be the best for your business, you then have to think about the details.
Remember that you have a twofold aim to achieve:-
1. to attract the maximum traffic to your booth
2. to ensure that they are the right sort of people
The attractiveness of both your booth and trade show displays is important if you are to achieve these aims and make your appearance at the show a productive one. Doing this for yourself requires expertise that your business might not be able to employ on a full time basis and many company executives find it preferable to subcontract the design of their trade show displays to companies that specialize in this type of work.
Trade Shows
Taking a booth at a suitable trade show should be a good way to attract more customers to your business. However, it is not quite as simple as accepting the organizers invitation and paying the appearance fees. This simply places you within the trade show area; it does not even guarantee that a single visitor will stop by your exhibition booth.
Maximizing Your Appearance At A Trade Show
Appearing at almost any of the numerous trade shows available for your type of business is going to be expensive. Expenses will go far beyond the organizers basic fees. First, there is the cost of making your basic shell booth attractive and relevant to your companys specialities. This is followed by the cost of the trade show displays that you will place within your booth. Probably you will have some entertaining and refreshment costs for your visitors; plus any freebies and give-aways that you place on your booth. Finally there are the manning costs (people away from their normal jobs; maybe with travel and overnight stay costs added in). This will all add up to a tidy sum.
To have a reasonable chance of getting a return on all this investment you not only have to strive to get as many visitors onto your stand as possible you also have to sift the visitors into those who could become your new customers and those who are little more than time wasters. Assuming that you have made a wise decision over the choice of which show at which location is going to be the best for your business, you then have to think about the details.
Remember that you have a twofold aim to achieve:-
1. to attract the maximum traffic to your booth
2. to ensure that they are the right sort of people
The attractiveness of both your booth and trade show displays is important if you are to achieve these aims and make your appearance at the show a productive one. Doing this for yourself requires expertise that your business might not be able to employ on a full time basis and many company executives find it preferable to subcontract the design of their trade show displays to companies that specialize in this type of work.
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