Best Booth Set Up to BOOM Your Sales from Home Shows and Trade Shows

Mark Hale ‐ August 29, 2014

Home shows, events and trade shows are a great way to market your business to a specific public. How you have your booth set up and how you work the public that come to your booth is the difference between simply marketing your business and getting sales from marketing your business.

Purpose?

What is the purpose for your participation in that home show or trade show? Is it to become better known with a specific market segment? Is it to get leads to sell your products? Or, is it to sell product at the show? It can be all three, but the answer to these questions will help you to design your booth and plan.

Getting Attention

Once your have outlined your purpose for participating, the next step is planning the booth or display. The basic principles of advertising apply to trade show displays and booths. Number one, you have to attract attention. You do not want your booth to blend in.

The design and layout of your booth should be built around your purpose. A basic rule is that a booth that looks alive, active and is bussling will attract more traffic than a booth with a table, back drop with a couple of bored looking employees sitting there talking to each other. Use an interactive display, such as a quiz or game on a computer, a contest draw, a scheduled demonstration; it doesn’t need to be fancy to draw people’s interest and get them to cluster around your trade show display rather than the others. At a gardening show, I once saw over 50 people crowding around to watch an exhibitor demonstrate how to turn compost!

Eye trail is very important, the idea is to first get noticed and then generate interest and finally pull them in. If someone is walking 50 feet away from your booth what is the first thing they see? Does the “thing” they see create interest or a yawn? Full color banners, a video display mounted on a 6-foot pole or flags and streamers all help to get noticed but the banners and displays must contain a message in the form of a benefit that would be of interest to your target public.

Traffic flow is the next thing to consider. Traffic must flow and not bottleneck.

How do you want traffic to flow to your booth?
What happens when they arrive at your booth?
What demonstrations can you do?
How can you get the public involved with your personnel and with your product?

We also offer a quick checklist for trade shows, which is a list of items and materials you will need. This list will save you time and best of all it is FREE. If you would like a copy just click here and we will send it to you.