Trade exhibition preparation – are you doing it well?

Most PR is planned and sustained, but exhibition PR comes as little burst of activity. Done well, and you have a cracking event. Done poorly, and you’ll see visitors to the show stopping off at the neighbouring stands – and missing yours out almost entirely.

In the last couple of months we’ve been to Engineering Design Show and Advanced Engineering show, and have been impressed by the organisers ability to get visitors there, but astonished by the number of companies who just were not prepared to make the most of their investment. When you think about the time out of the office, the travel and accommodation, the stand space and build costs and all those ‘stress ball’ or pen giveaways, then it seems such a waste.

Does your exhibition stand suck?

Here are just some examples of poor practises that we saw:

• people looking after the stand, just sitting and working on their phones
• stands with no literature to take away
• graphics which looked great – but gave the passerby NO CLUE as to what the company did
• Giveaways without branding
• Stands with empty coffee cups on all the surfaces

And if this is what’s going on AT the show, then I am pretty sure there is not a culture of great exhibition preparation back at the office. Goodness knows what communications they put out to their customers, old and new, but my guess is – not much.

We believe great exhibition preparation starts about a year before you’ve signed the booking form… and cranks up as soon as the ink is dry on it. We’ve created an easy to use 31 step checklist, broken down into easy chunks, so you can not only get a great result on the day, but you are confident that you have done everything that you can do, to maximise your exhibition investment.

Download your FREE ultimate exhibition checklist today!