Heading To A Trade Show? Want A Ride To Your Hotel?!

All convention display exhibitors know the importance of making a plan to attract potential customers to their booth. After all, that is the sole purpose of attending the trade show - finding new leads that may be nurtured into becoming good customers.

Having an attractive booth assists a lot with that goal, and our business (www.American-Image.com) focuses on helping our customers by providing fantastic trade show booth designs - we help produce displays that catch the potential customers eye and help attract them to the booth. This is an important component of the plan, but there are other key pieces in a great strategy for maximizing your investment return from exhibiting at a exhibition.

Savvy exhibitors start their planning well before the show, analyzing potential and known attendees, attempting to schedule visits with these leads, and coming up with ways to ensure the visits are productive.

A current write-up in Exhibitor Magazine (www.ExhibitorOnline.com) entitled All-Star Awards highlighted some very clever ways that exhibitors have used lately to attract clients and ensure they have high quality time with them.

The write-up highlighted one exhibitor that, realizing the convention center and nearby hotels were 30 - 50 minutes from the airport, offered to provide totally free rides from the airport to the hotels of particular targeted leads - ensuring a happy client and some 30 minutes to chat with them! This same exhibitor provided a cell phone charging station in their booth space throughout the trade show, alongside a small bar providing imported beers.

The message is simple - plan ahead to be able to maximize the quantity of leads visiting your booth, find a way to achieve some quality time with them during the show visit, and then make sure to follow up with each and every qualified lead.

There are lots of ways to approach this task, at each step of the way. Pre-show advertising can help encourage show attendees to visit, as can specific email advertising to targeted prospects. If you have a new product or service, or an eco-friendly one, many shows highlight these and provide free advertising - use it!

Similarly, maximize the appearance and effectiveness of your booth design. The trade show display needs to attract attention, and then it needs to help facilitate your show goals; if your goal is to show a product, have a counter or showcase in the booth to do that. If you need 5 minutes for an elevator speech with qualified prospects, then have an entry spot in front of the display stand to qualify them, and a quieter area where salespeople can speak to the filtered best leads without interruption.

And make absolutely sure to document and follow up with all trade show leads! This is the simplest part of the task, but after the show is over, many business people find themselves so focused on catching up with the tasks and events that they missed during the show that the new leads fade away and are left to wither in the dust, a horrible result after the significant investment of time and cost that was made to attend the trade show.

To read the entire article, you can go to the February 2011 Exhibitor Magazine (printed or online) to review the rest of the award winning approaches.