Your first trade show will likely cost more than you anticipated, and the planning process will be more time-consuming than you’ve been led to believe. The vendors that succeed are not always the ones who have the most money to spend. They are usually the ones who began preparing for the event early on and handled the details with equal importance as the promotion.
9-12 Months Out: Commit and Secure Your Space
Decide to exhibit, and register. Organizations showing for the first time almost always are given the worst spots, and it’s more of an issue than most realize. Booths near the main entrance, a keynote hall entrance, or a category anchor draws passive traffic. A corner booth at the back of the hall and you’ll have to kill and eat something just to get noticed.
That said more than 99% of small and mid-sized companies have to slum it when they first exhibit. Prime booth placement doesn’t often come available, and it does move quickly. New exhibitor losing a key booth space delivers more broken dreams every year than Powerball games.
In deciding which booth to commit to, review the show floor plan from the previous year. Notice where your direct competitors were placed, where other category leaders tend to cluster, and which aisles lead to a natural flow of foot traffic. Submitting your booth request by the early bird deadline can save some real money. Most shows provide a discount on both booth space and everything ordered through the General Service Contractor if you commit by the early bird date. Most exhibitors miss the deadline, blowing two important piles of money they’ll never see again.
6-9 Months Out: Build The Real Budget
The floor space fee is the most obvious cost to consider, but it’s often not the largest fee you’ll pay for the show when all’s said and done.
Budget an additional 20-30% for drayage, electrical, cleaning, lead retrieval, and I&D after the show. Drayage costs cover the transport of your goods from the expo hall’s loading dock to your booth space. It’s usually the biggest shock cost for first-time exhibitors and is out of the show organizer’s hands, as the General Service Contractor for each show sets their rates without competition.
Download the Exhibitor Service Manual as soon as it’s published. Every form you could need to order anything, every deadline, every early-bird-discount period is outlined in this manual. Think of it as a project management to-do list. That’s what it is.
Decide on your booth design now, not later when it’s 8 weeks out. That’s how long it takes if you order an exhibit booth, are unfamiliar with lead times for shipping and production for graphics, and don’t want to pay rush charges on anything. If you opt for graphics that aren’t part of the original exhibit booth design, and your current creative and campaigns don’t inspire you at this moment, you’re paying a premium to have your visuals in-hand (and hopefully in your booth) on show site.
3-4 Months Out: Lock In Logistics and Labor
This is typically where most first-time exhibitors start to get the cold sweats. Freight deadlines, labor scheduling, and show services orders are all converging at once.
If you’re bringing a custom structure or any kind of large display system, don’t just assume that your show team can safely and accurately install it within a few hours on show site. Read through a trade show exhibit installation guide at the beginning of the process so there’s time to make the case for professional I&D labor, line it item in the budget and hire the right crew. Setup mistakes lead to additional costs and headaches in just a few days when the show’s open, so being prepared is a must.
And finalize your lead retrieval system rental now while you’re thinking about it. They make you present because they want names. Don’t wait until you get your badge to decide how you’re going to keep track of everyone else’s.
6-8 Weeks Out: Train Your Staff and Launch Pre-Show Marketing
Training your staff is consistently misplaced in the priority list. The first 30 seconds of any attendee interaction on a trade show floor tends to be awkward by default – someone is walking past, your team member steps out, neither has any clue what to say. Work out a short opener, question-based and that invites dialogue rather than just launching into a product pitch. Then role-play it for hours until it’s second nature.
Pre-show marketing goes on at the same time. You’re sending an email to your prospect list, posting on your professional or social channels, and reaching out directly to anyone you specifically want to meet at the show. A six-week window is just enough to get appointments on people’s calendars, but that’s not going to happen if your entire team is counting on cold walk-up traffic. Outsource invites that include your free pass code to your vendors and associations.
And if you’re doing promotional products then order them now. The truth about giveaways is stuff that reinforces the product category, or just solves a small widely-shared problem, gets kept. Pens get pinched and passed on. Tote bags are so numerous at shows that one exhibitor actually had “No Tote Bag” pins made up one year and had a line of conventioneers at the booth.
Post-Show: The Window That Closes Fast
Plan your follow-up sequence before the conference. Identify those you will respond to the same day, who will get a personalized email within 48 hours, and who you will add to a longer nurture track. The Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) estimates that 80% of trade show leads are never followed up. So your competition has set the bar pretty low for you.
Pipeline generated, strategic partnerships established, competitive intelligence gathered – these are all returns on your trade show investment too. But you have to measure them to use them to defend your decision to go to the show again.
It may not always be easy to know in the short-term if the show was a success but it’s pretty easy to know if you did everything you could do to make it successful. And we all know, most of the time, you get out of something what you put into it.
