Exhibitions can help your business in multiple ways. They can offer you opportunities to interact with your current and prospective customers, your future partners and gather feedback from your visitors. All these can only become possible if you can attract relevant and willing visitors to your stall. Since attracting visitors can help you progress your business in unforeseen ways, we cannot leave it merely on luck.
Attracting visitors to your stalls include creating a flawless stall/booth that exhibits your brand identity and to treat the ones who walk in nicely, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Panache has compiled a list of 11 clever ways to attract more people to your exhibition stand, based on our 10+ years of experience in the exhibition industry. For simplicity, we have divided these 11 ways into segments to give you a holistic set of activities.
Since exhibitions are pre-planned and visitors cannot come accidentally, it is always a good idea to share the exhibition details and announce your intent to be an exhibitor. You can also extend an invitation to your close friends to visit your stall. This can help you practice your pitch, set the ball rolling, and start on a positive note.
While you cannot go too loud all the time with social media, you can consider including the exhibition details in your email signatures. While this is a very subtle way of announcing your brand's presence at an exhibition, every effort and footstep counts.
It always helps to hire a staff that is at least bilingual and approachable. Many visitors await eye-to-eye contact and a smile from your staff members before they walk into the exhibition stand. A diverse staff can easily invite a lot many visitors as compared to a non diverse team.
(to help the customer make an intelligent decision and engage with your long run). A visitor that walks in smiling and goes out smiling is an accomplishment that you should celebrate. Practice your pitch, keep your promotional material handy, and waive them off with a smile.
Yes, your staff may end up hosting potential partners too. Treating them as your visitors can cost you a business opportunity. Have your senior staff present to deal with business partners, same industry players, and government officials.
Many businesses do collect business cards of their visitors but rarely do anything good with it. Since exhibitions span a minimum of 2-3 days, sending a simple thank you message can help increase recall, spread word of mouth, and a lot more.
This can be a game-changer for your business in multiple ways. A shabbily done stall is a risk that you as a business cannot afford. Also, micromanaging the whole exercise can cost you preparing to host your visitors. Consider an experienced exhibition designer and booth maker as an investment instead of an expense.
If it is a product, then display how it solves the problem of your intended customers (a small demo model works wonders); and if it is a service, enlist the reasons – why it is easy to use and how it solves the problems your visitors may be grappling with. Customer feedback and enlisting your existing customers can be one way to increase visitor buy-in.
Consult your exhibition designer and booth maker about the location of your stand. It is always a good idea to have a stall close to a high-footfall stall wherein you can offer solutions allied to it.For example, suppose you are exhibiting in an automobile exhibition that offers electric vehicles. In that case, you can consider putting a stall near the similar segment petrol vehicles and play on the low running cost of your vehicles.
Innovative and practical giveaways can make you a talk of the town, spread word of mouth, and attract visitors.
While these ways can help attract visitors to your stall, you must never forget two things: one, help your visitor; two, use good copywriting because everything you write or say is your advertising.