Strategic planning
Strategic planning is probably the most important phase of your exhibition journey. You need to start by establishing precisely what you hope to achieve. Are you focused on generating qualified leads, increasing brand awareness, launching a new product or perhaps rekindling relationships with existing clients? These objectives, once identified, will guide every subsequent decision, from stand size to staffing requirements.
You need to give careful consideration to budgeting. Exhibiting is all about making a return on your investment, so the amount you pay in the first place is one half of that equation. As a rough guide, an exhibition budget typically includes:
- Stand space rental (approximately 30–40% of your total budget)
- Stand design and construction (20–30%)
- Marketing materials and promotional items (10–15%)
- Staffing costs including travel, accommodation and living costs (15–20%)
- Technology and equipment rental
- Shipping, storage and logistics
Your current situation will determine how much new money you need to spend, and of course, every exhibition and sector is different. But keep these ballpark figures in your head, and you can start to make sacrifices or extra investments as you see fit.
Selecting the right exhibition(s) is perhaps your most important decision. Not all events will bring equal value for your business. Do your research – thoroughly analyse demographics and review previous exhibitor lists to get a feel for whether the audience is right. Speak with past participants about their experiences if possible (the organisers might be slightly biased). Also, ask yourself if an event’s reputation within your industry is good, bad or neutral. Have you even heard of it? Does it attract industry media, potential clients, suppliers and partners?
Ensure that nothing falls through the cracks by making a detailed timeline alongside your stand suppliers and internal team. Most exhibitions need at least 6–12 months of planning, so this isn’t a last-minute thing. It can help to create a checklist with key milestones at the 6-month, 3-month, 1-month and 1-week marks. Make sure you book your exhibition space as early as possible, as prime locations are typically secured early.
Finally, work with your sales team to come up with key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can measure an event’s success (compared with not doing the event). These might include number of leads generated, cost per lead, sales resulting from the exhibition, social media engagement, new partnerships established … anything that is measurable and matters to your business.
Exhibition stand design
Your exhibition stand is essentially a three-dimensional representation of your brand. It should attract attention, communicate your key messages and allow meaningful interactions. Its success in these areas will determine whether it’s all worthwhile.
Stand location also impacts visitor engagement. When booking your space, it’s best to go for high-traffic areas near entrances, refreshment zones or main thoroughfares if possible. Corner positions or ends of rows offer extra visibility and access opportunities compared to mid-row inline locations. Note that the best locations naturally cost more as there’s higher demand, so this is an area where you can compromise or invest, depending on your sums and projections.
The layout of your exhibition stand will depend on your budget and goals. First-time exhibitors might opt for inline stands or corner stands of 3×3m or 6×3m. These options balance visibility with cost-effectiveness, and let you dip your toe in Lake Exhibition with minimal upfront costs. If it’s a success and you feel you could have met more demand, you might want to look at peninsula stands (open on three sides) or island stands (open on all four sides) for greater impact. Choosing a modular stand from the start lets you easily add sections later.
Integrating technology can really boost visitor engagement. At present, that means things like interactive touchscreens for product exploration, digital signage for dynamic content updates, or demonstrations with cool technology. Even simple additions like phone charging stations can serve as both a visitor attraction and a reason for people to linger. Just remember – today’s high tech gadgets are tomorrow’s everyday objects, so try to keep abreast of what’s new if you want to stay fresh and innovative.
Exhibition stand lighting deserves special attention, as it impacts the atmosphere and effectiveness of your stand like nothing else. You can use illumination to highlight key products or create a visual hierarchy, but in general, good lighting contributes to an overall impression of professionalism, and it has health and safety implications too.
Remember that your stand must function practically as well as aesthetically. The most beautiful stand will fail if it doesn’t support your team’s ability to engage effectively with visitors. Don’t overlook storage for products, samples, leaflets and staff’s personal belongings, as clutter will always be your enemy in a 3×3m space, and just looks bad in bigger stands. If there’s room, try to create talking spaces, product demonstration areas and private areas if you’re there to do deals.
Marketing and promotion
Pre-show marketing should begin 2–3 months before the exhibition. That’s when you can start generating awareness and excitement about your attendance among your potential visitors. You can do little things like adding exhibition details to your email signature, creating a dedicated landing page with your stand location and offerings, and sending targeted invitations to existing clients and prospects. Social media is also a powerful tool for exhibition promotion. Develop a content calendar specifically for the exhibition, and stick to it.
Email marketing is highly effective when properly set up. Don’t just carpet bomb all your contacts – create different messaging for existing clients, prospects and cold contacts, each pointing out why they should pay you a visit. If you feel it’s appropriate, send reminder emails a week before the event, and again the day before.
Make sure you’ve got a proper plan when it comes to capturing leads. Set up a database that will help your team to capture visitor details quickly and accurately, so the sales team can get to work after the event is finished. You should be able to integrate any lead capture system with your CRM to help with this, but make sure the systems are compatible before you create a ton of data that needs to be hand-copied from one system to another.
Stand materials and logistics
The materials you bring to an exhibition are tangible touchpoints with your brand. There’s often not enough time to go into too much detail face to face, so giving visitors information and contact details lets them go away and digest, and ask questions of the right people later on. Typical collateral includes:
- Product and service brochures tailored to the event audience
- Business cards for all staff members
- Case studies demonstrating proven results
- Pricing information if appropriate
- Technical specifications for product-focused businesses
With promotional items and giveaways, always prioritise quality over quantity. Choose things that relate to your business or solve a problem, and which drive home your brand message. You might even want different tiers of giveaways – standard items for general visitors and premium items for qualified prospects.
Get ready to plan your transportation and shipping logistics with military precision, particularly for international exhibitions. Events won’t let you drop things off days in advance or pick them up weeks after it’s finished – there are small windows when it comes to arriving, setting up, taking down and vacating the venue. You need to know precisely when these windows open and close, and have plans – and backup plans – in place. Prepare detailed inventory lists, and arrange insurance coverage.
Don’t forget about accommodation and travel arrangements for your team. Book accommodation close to the venue to minimise commuting time, and pay attention to the typical conditions of roads and public transport at the times of day when they’ll be travelling. They absolutely must not be late.
It’s always worth having contingency plans for issues like technology glitches, staff illness, shipping delays, stand damage or material shortages. Having solutions for these scenarios in advance will minimise disruption should they occur, and let the show go on.
Staff training
Your team is the human face of your brand, so preparing them for anything the exhibition might throw at them is vital. Train staff for brief, high-impact conversations – if your sales team aren’t attending, let them spend some time with the stand team to divulge a few tips. Role-play typical visitor scenarios so the team will be confident that they can steer conversations in the direction they want – and subtly cut short the chats that are obviously going nowhere.
Ensure all staff can speak knowledgeably about your products or services before the exhibition, as visitors will have hundreds of questions. Beyond the FAQs, some visitors might ask technical or commercial questions that are beyond a team member’s pay grade. Let them know how to deal with such questions, such as who is best to talk to or how to take details so they can talk later.
For multi-day exhibitions, have daily briefings and group chats to share information, such as questions that keep cropping up and how to answer them. No amount of pre-event training will prepare you for the real thing, and these daily briefings are essential for getting the lay of the land and making sure the whole team has a single message.
Don’t be afraid to send your staff out on reconnaissance missions to check out your competitors and see how they do things. This can be a plain clothes operation if you’re feeling mysterious, but in reality, your competitors will also be visiting your stand – it’s no secret that this goes on. Just make sure they know what to look out for – how engaged visitors look, what the stand looks like, what technology is being used and so on.
Post-exhibition analysis
The end of the exhibition marks the beginning of the follow-up phase – and that’s where your return on investment will be calculated. It’s now that all those carefully collected leads will start to flourish into communications, relationships and, hopefully, customers. You’ll quickly get to know how useful the information you captured was, and which was superfluous. That’s handy for making your next exhibition more efficient and effective.
A team debrief within a week of the exhibition lets you make learnings while memories remain fresh. Get feedback on what worked well, what could be improved, and those all-important observations about competitor activities. This will all feed back into your next exhibition.
Analyse your stand’s performance by comparing results against your pre-defined KPIs. Then you can calculate actual ROI and cost per lead, and identify which aspects delivered the greatest value. Your own team should come up with ways to trace leads and sales directly back to the event, filtering out any that had nothing to do with the exhibition. You can often do this with codes on collateral, or things like unique email addresses or phone numbers, as well as simply asking leads where they heard of you.
Ready to take the next step?
This article should give you a decent idea of the kinds of things you need to think about ahead of embarking on your first exhibition. There’s no such thing as “common sense” if you’re completely new to it, and as all exhibitions are different, there is no single way of planning and executing a stand.
One task that can be taken off your hands is the design and construction of your stand. At Focal Exhibitions, we have the expertise and the experience to guide you though the whole process and deliver any kind of stand you need. We can help you from the very early stages, when you’re still unsure about the kind of stand you need, right up to showing you how to assemble and disassemble your stand so it’s ready to use again. We’d love to help you in your exhibition journey, so please get in touch!
