Ultimate Exhibition Guide 5 – Planning Your Stand

It’s all in the planning. And the listening!

Yet again, we come back to taking the time to plan things out. If you’ve done a good job in the earlier stages of planning for your exhibition, you’ll already know who you are trying to attract to your stand and how you think your stand can help you do that.

The very best exhibition stand contractors can build just about anything you have a mind for, but working with a good exhibition stand company should be a partnership where you share ideas to get the best results and benefit from their experience.

Exhibition stand builders will look at your company branding and your aims for the exhibition and your stand, before making suggestions and offering ideas that will help you achieve your goals.

Build to suit your brand

Whatever type of marketing you are doing, from sending out emails to printing brochures should reflect your brand, not just with the same fonts and colours, but with how you want your brand to come across and how you want your customers to feel about it, and your exhibition stand is no different.

When you pick aspects and ideas for your stand, always refer back to your company branding and check that your ideas fit.

Finding inspiration and ideas

Ideas are everywhere, and here are just some of the ways you can find the right ones for you:

• Look at your competition. What did they do for their stand last year, and how would you improve upon what they did?
• Visit either the same exhibition or something similar before you exhibit, so you can wander through all the stands and get inspiration, even from people who aren’t in your field.
• Browse Pinterest for design ideas and clever tricks that other people might not have thought of.
• Take a tour through your exhibition stand contractor’s portfolio and see what they’ve done previously.
• Keep up with technology and see what new things are coming up for something really different.

What will attract people to your stand and keep them there?

We talked about this in the last part of the Ultimate Exhibition Guide, but it’s worth keeping in mind again as you plan your stand as you’ll want to make it as inviting as possible, and highly targeted to your ideal customers.

Think about the practicalities

Obviously, your stand has to fit the exhibition space available to you, and if you want structures hanging from the ceiling, you need to check with the venue that that’s possible, *and* included in what you’ve already paid.

Check what you’ve got available on your stand spot, including whether you’ve got enough power sockets and lighting available for what you want to do.

Don’t forget that you’ve also got to store this stand somewhere when the exhibition is over, so plan for that too.

Whatever you choose for your stand, as long as it’s eye-catching, attractive and highly targeted to the people you want to reach, you should have no trouble standing out at your exhibition.