Ultimate Exhibition Guide – Part 2 – Exhibition Plan

Exhibition Goal Setting and Planning

In the first in our Ultimate Exhibitions Guide, we talked about choosing the right exhibition for you, and now we move onto the planning stage. Planning and goal setting matter, not just in terms of thinking about your stand and making it appealing and interactive, but also in terms of knowing why you are exhibiting and what you want to get out of it.

Just like you’d decide on KPIs if you launched a new product or a system within your business, when you’re exhibiting you need to set out what you want to achieve and how you’ll know if you’ve made it. You could wing it, and just see how things go, and if this is your first time exhibiting and you don’t know what to expect, that could be tempting. But you will get the best results from exhibiting if you have an exhibition plan.

Your Exhibition Plan

What should be in that plan?

It’s far too easy to be told time and again that you need a solid plan for any event you’re planning, however an exhibition event whether you’re exhibiting with a new stand or even if you’re just an attendee certainly requires a rigid strategy from the outset. From our vast experience of building exhibition stands, we’ve come to realise the core tenants that are require as a backbone of your plan. It is imperative your business considers the following goals and steps:

The results you are aiming for.

Are you looking for a certain number of new clients? Do you want to get so many sign ups to your newsletter? Do you want live feedback on a prototype product from potential buyers? Whatever it is, write it down so then you can move on to step 2.

How are you going to get your desired results?

If it’s newsletter subscribers you want, will you run a competition in exchange for email addresses or will you have a QR code on your marketing leaflets for people to sign up? What’s your plan to get those new sign ups?

If you need feedback, how are you going to collect it and process it later to get the most out of it? Whatever your aims, work through how you’re going to get there and plan out as much as you can.

Plan the time on your stand

How many people do you need to manage the stand? How will you manage breaks and time off for lunch? How will you ensure staff get the chance to walk around the exhibition and meet other people?

If you know you want to attend some of the seminars or take part in 1 to 1 meetings, get that planned in, too. If you want to be organised with meetings on your stand, why not create time slots for each member of your staff so visitors can book in advance?

Set up your marketing plan

We’ll go into this in more detail in the next article, but basically you need to figure out how you’re going to market your attendance at the exhibition, and how you’ll attract visitors to your stand.

Plan your stand

You’ll note that this isn’t number one on your list, and that’s for a reason. If you have your aims and goals already set out, and your marketing plan, you’ll have a much better idea of what your stand should be like, and how it needs to be set up. We’ll also have an article on stand planning later in the series.

Whilst our guide may be helpful in understand the core factors that make up an exhibition stand plan, this should only be the start for your business. Only you and your team will fully understand the unique goals and KPI’s that need to be set prior to the event, and those which will inform your plan.

For further reading don’t miss the next instalment in our complete series to exhibition stands, and if you’re focused more heavily on the monetary aspects prior to exhibiting make sure you read our guide to calculating an ROI on your exhibition stand.