What are you here for?

Written By Angela Paul

It’s not enough to just turn up

If you're sponsoring or exhibiting at a conference, chances are you've invested thousands of dollars for a few short hours of face-to-face time with potential customers. Unfortunately many exhibitors make the same mistake - they focus on being seen rather than being remembered.

Banners, bowls of lollies, branded giveaways, interactive games, and stacks of brochures might attract attention, but attention alone doesn't build trust, create opportunities, or generate sales. If you want to maximise your investment, every aspect of your conference presence needs to be deliberate, strategic, and aligned to a clear business objective.

Why most exhibition stands miss the mark

Walk through any exhibition hall and you'll see a similar pattern:

  • Sales staff waiting for visitors to approach

  • Branded merchandise and giveaways

  • Competition entries and prize draws designed to attract delegates.

These tactics create interest, but they don't build trust or create results. So you have to ask yourself - are you getting the most out of your exhibition stand? Is this the best use of your sales and marketing budget?

The problem is that most exhibition stands are designed to get people to stop. They aren't designed to help people understand how you can help them and why they should trust you to do so.

A free pen won't solve a customer's problem and a spinning wheel won't demonstrate your expertise.

Unfortunately, what I find is that most delegates leave events with a bag full of branded goodies, but very little recollection of who they spoke to or why it mattered.

The cost of confusion

Conference attendees are already overloaded with information. By their very nature, conferences are packed full of people sharing their latest research, predictions, results, case studies… so imagine how the delegates feel when they step out of the conference room, only to be overloaded with a score of exhibitor stands screaming ‘look at me!’.

When your stand presents multiple messages and disconnected activities, visitors have to work too hard to understand who you are and what value you provide. If your message isn't clear, your stand is adding to the confusion rather than generating opportunities.

What high-performing exhibitors do differently

Successful exhibitors ask themselves ‘What is the one thing we want delegates to understand and remember about us?’ and they plan their stand from there. Their booth design, their team talk track, their demonstrations, activities and handouts all align and reinforce their chosen ‘one thing’. Rather than trying to tell delegates everything, they focus on communicating the one thing that matters most. That is, the one key takeaway you want delegates to remember when they think of you and your brand.

Make deliberate choices

Every part of your exhibition stand should help attendees understand your organisation and how you can help them, so it’s helpful to ask yourself:

  • What is our key message? (if you don’t know, delegates definitely won’t!)

  • Does this activity/giveaway/brochure support our key message?

  • What’s the one thing we want delegates to remember/know/do after we’ve spoken to them?

  • Does this experience build confidence in our expertise and/or product?

And one of the most important questions ‘How will we know if we’ve been successful at this conference?’.

  • Are we shooting for brand recognition? If so, how do we know we’ve built it?

  • Or… are we looking for sales leads? If so, are we set up to capture these?

At the end of the day, successful exhibiting isn't about attracting the biggest crowd. It's about creating the conversations that help you achieve your strategic goals.

Angela Paul