Attending a trade show is a great way to meet your current customers, attract new ones and meet with your suppliers. It’s a great way to get out of the office and boost your business with some good old fashioned face to face interaction.

The trade show floor is a busy, crowded place, with a lot of top businesses competing for attention and customers. With these simple hacks you can make sure your business is the one that stands out from the crowd, and ensures you can have a successful trade show experience.

Before The Trade Show

If you’re going to make the most of a trade show visit, you need to make sure you do proper planning in advance. Think about what you want and need to achieve from the show, and set a measurable target for you and your team to reach while you’re there.

Depending on your goals, this target could be to meet a certain potential supplier, or to gather a certain number of email addresses. By having a set target, you can measure how successful or unsuccessful your visit to the show was, and gives you something to work on for your next trade show.

Do some advance research to get a plan together for the show. Get a list of other attendees of the show and make a note of anyone who you think is your direct competitor, and anyone who is a contact you’d like to make. For the competitor list, see if they’ve shared any plans for the show on their social media, and see what you could do to stand out.

What can you offer that they can’t? What do you do better than they do? Whatever that is, make sure you show that off. For the list of contacts you’d like, find out where their stand is going to be located and assign someone to go across to meet them.

Your stand is very important to help you stand out, so bring in a professional company to design something eye catching. Make the best use of space available to you to show off your products, but don’t overcrowd it. You still want people to be able to get in and move around.

While space is important, don’t be tempted to go for the biggest stand you can afford, and instead go the most space that you can effectively use. The best trade show floor plan design is usually a smaller stand, properly laid out and with attractive design. This is going to be far more effective for you than a huge, sparse stand with lots of empty space that isn’t being used properly.

Order plenty of business cards and items like brochures or flyers well in advance so you’ll have them on time and won’t run out during the show.

Let your customers know that you’ll be attending the trade show. Many of these shows now provide graphics to attendees that show where you can be found on the trade floor.

Ask staff to add these graphics to their email signatures, and use them on social media to advertise your attendance and your stand number. Make sure you’re shouting about where you’ll be and what you’ll be bringing.

Many businesses are tempted to staff their stand with the newest members of their team. While dealing with customers all day is great experience for newer staff, it’s unlikely that they will know enough to answer all the questions on the day, which won’t show off your business to well.

Instead, make sure you’re also sending some of your high flyers to show your business in the best light. Send team members who are experts on your business and who are charismatic and confident enough to chat with people all day. Make sure your organise a rota for the show that has an expert on the stand at all times.

During The Show

Make sure you use the show to showcase your business in the best possible light. Staff appearance has a part in that, so make sure everybody goes looking smart and professional. If your company has a uniform, make sure everybody wears it.

You could have custom shirts printed for the show with your logo on, to clearly mark out who works for you. At minimum, ask staff to wear a shirt in your branding colours, so it’s easy to tell who works there and who is a customer on the stand.

If you’re going to be showing products, try and find a way to show them off in a way that is more interactive. Host a taster version of a course you offer or do product demonstrations. Create visually interesting displays instead of shoving brochures into a display rack.

Keep your social media active during the show day. Share photos of the booth and short video clips of any demonstrations. You can share photos of the booth and short videography clips of any demonstrations. Film a walk from the show entrance to your booth so your customers can find you more easily.

Interact with other companies who are at the show, and use any hashtags for the show, so other social users can find your feed. This activity could gain you followers and lead to some in person networking while you’re at the show.

After The Show

After the show is over, make sure you keep up the productivity momentum. Look back at your list of people you wanted to make contact with during the show. Did you meet them? If not, why not? Did you make productive contact? What worked and didn’t work with this networking? Identify what can be corrected for next time.

You’ve probably returned to work with a lot of business cards from the show. Don’t just hide them away in your desk and forget about them until it’s time for a desk clearout. Instead, take some time to check through them and see who you made contact with.

Check company websites or LinkedIn to learn about the people you collected cards from. If you have business cards from anyone you think might be useful to your company, make sure their contact details are added into your system and follow up with them.

A brief, friendly email to acknowledge meeting them and an invite to open discussions about how you could work together works really well.

If you met anyone who has asked for additional information about your products or services, or to have samples or brochures sent out, make sure you arrange this in the first couple of days after you get back from the show, and follow up with any customers who had questions for you during your time there.

Doing this promptly shows you’re reliable and quick to deal with, so make sure this doesn’t get forgotten when you’re back in the office.

Make sure to do something to acknowledge the hard work of the team who worked on the show. Trade shows can be very tiring and boring, so even if you just send an email to say thank you, your staff will feel you’ve noticed their effort. You could reward them with some extra hours off to recover after the show.

Say thank you to anyone who went above and beyond, and either secured great sales or made an important contact.

With proper planning, the right staff, proper networking and getting creative about how you show off your company, you can use a trade show to really great advantage. Attract new business, impress your customers and build up your contact base, by making the most of every opportunity that a trade show gives you.