7 Ways to Get Noticed at Trade Shows

Making a lasting impression as a business is crucial to your brand’s growth and having a well-designed logo and social media presence isn’t always enough to do that. To remain memorable, you must connect with people, and there’s no better way to do that than to interact with your audience in person.

Trade shows are an excellent platform to engage with potential customers and partners in a meaningful way, but they come with a caveat: the competition. As a result, these events are packed with countless other vendors looking to make the same impression.

So how can you stand out?

We’re answering that question by sharing seven sure-fire ways to get noticed at trade shows.

Create a plan

The most simple and effective way to make sure your brand stands out at a trade show is to plan. It’s not enough to reserve a spot and show up. This is an opportunity to make invaluable connections with other businesses and authentically showcase your brand in person. Before diving into marketing and design, take the time to get clear about:

Your target audience
Your brand’s values, mission, and message
Your budget

Invest in booth design

Unfortunately, it’s easy to go unnoticed at a trade show because of all the other booths. After a while, things can start to blur together for attendees since so many businesses present their brands the same way. However, you can cut through the noise and capture attention right away by investing in professional booth design. To do this, find a local exhibit house partner, and they’ll work with you to design a booth that gets traffic. However, if this isn’t in your budget, don’t worry. You can still have a killer booth by investing in banners, signs, and booth displays, all things that Infantile Industries can help you with!

Give visitors an experience

You can build off your eye-catching booth design by also providing your visitors with an experiential exhibit. By providing an immersive brand experience, you’ll engage your audience’s senses and immediately makes your business more engaging and memorable. In addition, by interacting with people in a unique, captivating way, you’ll also create good word-of-mouth, one of the best forms of marketing.

Get familiar with your competition

One of the earliest stages of any good marketing strategy is getting to know your competition. This is also an essential step when planning for your trade show. Find out what other vendors will be there and learn how they’re attracting customers. For example, do they offer sign-up discounts, or are they having a giveaway? Understanding what’s been working for others will help you create a strategy that better appeals to your audience.

Give away branded freebies

If there’s one thing we all know, it’s that people love getting stuff for free. That’s precisely why giving away freebies like company t-shirts with a logo is always a brilliant idea. You can choose to offer something small to anyone who visits, like custom stickers, or take it a step further and provide a giveaway of more oversized items, like custom embroidered company hats or power bricks.

Promote your booth before the event

The biggest mistake you could make is saving all your marketing efforts for the trade show. Instead, it’s much wiser to start promoting your booth, brand, and service as soon as possible. Ideally, you’ll be ready to begin promoting 6 to 10 months before the event. More specifically, you should target the trade show guests, which you can do by requesting a list of attendees from the organizer.

Have fun!

Yes, the goal of trade shows is to generate more customers and opportunities for your business, but that doesn’t mean you should be all business. It’s just as important to enjoy what you’re doing! When your booth has a fun and engaging atmosphere, you’ll attract even more people and leave a lasting impression.

Get the most out of your tradeshow booth

If you’re a new St. Louis startup or business and want to get noticed at trade shows, you need to more than show up with marketing materials and a sales pitch. You must provide an experience, do your research, develop a strategy, and have a good time!

Let Infantile Industries help you stand out with custom signage, table covers, flags, branded giveaways, promotional products (swag), embroidered company t-shirts and other commercial print products at your next event.