Maximise your event!
Having a successful show is not just about booking a place and setting up a stand, it’s also above all about communicating. Your investment in preparation and organisation will be crucial. We have detailed below each of the stages that you need to think about before, during, and after the show.
1. Define your objectives for participating in a show
- Exhibit your new products
- Meet new prospects
- Promote your added value
- Meet your customers under different conditions
- Differentiate yourself from your competitors
- Research your market
- Mobilise your troops
- Show third parties you are an active member of a dynamic profession
- Consolidate or enhance your brand image and reputation
- Inform the trade press
2. Respond to visitors’ main motivations
- Discover new products and view demonstrations
- Update their knowledge
- Make contacts and foster business relations with their regular or new suppliers
- Access precise information with the aim of preparing an order or investment
- Find a solution to a problem
- Make general inquiries
3. Put together your strategic plan
- Make the show part of your sales and marketing policy
- Orient your participation based on chosen objectives
- Invite customers and institutional representatives
- Animate your stand according to your objectives: selling, launching products, image…
- Mobilise and stimulate your staff
- Select event partnerships within the context of the show and promotional tools that will enable you to strengthen your presence
4. Budget for your show participation
- Compare the costs of installation and decoration with stand packages
- Decide on the return on investment you require
- Quantify the number of customers and new prospects to meet; the number of appointments to make.
- Plan the show analysis: Hold a debrief meeting; Analyse: - information gathered from visitors at the show, from the press, from the competition - contacts - follow-ups on visitors welcomed to the stand - actual expenses - orders registered from the list
5. Prepare your show communication
Before the show
Publicise your presence/create traffic with the tools proposed by the show
- Publish sales and promotional literature
- Send invitations to your customers and prospects
- Publicise your participation in the show (order the show’s promotional tools: e-mailing, advertising on your website, on the show website…)
- Plan a press relations exercise. Submit a quality press kit to the press office
- Ask the organiser about his publicity campaign (media campaign and press operations).
- Plan public relations exercises: hold press conferences, product presentations, workshops, VIP cocktail receptions…
- Organise your stand - make areas for greeting and receiving visitors - employ hostesses, marketing people - define tasks, perfect views
- Make your stand a lively place: push your innovations and new products, give demonstrations, run a contest, hand out gifts…
- Favour the contacts made at the show: send a thank you message, deliver requested documents, confirm orders
- Follow-up on absent guests
- Contact those who came to the show but not to your stand (rent visitor listings)
6. Tips for being ready on time
- List the responsibilities: "who does what?"
- List the actions that need to be undertaken
- Draw up a timetable
- Set yourself deadlines so as not to have to do things in a rush
- Don’t underestimate the quantity of work to be done
