Business Opportunities Weblog

How to Run a Successful Trade Show Booth

By on September 11, 2009 in Ideas


Creative Commons License photo credit: naelyn

Need some tips on how to run a successful trade show booth? Jason Calacanis offers 22 good ones:

In order to maximize your investment in a trade-show booth or conference table top, you must clearly define your goals. A booth is but one of many ways to obtain value from a conference. In fact, even attending a conference can be a way to grow your company. It’s important that your entire team, from marketing to product to the CEO, agree on the goals long before committing to an event.

The most frequent reasons I’ve heard for hosting a booth are:

  • to obtain leads/clients
  • to further develop relationships with existing clients
  • branding
  • educating people about your company and products
  • to support your industry or the people throwing the event
  • for the fun and enjoyment of the team attending the event (i.e. “a junket”)
  • recruiting
  • courting investors

Since your goals are going to determine your strategy, you need to really think about which one or two of these are the most important to you. Most companies will look at the list above-the same list that’s in the marketing materials that sold you on getting a booth-and say “yeah, we want to do a little of all of that.”

If you focus equally on each of the goals above, chances are you’re not going to succeed in any real way at any of them. Once you have a list of goals, you really need to prioritize them. I like to force myself to define one clear goal, like “we’re here to find an investor,” “we’re here to get press for the latest version of our website,” or “we’re here to find a CTO.”

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Business Opportunities Weblog editor and publisher Dane Carlson lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, just 15 miles from Yosemite National Park. He accidentally became a professional blogger in 2001. He has added 12,203 posts to the site.

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