How To Drive Traffic To Your Exhibition Booth
There are hundreds of thousands of booths in an exhibition. So how do you attract customers at the show? Letting it be your own business partner is something that exhibitors must pay attention to.
Here are some of the important factors that you can use to attract customers to come to your booth during an exhibition show.
1. Advertising before the exhibition
Nowadays, more and more exhibitions and their sponsoring cooperation units provide the website connection of exhibitors. Exhibitors can enhance the visibility of the company and its website through the connection.
Exhibitors can also display the product images or themes on the website as well as the detailed product information to enhance the visibility of the exhibition site.
The professional exhibition management company believes that exhibitors must publish at least one advertisement in a professional magazine three months before the exhibition, and then send a copy of the advertisement to the current and potential customers, with information attached. By doing so, this can help to remind the customers that the product will be on display at the exhibition.
2. Training of exhibition staffs
Usually, the exhibitors will pay attention in providing information to the exhibitors, but ignore the real purpose of the exhibitions. They often miss important information because of the lack of questioning skills.
To avoid this problem to happen, it is necessary to conduct proper training and preparation before the exhibition. The participants in the exhibition must be willing to talk to strangers and understand their needs.
They will send the prepared corporate prints or exquisite gifts to potential customers in a timely manner to achieve the ultimate goal of marketing.
3. Selection of booth location
Choosing the right venue is an important part of the exhibition. The first thing to consider is the way the crowds move.
Once you understand the direction in which the crowds move throughout the exhibition grounds, you can then make your decision to pick the booths accordingly.
For example, the most popular place for people is the proximity to the entrance and exit, the washroom, the lounge, and the eating area. The pillars of the exhibition hall and the loading area have potential problems that hinder the crowd where you should avoid to select these locations for your booth.
4. Booth creativity and decoration
Most of the exhibitions will provide exhibitors with ceiling spotlights or some exhibitors will prepare their own portable lighting systems.
According to industry surveys, lighting can effectively increase exhibit recognition by 30% to 50%. In addition, the exhibitor can use a small number of large-scale display pictures to create a strong visual effect.
Pictures that are too dense or too small are not easy to read, and they limit the use of promotional text. The exhibitor should place the picture above the line of sight, then choose to use bold and eye-catching colors.
The thing to avoid is using neutral colors that are easy to blend into the background, this is to make the exhibition booth stand out from a distance.
How To Attract Customers’ Attention In International Exhibitions?
Defining the purpose of the exhibition
Attending an exhibition is an important part of corporate marketing and operations strategy. The exhibitor must have a clear purpose for each exhibition.
The final purpose of the exhibition will help the completion of other important works. Doing things with purpose will help you to do more works with less effort.
General Purposes of Exhibiting
The general purposes of exhibiting are include of demonstrating, enhance corporate image, promote products, demand cooperation opportunities, reach potential customers, meet face-to-face with cooperative customers, learn about peer development, understand competitor products, information, market, collect product information of other suppliers, and understand specific products in the exhibition market.
Booth Staffs Arrangement
Before an exhibition, you need to arrange the number of staff there are needed to be in the exhibition. They should have their division of work and job roles.
The exhibition staff should be proactive to greet the customer and making chances to let customers sit down for discussion. The rest of the staff should stand in front of the showcase and be ready to welcome the next guest. This need to carry out with team awareness.
You need to brief all staff about the purpose, content, and expectations of the exhibition, and carry out intensive training.
Receptionists
Receptionists need to be generous, decent, and always put the smile on their faces. When the guests are seated, immediately politely give them a warm welcome.
The sales staff (salesman)
Sales staff need to prepare their business cards and give to potential customers proactively. They need to take the initiative to request business cards or contact information from customers.
Also, they need to timely record and organize the information collected during the day (sorted out products that are of interest to each customer and the quotation that you offered to them. This can help in facilitating future contact and management).
You need to let your sales staff know that if they want customers to like them, they need to pay attention to their integrity. They need to know how to use the right methods and techniques to pass on trust and have a pleasant conversation with their potential customers.
Technician
It is not necessarily for every exhibition. If there is a certain technical question being asked by the customer and there is no technician available in the exhibition, you should jot down the questions asked from the customer, and then reply to the customer with a professional tone.
After returning to the office, you can ask the technical department for all the technical questions that were asked by your customers and reply to them once you have the answers.
Chief Officer
The chief officer is required to give customers a good team impression with well-trained and well-defined roles.
Booth Design
The booth design needs to be stylish and have a professional feel. It is good to have audiovisual effects like printing and multimedia visual impact for your booth.
Besides, the product placement needs to be secured and easy to demonstrate to visitors and the meeting table setting needs to be comfortable and convenient.
Accessories
Some accessories are not easy to obtain at the exhibition venues like a notebook, stapler, transparent plastic, scissors, etc. You need to prepare before the exhibition.
Also, you need to confirm the booth status in advance as follows:
Implement the number of panels so that posters and banners can be arranged in advance (product posters, image posters, banners, etc., and the layout of the panels is harmonious.
You will need to find a professional company to design and unify the company’s image. This is to avoid the themes and images are different each time.
Supplies
Flyer, company profile, business card, quotation, leaflet, and other materials should be neatly arranged. You need to have all kinds of materials needed for the exhibition to be ready.
Avoid subtle errors. This is mainly happened for outsourced products, whether the classification is accurate, and the indicators are checked.
The information represents the company’s image and they need to be prepared in a timely and accurate manner before the exhibition. The number of materials that you need can be determined according to the previous exhibition experience.
Some reference information such as the packaging of the product, the customer might want to know the information like gross weight, volume, material, etc. You need to have all this information in place so that you can refer to them and provide the answer to your customer right away.
Samples
You should have an estimation of the number of samples that you want to give away in an exhibition and prepare them accordingly.
When the sample is released, it is necessary to collect the customer’s information, such as usage, dosage, whether it is currently cooperating with other suppliers, whether it is necessary to recommend other products, etc.
Before coming out with your sample, you need to know whether the sample packaging design is creating a promotional effect?
Samples should be selected for general and representative products, highlighting the variety of products and the latest technology that your company has.
For each sample, prepare the corresponding test sheet at the preparation stage, and record the released samples for tracking.
If your company is offering services and not selling any product, you need to think about how to showcase your company’s service to customers.
Usually, send some information to the customer within 1 minute to let the customer know what services your company is provided.
The Competence Of The Foreign Trade Representative
1. Pre-exhibition knowledge and information collection
- Understand the local culture and taboos, prepare the company’s product information, and memorize the exhibition’s common jargons.
- Familiar with all the products such as prices and product characteristics.
- Information that customers would want to know is including product usage, characteristics, packaging, transportation, production cycle, inventory, price, etc.
- The uses of the product itself, where the customer wants to use the product. Features: Must be mastered.
- Product specific specifications, materials, production processes, etc.
Packaging: The various effects that packaging may have on the product.
Transportation: The various issues that transportation may have on a product.
Production cycle and inventory: The basic premise of delivery time.
Price: cost + shipping + profit or competitive offer.
When the customer asks for the price, it is necessary to know the customer’s single demand, and the price of the shipping container and the LCL are different.
Foreign trade representative needs to familiar with the foreign trade process like that quotation terms of FOB, CIF, CFR, etc. and the price terms TT, LC, DP, etc.
Besides, the responsibilities of a foreign trade representative to drive traffic to the booth are include:
- Marketing (customer market and culture)
- Prepare a notebook for collecting guest information
- Target market product application
- Target enterprise demand characteristics
- Target market consumption behavior
- Target market business culture, etiquette, and characteristics
2. Company Image
Dress
Company image needs to be decent, you can think of whether to consider a uniform dress code for all staffs.
Temperament
Staff should have a similar level of eye-sight with the customer. Don’t let the customer have the feeling that you want him to buy the product. Rather, we should show the customer that we want to help in solving his problem.
Sitting
Eyes and expressions (pay attention to eye contact)
3. Attitude
- Be yourself – always be prepared and put a smile on your face.
- Friendly, sincere to help and answer questions.
- Prepare for market research, create business opportunities for yourself, and learn more about your potential customers.
4. Rules for First-time Communication
Avoid talking about cultural taboos
The first impression is very important (eye contact, interaction, attention to people, more communication with other information, slowly introduce topics)
Language style (volume, intonation, rhythm, more listening)
Strive to achieve, build a good friend relationship when exhibiting, and have a deep impression.
5. Make Use Of Psychology
- Avoid the introduction of the company in monotones and not listen to customers.
- Avoid stereotypes.
- Understand customer concerns.
- Understand the interests of customers.
6. Negotiation
Don’t ignore the real needs when providing information to customers. Some important information is often hidden in the questions of the customers. You can:
- Focus on the issues that customers are most concerned about right now.
- Make customers resonate with something.
- Don’t discuss business or products from the beginning, discuss on other more casual like sports, weather, things that happen around the exhibition, etc.
- Offer your customers a sense of security. Jot down the problems you faced after the exhibition, and collectively discuss the advantages of product improvement.
