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The success of trade show marketing depends on the way the staff interacts with prospects and attendees on the show floor.
Your booth team is almost like the lifeblood of your exhibit – they can make or break your success at the trade show. As such, you need to staff your booth with the best representatives of your organization. But how can you do so?
In this post, we will outline the best practices for staffing your trade show booth to help you get optimum results from your marketing strategy.
Shortlist the Suitable Personnel
Before you begin recruiting your booth staff, take the time to pause and think about your goals. What do you want to achieve from the trade show? How many potential prospects do you expect to obtain? Take notes of the required skills, competencies, and knowledge that you need from your booth staff members. Appropriately staff your booth to handle visitor crowds, so that you won’t end up with too little or too many people in your exhibit area.
Once your list is complete, it’s time to fill the positions in your booth. Choose employees who genuinely want to be in the trade shows. Are there any employees who show their enthusiasm early on? Vet each potential booth staffer to ensure that he or she can effectively perform the duties required in the manner your trade show program demands. Recruit your strongest players who have the ability to set the stage for success.
Assign Roles and Responsibilities
After you have gathered potential team members, you can now focus on assigning roles and responsibilities to each person. Carefully evaluate each individual’s personality, skillset, and expertise. What are their special traits? Make sure that you have the right mix of personality types and skills to represent your brand.
For instance, someone who is warm, welcoming, and highly social should be assigned as the host. Hosts are your company’s brand ambassadors, responsible for greeting visitors and making the first contact. Meanwhile, presenters are skilled public speakers with the ability to keep the audience engaged and entertained throughout the whole product demonstration. On the other hand, sales staff should be responsible for lead acquisition, thus they are ideally people who are experts at pitching your products and masters at selecting prospective attendees.
Staff Training and Education
A trade show booth is only as effective as the staff behind the exhibit. Typically, you’ll only have 3-5 minutes on average to interact with each audience, so we need to make this short encounter as informative as possible. An undisciplined and poorly trained staff will reflect accordingly on your brand perception in the public eye. If you want to have a long-lasting impact on your target audience, you need to effectively and thoroughly train your staff prior to the trade show.
Start your training early and repeat often. Training is great for preparing your staff both mentally and physically so that they feel ready and equipped on the show floor. Let your staff know that you are making a big investment to have a presence in the show and that they have been carefully selected based on their outstanding skill and performance. You also need to ensure that they understand the key messages that need to be conveyed to visitors, and how the trade show booths have been designed to help them convey these messages. Ideally, training should include a well-practiced script that has been timed to ensure its efficiency.
Staff Grooming and Uniform
Having a well-groomed staff is essential to create a professional image on the trade show floor. Make sure that you are well aware of the nature of the trade show, and dress your staff appropriately. Should they dress in business casual outfits? Or corporate apparel? What your staff wear makes a big impact on how they are perceived. Untucked shirts, soiled clothing, and wrinkled attire are generally not pleasing appearance, which may turn off prospects and make your organization seem less professional.
Giving your trade show booth staff a cohesive look helps to reinforce your brand identity. Color-coordinate between your brand colors, booth design, and staff uniform. If you’ve used your company colors as the theme for the booth, then pick another color that pairs well (i.e. complementary color) for your staff uniform. This will ensure that your staff stands out in the booth and won’t fade into the background. Equip them with your corporate branded items, such as promotional products pens, and promotional notepads to gain more exposure to your brand. Alternatively, it could be a smart marketing strategy to have your staff’s attire reflect a service your company provides or a product it manufactures. Check out our options for branding custom apparel with your company logo that you can customize with your brand’s personality.
What’s Next?
Now that your trade show booth staffing is taken care of, you may start to plan the other aspects of your next event. You might be thinking about which custom promotional items to give away. Our tip: Think outside the box and come up with something unusual and unique that represents your brand!
At Promote It, we have thousands of company branded promotional items to choose from. With over 20 years’ experience in the industry, we provide exceptional quality promotional products Auckland, from custom logo merchandise to custom corporate gifts set. If what you are looking for doesn’t exist on our website, contact us today and we will personalize it for you.
