Creating a theme for your exhibition stand and the associated marketing campaign can be one way to ensure that people remember your business long after the trade show or expo event. Building a theme can be far more than thinking of a catchy phrase or idea. Here are six ways that you can incorporate your theme into exhibition marketing processes and into your exhibition stand. For this example, the marketing campaign is for a product that reduces snoring.
Before the Exhibition
In your pre-exhibition marketing materials, you should allude to your theme. You may want to titillate the people you send your pre-exhibition marketing material to with an allusion or a question that you will answer at the expo. Your pre-exhibition marketing could ask the question “What is the most common reason to have a bad night’s sleep?”
If you send out an email or a direct mail out to your client database, you want the people to attend the expo, and to visit your exhibition stand. You could include a crossword or a find a word puzzle that introduces the theme and forms an entry form into a competition that you have running at the exhibition stand. If you do send out a direct mail flyer or brochure, you could have the design in the shape of a pillow.
The Exhibition Stand Itself
Designing your exhibition stand to incorporate a theme is an essential element in this style of marketing campaign. To create an effective exhibition stand with a unique theme, you can use a box style of exhibition stand, where you have walls, floors, and all the elements especially built for the exhibition. For example, if you have a theme that suggests people can have a good night’s sleep by using your product, you could create a huge four poster bed as your exhibition stand.
Exhibition Stand Signage
Your signage at the exhibition stand is going to attract people into your exhibition stand and to provide information about your product. Incorporate your theme into the signs that you create for the trade show. Using the example, you could have pillows and pictures of people getting a good night’s sleep and information about the product in the dream “bubbles”.
During the Exhibition
Incorporate the theme into all the marketing materials your staff will hand out during the expo or trade show. You can provide little pillows to give out, which could open to provide information on the anti-snoring product. Ensure your staff are wearing appropriate clothing that enhances the theme. In this particular example, you could have your staff wearing pyjamas in the colour of your corporate logo.
Immediately After the Exhibition
Following up the trade show with good marketing is essential. Within a few days of the trade show, you should send out an email or direct mail contact to the leads your staff collected during the exhibition. This marketing material should include the theme and mention the exhibition stand. You could include a photograph of the exhibition stand to remind people of your stand.
Six Weeks After the Exhibition
Finally, send a follow up several weeks after the expo or trade show. Immediately after the trade show, people are overwhelmed with many marketing emails and brochures from all of the companies who exhibited at the trade show, but following up several weeks after the expo can be an effective marketing ploy. Using the theme again in this final marketing campaign will ensure that people will remember your exhibition stand.
