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Leverage your competition’s creative promotions at tradeshows

Posted on 10. Aug, 2008 by PJS in Tradeshow tips and tiffs

For over 10 years I’ve come up with creative concepts to draw crowds into the booth, but one can only have creative with a budget.  There were cases where groups performing the show had literally no budget and could barely afford to get the booth to the show.  These cases are a real bummer for the booth staff.

So a “cool” promo concept and item is out of the question.  You have been given the high command to draw in the attendees by the droves, yet merely armed with 20 cent (USD) corporate pens, a 1-pager, and a Clip Art riddled Power Point run on a laptop.  This is going to be a big challenge.  You need to essentially rely on your good looks and charm to get attendees into your booth.

THE SOLUTION:  Leverage your competition’s promotions.  Whenever I’ve had great promo concepts drawing in the crowd by the droves, I often had fellow exhibitors stationed next to me that were peeved.  They would moan and grown.  We were blocking their booth, we were taking people away from their booth… we were in the aisles.  Complaint after complaint and the end result for them was all this complaining was still not bringing their booth any more attendee traffic.

Finally one show, an exhibitor (who had no promotion) got smart and started to grab the mass of attendees leaving our booth and bring them to theirs.  How?  Everyone needs a “foot-in-the-door”, an opening line to engage attendees.  So the company sparked conversation with attendees by talking about our concept and promotion.  It worked very well and within hours they were getting a nice, steady stream of booth traffic.

A great example of leveraging other’s promotion is as follows.  I was at a show ages ago and we had nothing.  No pens, a crummy booth.  We had to write our company logo on bar napkins and hand them out.  Well there was a booth that was giving out Spud Guns.  A Spud Gun is a cute, small gun that you plug the nozzle into a potato, it takes a potato chunk, and then through compressed air it shoots out the chunk of potato.  The Spud Gun directly linked to their company (not going to get into the full details) so it was a great promo concept.  For some reason or the other, this company did not provide potatoes.

So the item was cool but people did not get fully excited as they could not see the gun in action.  SO WE TOOK ACTION!  We went out and got probably about 100 lbs of potatoes.  We were then able to lure attendees with a Spud Gun to our booth by giving them a potato.  It worked great, although we obviously could not logo the potatoes.

Conclusion:  Don’t give up.  There are two ways to look at working a booth.  You could stand there and be bored (and complain) or you can network.  The latter not only makes time go by quicker, but will also get results for your company, and in theory, get recognition for yourself and team.  When armed with the minimum, find a booth armed with the maximum and piggy-back off their marketing concept and investment.
 

Tags: competition, conferences, leverage, promotions, strategy, tradeshows