5 Great Business Expo Booth Ideas

Boost Your Traffic With These 5 Business Expo Booth Ideas

You’ve secured a booth at the local business expo. You’ve manned that booth with some of your best representatives so that you can leave an incredible first impression. Yet when the traffic from the expo comes funneling through, almost no one stops by your booth and you feel like you’ve wasted your time and money. That doesn’t have to become a reality with these business expo booth ideas!

Being creative with your business expo booth ideas is the key to having a successful event. By attracting attention to your booth, you’ll create a natural desire in people to investigate because you’ve made them curious. Combine that creativity with your best representatives and you’ll be able to get the traffic you want at your next event.

1. Contact Your Anticipated Visitors In a Unique Way

One of the best years at an expo for my organization was the year that we made an effort to contact as many other organizations and individuals who would also be attending the event. We wanted to focus on promoting our free trade goods that year, so we purchased a very large load of recorders to send out to people. They were only a few cents apiece, which meant they were as cheap as a pen, and then we included a practice song sheet that included a parody of our company’s jingle with the hopes that it would make people laugh.

Not only was our booth the most popular it had ever been that year, but people came to the booth with their recorders in hand to demonstrate their ability to play the song we included. Our sales that year went up nearly 25%!

By contacting people before the event, you’re already placing your booth at the top of their mind. You’re creating desire! Including humor or value by sending them a unique gift will help to further gain their attention… just make sure that what you send to someone makes sense for what your goals happen to be.

2. Make Sure That Your Booth Looks Inviting

Strangely enough, one of the biggest failures I’ve seen in terms of manning an expo booth is a lack of decent lighting. Do you really need more lighting when you’re in a large room that is filled with fluorescent lights? Absolutely! When it comes to business expo booth ideas, changing the lighting to add reds, blues, and greens to your booth can really help it to stand out.

This may take some ingenuity on your part to make it happen. Some business expos don’t allow for electricity to be utilized by a booth. Other expos charge a larger fee to have access to electricity. Our company decided to invest in battery powered LED lights that would help set our booth apart visually so that we could set up anywhere, leave the right first visual impression, and not have to worry about paying extra for access to an outlet.

3. Make Your Booth Be More Social In Nature

With the popularity of social networking ever expanding, people love to be social, anti-social, and competitive all at the same time. You can take advantage of this with your business expo booth ideas by involving your social media influence in some way. Offer people discounts or perks for coming to visit your booth, but only offer them over social media.

You don’t have a social media presence yet? That’s ok – first, you’ll want to begin establishing one. Secondly, you can go about social networking the old-fashioned way. Talk with some of your other booth buddies and develop a fun game that booth visitors can play. You’ll often see product scavenger hunts, but you can do better than that!

Our game involved bringing specific people to our booth to have a representative sign off on the game card that this happened. You had to find people with a red beard, or a goatee, or a shaved head, and then have them stop by our booth. This allowed our representatives to contact more people, everyone enjoyed it because we gave away a lot of company-themed prizes, and every booth that participated got a lot of extra exposure.

4. Shiny Things Are Always Good Things!

People will walk across a desert just because they see something shiny and it makes them curious. We humans are greatly attracted to shiny things, so make your promotional products extra shiny to attract attention! The worst year I ever had at a business expo was the year I was two booths down from a company that put chrome plating on just about anything. They let people touch their products, play with chrome spray paint, and they’d even chrome stuff for people while they waited at the booth.

Now not every business can put chrome plating on stuff. For business expo booth ideas, however, what you can do is increase the curiosity that people have for your booth. Instead of handing out pens, hand out gizmos with flashing lights. Offer bright products at the front of the booth to draw people in. Even a sign that says “Big Sale” in flashing lights will draw people’s attention because it is visually bright. Shiny things will always pay off!

5. Most of All, Don’t Overthink What You’re Going To Do

What causes many business expo booths to ultimately fail is that too much planning goes into them. You really can overthink your strategy and cause yourself to suffer a disaster because you tried to anticipate too many things. Just keep it simple. Business expo booth ideas don’t have to be forever memorable for each visitor that comes by. It just needs to leave a good first impression so that in those first 30 seconds when you and your organization is judged, you come out smelling like a fresh rose, sunshine, unicorns, and rainbows.

With these business booth expo ideas, you too can have a successful booth at your next expo. Implement them today and see for yourself what a little extra attention could bring you!