How to Attract an Audience to Your Trade Show Booth - Part Two

Thanks to all that read and reacted to the first Smells Like Cookies newsletter.

This newsletter looks at a few more tactics (successful and unsuccessful) I've used to attract an audience to a trade show booth.

This first tactic seemed like a winner (just like the cookies).

The approach was simple - have highly polished business colleagues present interesting topics at the booth.

Their public speaking abilities and the topical relevance of their presentations would surely stop those passing by in their tracks and get them to take a seat.

Much to my dismay, the seats stayed mostly empty.

The problem was my speakers weren't comfortable starting their presentation with no audience.

This never happens where they typically present - in a conference room.

In this environment, the room is often full before the presentation begins.

My speakers also weren't comfortable trying to recruit people in the aisles.

Again, this isn't part of the conference room environment.

Like our cookie-scented candles, using highly-polished business colleagues alone to attract an audience to our trade show booth was mostly a failure.

After these failures, it was obvious what was needed to get more attention in this particular show environment - build a booth with a large physical presence (including an elevated 30-foot-long stage), create an entertaining and out-of-the-box introductory session, and hire a professional to run the intro session and introduce presentations and hands on demos by business colleagues to come.

Success!

The intro session attracted crowds so large that the aisles bordering the booth were impassable.

I won't go in to the out-of-the-box approach we used for the intro session, but as the division VP at the time said after, it was "a promotable offense."

A colleague suggested an idea for the session, and we co-developed it.

My colleague was later promoted.

So was I.

I hired another professional presenter, Christine Alt-Parry , to help draw attention to our CES booth.

CES is one of the biggest trade shows in the world.

For those that have had a booth at CES, you know it is very challenging to attract a crowd.

The show is sensory overload, and it's difficult to stand out.

We tried to attract a crowd at our CES booth for several years with just product.

The product was popular, and we had a decent number of visitors.

However, one year at CES we were launching a new version of our product and wanted to generate energy and excitement at the booth.

Leaning on past experience, we left it to the professionals to do this.

We hired Christine, a veteran product presenter on TV shopping networks, to host a game at the booth that utilized the new product.

Christine and a colleague did an excellent job attracting an audience and hosting the game.

The product launch was successful.

We received worldwide media attention and a significant amount of orders.

Hope you found these stories interesting.

They were certainly memorable parts of my marketing career.

Planning one more take on the trade show world in the next newsletter and then we'll move on to some other facets of marketing.

[ If you need marketing leadership on a fractional/contract basis, or want me to cover specific topics in this newsletter, reach out or leave a comment. ]