Are you asking the right questions when briefing your exhibition stand design to meet your aims?
Exhibition planning doesn’t need to be time-consuming with an outcome that’s expensive and hard to measure. Planning will help set out a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how to achieve it.
Download our free guide and worksheet to writing an exhibition brief now and start asking the right questions to really nail your next exhibition brief and help meet your objectives.
7 ways to turn trade show objectives into a reality
How can an agency or design and build contractor provide the best solution If you don’t know what you want to achieve? Here’s a teaser of seven questions that we help you to ask in the free writing a brief guide and worksheet:
1. Make sure everything you do works towards your objectives
There are many reasons why you may want to exhibit. From the launch of a new product or service, hosting clients, advance prospects down the sales pipeline through the exhibition experience or gain more sales. Your objective should become the basis of everything you do – when planning your exhibition, while attending it and even post-show.
2. Plan and prioritise integrated activities to engage, educate and entertain
An exhibition brief is a way to plan and prioritise all elements and activities involved in your campaign. It enables you to integrate activities such as hospitality, competitions, demonstrations and digital engagement with great stand design and the advertising and PR campaign surrounding your attendance at the show – all to meet your core objective.
It also gives a well-rounded picture to those who are designing your stand for what they need to achieve.
3. Keep your campaign messages simple and on point
It’s easy for exhibitors to stumble into ‘the default approach’ – creating a stand that tries to say everything and lacks focus on a core theme.
While a great brief co-ordinates all the working parts of your exhibiting programme, it also helps you to focus on core elements and clarify which message you want to tell to who. A few simple messages are far more powerful than a hundred.
4. Understand who your event audience is and what messages you have that will solve their problems
Understanding the exhibition’s audience and comparing this to your own customer profile should help you establish who you will target to meet your objectives. Are they new prospects you want to draw and engage? Are they existing customers that you want to host and cross-sell to? You can then choose the right message to explain to this targeted audience how you intend to solve their problems with your brand, product or service.
5. Don’t be too prescriptive – it will limit your success
A great brief shouldn’t have all the answers but it should detail your desired outcome and challenge you face when exhibiting.
A good brief won’t list that you want 4 chairs, a table and 3 products on show, it’ll say that you need an area for meetings with existing customers to build relationships and that you want to raise awareness (and gain sales) of your new products. Try putting yourself in the shoes of your stand team to understand how they would want to go about facilitating your objectives.
What tools would they need to facilitate discussions, to add depth and to engage with prospects?
6. Learn from your past experiences to improve
A great plan is built on great research. If you’ve exhibited before, what worked and what didn’t. Did your competitors have a bigger stand than you last year? Be honest – it will make what you do next even better. Knowing your past – warts and all – will help agencies and contractors to evolve your exhibiting programme rather than starting from scratch.
7. Understand what good looks like for you and measure it!
You’ve thought about what you’d like to do, but what’s the desired outcome of your exhibiting activities? You should explain how you will know what success looks like. Measuring whether or not you have achieved your exhibiting objective is really important but often overlooked.
What should you ask when writing an exhibiting brief?
We’ve put together a comprehensive list of these questions and more to ask yourself when putting together an exhibition brief.
By thinking about these questions, you will be able to provide an in-depth view of what you want to achieve from your exhibition. Asking these questions will help your stand provider to be able to meet your objectives.