193 – Shaping Your Booth Process and Attendee Journey in 2023

One of the most impactful and strategic moves you can make for your trade show in 2023 is to create your booth process!

If you’re not familiar with the term “booth flow,” it’s literally what it means – how you keep trade show visitors flowing through your booth. Another way to put it is the “visitor journey”! This is probably the most important thing you can plan and schedule, and it will have the biggest impact on your results!

· The reason why the booth process is effective is that it integrates the most critical parts that determine your success or failure at the show.

How to attract attendees

What information to capture

How to capture it

What do you want people to take away when they leave your booth?

Booth Flow is your game plan! It consists of only three key components:

First – Attract attendees to your booth

· Second – Capture your key information – What do you want to capture, and how?

Does the business card have everything you need? Probably not. Then you need to identify all the information you need and want.

· How are you going to get this information? Come up with a system.

· Third – What do you want them to take away?

Literature/marketing materials

Free gifts

What do you want them to remember?

What do you want them to experience?

· How do you want them to feel?

· Carefully orchestrate how attendees enter, experience, and exit your booth—this is the secret to maximizing your results.

Your booth process, like everything else, starts with your goals. Your goals will help determine your process.

· It all starts with the first contact with attendees. Don’t expect attendees to come to you. You need to develop a strategy to attract attendees.

There are three ways to keep people at your booth:

#1 – Pre-show marketing. Advertising, social media, direct mail, etc.

· #2 – Games, giveaways, attractions or promotions. Nothing is more appealing than a spinning prize wheel, a magician or something entertaining.

#3 – Really engage people and invite them into your booth. This can have the biggest impact on your trade show results.

· Now, you can do all 3 options at once to increase your chances of getting more people into your booth, but option 3 is undoubtedly the most important.

· Never assume that attendees walking past your booth have received enough information to tell them they don’t need to stop.

You may have the best products, innovations, presentations and people. But if people don’t stop, none of it means anything!

· Six things you should never do at your booth:

Use simple greetings like “hello,” “all the best,” or “how are you.”

· Ask any right or wrong questions that are not relevant to your company or will not make attendees think.

· Say nothing! Just look at the attendee, smile, and say nothing.

4. Being on the phone and ignoring attendees. Put your phone away when you are in the booth!

5. Talk to other booth staff

6. Leave your booth empty. Never leave your booth empty unless you are alone and have an emergency!

· Switch to this simple technique that will get more people to stop and have meaningful conversations with you and your employees.

Ask questions to every attendee who passes by your booth Relevant to your business Let them stop and think for just a moment.

· It needs to be a question that gets you a quick answer.

· Can be a yes/no question, but only if the participant is eligible.

If they are not qualified and willing to do business with you, don’t spend your time talking to them. Let them go.

But if they answer “yes” to your questions, that’s great! They’re qualified and you want to talk to them. Now move them straight to the next step in your booth process.

The key is – don’t be picky about your questions. Ask everyone you can! Once you’re done talking to one person, ask the next person you see.

In episode 002, Staffing Your Stand, we talked about how to run your stand like a restaurant. A restaurant has a front and back. The front is responsible for welcoming, seating, and serving guests. The back is responsible for food preparation, food presentation, and other details.

· Divide your booth into two areas – the front of the booth and the back of the booth.

· The front of your booth is where you first engage with attendees, usher them into your booth, and qualify them.

· Behind the booth to answer questions, conduct product demonstrations, distribute information, etc.

Assign specific roles to each staff member.

· Just like a restaurant, you have to have a process in place for attendees. For example, who greets them first, what that person says to the attendee, what you want the attendee to do, who they go to next and why, etc.

The next step is to get all the information you want and need. Ask more questions, have them investigate, do a demonstration, input them into a drawing, etc.

Find out the person’s role in the decision-making process

Capturing the information – determining who will capture the information and how it will be captured

·

The third part of the booth process – what you want them to take away. If you are promoting a new product or service, then they should learn all about it, take away relevant literature, and sign up to get the latest information.

The key to all 3 parts of your booth process is consistency! Ask the same questions, get the same information, take them through the same experience, and have them take away the same thing.

You may have 2 or more sessions for attendees based on their responses, their customer type, or other variables. Just remember to stay consistent.

So your homework is to start creating a booth process for your next trade show! Take the time, train your staff, and stick with it. It will pay off more than anything else you do!

Want to create the best possible booth flow for your next trade show, expo, or conference?

• Click here to contact me and together we can help you get more leads and better ROI than ever before!