Signing up for booth space in any industry event is an expensive affair and you definitely should strive to make the most out of that investment. This requires loads of planning upfront and you should set up your booth in a way that it attracts maximum visitors. You need to grab the attention of someone in 2-3 seconds as that is the time that it takes for a visitor to walk past your booth.

You need to plan well and you need to ensure that all the basic are done - getting your demo up and running, allocating space for doing the demo, keeping your brochures and pamphlets ready, getting your press releases done upfront, being seen on the show catalogue, writing in advance to potential visitors, making it known in your website about your booth number and a few more things….

You have taken care of all of these things and so has 500 other companies that are going to have booth space in the same event. Apart from doing these basics, how do you essentially differentiate yourself from the crowd?

I’ll give you two examples, one I have been involved in and the other I have heard from a good friend of mine:

1. There is this networking company which took up 30 sq. m space in a major event. They had four table tennis tables on four sides of their booth space with experts on one side of the table. Any visitor who gets to score five points against the expert gets the company’s modem free and anyone who scores at least 1 point gets a t-shirt free. They also had a lounge set up in the middle where the visitors were entertained by the booth representatives. Needless to say, their booth was the most visited in the full event.

2. Me and Satish were involved in helping the onsite sales folks of my former employer set up a booth for an event organized by OpSource. Apart from doing all the normal things like designing the back-drop, doing collaterals, and demos, satish picked up some nice traditional Indian gifts that were to be used as take-aways for the visitors and it was branded nicely just with stickers, considering the fact that we had very less time. This booth had the maximum traffic in the event and the gifts were really appreciated. Even the organizers complimented out team at the booth on the take-aways and ofcourse, our team also picked up a number of valuable leads and connections.

Essentially, one needs to look for differentiation to make the most out of the investment on booth space