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CHAPTER 3

PLANNING

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

—Abraham Lincoln

If you’ve decided having read the first two chapters that trade shows have a strategic role to play in meeting your organisation’s objectives, you’re probably eager to just get on the trade show floor and start talking to all those great new contacts. Hang fire though, great results from trade shows don’t happen by accident and the more you can put into the planning and preparation for your events, the more you are likely to get out. Just as Abraham Lincoln knew the most effective way of chopping his tree down was to invest the time to get his tools right, the more time you can dedicate to getting all your trade show tools in shape, the more likely you are to attract the right kind of visitors to your stand, and actually recognise them when they arrive.

Why visitors visit

Before we get too deeply into, and too excited by, your own planning, we want to challenge you to flip your thinking into your customer’s world for a moment – the more you can ground everything you do in solving your customer’s problem, the more likely you are to have a meaningful conversation with them. Visitors aren’t going to engage in a conversation with you because you like your product or service, or to do you a favour – they’ll keep talking because you’ve listened and identified their needs and are showing how you can help solve them. However, here’s the science bit that shows from research the reasons why visitors attend trade shows in priority order:

• Exposure to new products and services

• To get more information on a specific product or service

• To reinforce or confirm existing buying decision

• To buy something

• To keep up to date on industry trends and innovations

• To make more industry contacts

Ninety-one per cent of attendees state that exhibitions impact on their buying decisions and product placement.

(GraphiColor Exhibits, 2017)

When to start planning

It’s never too early to start thinking about how you will exhibit at a show, even if you don’t even have a trade show in mind yet. If you’re a first-time exhibitor and wondering whether trade shows are the right strategy for you, take the time to imagine what your trade show stand might look like, the sorts of conversations you would want to have, the type of potential and existing customers you might want to meet there and the outcomes you would want to achieve. This initial thinking will help contribute to a clear, strategic plan for your event, that informs a number of decisions you will make as you move through the planning process. Keep that vision and those conversations in your mind, write them down to keep yourself grounded in the reasons why you’re investing all the time and money that will be needed to deliver brilliantly. If you’re a seasoned exhibitor and you’re wanting to generate more effective results from your events, think about the previous events you’ve delivered. What worked, and didn’t for you? Which elements do you recognise you’re weaker in? The more you can pinpoint the reasons why your trade shows aren’t working as hard for you as they could be, the better chance you have of being able to understand how you can execute them more effectively next time.

To put a more specific timescale on when to start planning, ideally give yourself 12 months ahead of the show dates to plan effectively. This might sound like a luxury, especially if you’re a business owner with responsibility for every aspect of operations, or if your role as trade show project manager is just one element of a hybrid responsibility. The word we use here is ‘ideally’ and 12 months is a fantastic lead time if you have it. If you don’t, whatever the length of time before your show, you can still plan and improve your outcomes. Even if it’s only two weeks until your event, you can still take the ideas in this chapter and put them to good use to enable you to deliver a more impactful and effective show. In fact, we’ve run Exhibitor Bootcamps on the morning of a show opening and exhibitors have told us they still learnt something that changed what they did during the day that impacted positively on their results. In short, start as early as you possibly can but never think it’s too late to start either.

3.1 SMART objective setting

We so often hear that exhibitors have no way of evaluating trade shows and therefore they can earn the perception of being a money pit with no measurable return on investment. It’s certainly true that trade shows can be harder and longer-term to evaluate than the effectiveness of other tactics such as pay-per-click via social media, discount promotions or television advertising. However, harder and longer-term does not mean impossible, it just means it requires more effective planning up-front to ensure that you’re clear about what you are trying to measure.

On average, companies allocate about 32% of marketing budgets to events and their stands. However, 70% have no specific objective for attending those events!

(Levin, 2017)

However, let’s stick up for trade shows for a moment, as they can become a very easy target for dismissal in comparison to more ‘measurable’ tactics such as those mentioned above. Quite often social media or email campaigns are measured on a return on an objective, such as number of re-tweets, opens, click-throughs or likes. Where an organisation does not have a direct e-commerce platform there is no way to judge how those metrics have converted to actual cash purchases. Equally, television or radio advertising can drive awareness and approximate numbers for how many viewers or listeners may see or hear an advert can be measured. However, again it is difficult to measure how many of the eventual purchases of a product have been influenced by the media that the consumer has digested. And be honest, how many of us just store TV programmes and fast forward through the adverts these days? Finally, in respect of promotional discounts, these may be the most transparent in judging the effectiveness of a marketing tactic by driving additional sales but without investing in deeper research around customer metrics, it is difficult to identify how many consumers were going to buy the product anyway, how many are cupboard-filling and won’t buy for several months and how many are impulse purchases driven by the promotional activity. However, in all these instances it is easy to measure achievement of objective, for example:

Brand A deploys a social media campaign to drive awareness of its new product. The overall campaign is intended to:

a. drive interested buyers to the website to learn more about the product and

b. convert this interest to a purchase in their local store.

The campaign will consist of:

• Sending a targeted email to 50,000 customers on its mailing list.

• Upweighting Tweets to five a day, increasing two-way conversations and investing in Twitter advertising.

• Starting an Instagram account, posting two images a day and running some sponsored content.

• Creating a weekly blog post about how its product is being used by consumers in unusual and interesting ways.

The social media campaign will run in parallel to consumer sampling activity, the retailer’s own marketing activity and promotions and general PR.

In this example, it would be straightforward to attach measurement metrics to the objectives such as number of opens of an email, click-throughs to the website from Twitter ads or views and shares of blog posts or Instagram. What would be much harder to calculate are the resulting sales of the new product based on the social media campaign on its own, as it isn’t being run in isolation. As we have already discussed, trade shows shouldn’t be run in isolation either but as part of a fully aligned marketing campaign. Therefore, what can be measured accurately and effectively is the cost of achieving objectives that contribute to an overall return on investment. Assumptions can be made on the number of consumers who subsequently go on to purchase a product and this can contribute to a deeper discussion about return on investment, but it will be based on a number of hypotheses based on possible consumer behaviour.

No doubt a number of highly skilled marketers will argue that there are very many platforms, software and expert resources available that can measure the effectiveness of campaign activity very accurately, which is a fair point. If you run no marketing activity at all and sell ten widgets a week at £10, then spend £100 on some activity that increases sales to 30 widgets a week, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out a return on investment – every £1 invested has earned an incremental £2. But will those buyers who bought it once buy it again in future? Is it reaching a new audience or people who bought it anyway? Why did it only increase sales to 30 and not 50? Much ROI analysis can tell you what happened in relation to a limited number of direct elements but fails to look deeper into the why or how and implications for the future. We’re not here to argue the merits or otherwise of measuring different types of marketing activity, it’s simply to say don’t let someone fob you off with an argument that trade shows aren’t worth investing in because you can’t measure ROI when so many other marketing tactics get away with measuring objectives achieved and not actual ROI.

How do you measure a trade show?

Phew, now we’ve got that out of the way – there’s absolutely no excuse for not setting some SMART objectives for your trade show activity and there are most definitely ways you can measure whether your event has delivered what you set out to achieve. When we ask exhibitors, ‘What’s your objective for attending a trade show?’, we so often get the response, ‘To meet people’, and that’s about as much thought as goes into it. If that is genuinely your objective then undoubtedly, you’ll achieve it, just through meeting security when you arrive, the bar man at the hotel, a bloke in the toilets who’s at a different event in the same venue and the cleaner who tidies up your stand but can any of those people contribute to the delivery of your overall business objectives? Getting SMART about your objectives focuses your mind for every subsequent decision you make about how to spend money on a show and how that contributes to achieving your overall business strategy. But how do you get SMART in the context of trade shows?

Looking back to Chapter 2 remember why you decided that trade shows were even the right tactic for your business in the first place – what is it about a trade show that makes you confident it can contribute to the overall delivery of your plan?

Some of the big marketing ideas (macro objectives) for exhibiting at a trade show might be:

• Entering a newly identified market with an existing product or service

• Launching a new product or service into an existing market

• Entering a new market with a new product or service

• To drive brand awareness in a current market with existing and prospect customers

• To be part of the industry conversation

• To collaborate or initiate a conversation with partners who could be useful

These are not so great examples of objectives for exhibiting at a trade show but ones we have heard before:

• Because we always have

• Because the organiser is a mate of the boss

• Because it was cheap

• Because I fancied a trip to Spain/USA/Birmingham

• Because the competition exhibit there (that’s a tough one – see below)

The first step in setting SMART objectives that actually mean something to your business plan is working out specifically why you’re exhibiting and that should be fairly obvious from the thinking you did in Chapter 2. Picking up on exhibiting because ‘the competition are’, it is admittedly a tricky argument. There is some credence in the suggestion that if your competitors are exhibiting at a show it is likely to attract the same visitors who you could do business with and that provides you with an audience. It is equally worth noting that you may be conspicuous by your absence and as shows impact the buying decision of 91% of visitors (GraphiColor Exhibits, 2017), by not being there, the only decision a potential customer can make is to buy from someone else. However, exhibiting just because a competitor is doesn’t make a strong enough objective on its own. What if your competitor is much bigger than you, with more money to invest, making you look inferior by comparison even though you know you have a better product? Is there a more creative and less comparable way you can engage with them to demonstrate your quality? What if your competitor is only exhibiting because they always have without thinking about whether it’s right strategically for them – it’s a bad reason for them to exhibit and a doubly bad reason for you just to copy. So there might be a good reason to exhibit if your competitors are, but you probably need to explore more deeply if there are other reasons why it’s right for you. Also, remember the visitor’s perception of a company and brand that isn’t supporting an industry show can reduce by as much as 5% (Russo, 2017).

If you’ve figured out the big reason why you’re going to invest thousands, potentially tens of thousands of pounds in a trade show, congratulations, but you’re only halfway there in terms of SMART objectives and there’s still a bit more work to do. Just knowing you want to launch in a new market doesn’t tell you who you’re going to meet, how many you want to meet or how you’re going to communicate your expertise and start building those relationships that are eventually going to lead to profitable sales. So how do you set SMART objectives for what is considered such an intangible tactic? It might help to sit down at this point and imagine being back in the office the day after a show, talking to your colleagues who ask you ‘So was it a success?’. Imagine having an answer ready for them that starts ‘Yes, because…’ while you’re able to reel off all the great things that have happened and how they will specifically contribute to the delivery of your organisation’s business plan.

So here are some ideas that might inspire you towards setting your own SMART objectives:

• To distribute 3,000 samples of our new product variety to visitors

• To host five demonstrations with 20 interested buyers at each session

• To contribute to a live panel discussion featuring two of the key thought leaders in the industry

• To make contact with five high potential prospects and secure a follow-up meeting

• To give out literature and contact details to 100 interested browsers

• To ensure 2,000 visitors leave with our giveaway that reminds them what we do

• To meet the senior team from our top five customers

These are just generic examples and there will be hundreds of other examples that are possible based on the industry you work in. We will talk more about definite buyers and interested browsers in Chapter 4, but not every visitor to a show will be a potential buyer of your product, however well you’ve done your research, so it’s useful early on to manage expectations and understand what’s realistic in terms of contact. However, if you do know the average order value for customers you can start to add some more specific figures about the number of contacts you’re likely to meet, potential conversion rates and possible order values that start to bring your objectives to life, especially for a sales team who are always focused on the numbers.

Another comment we often hear in relation to setting objectives is ‘we want to meet everyone who attends’, which is an admirable if somewhat challenging aspiration. This is so often the default position for exhibitors who think that trade shows are all about meeting as many people as possible without considering the resource needed on the stand to talk to that many people, never mind the sales force required to follow up with them. In reality, research shows that on average 16–20% of a trade show audience will be able to buy your product or service (Bailey, 2004). Without any targeting or filtering, gathering contact details for every random visitor who attends the show becomes a value-less experience. Exhibitors fail to engage with visitors who have a real prospect of buying in the haste to move on to scanning the next person’s business card. It’s worth remembering that just one or two high-value contacts at a show could return more in orders than the cost of the show itself. We will go into how to engage and filter visitors in more detail in Chapter 4.

So, just to clarify, when setting SMART objectives, the key rules are:

• Specific: Who, what, how many?

• Measurable: Can you record it?

• Achievable: In the context of the resource you have available.

• Realistic: Be honest.

• Timely: Within the parameters of the event.

We’re not suggesting setting objectives is easy, it isn’t, especially with so many variables but it is massively helpful in informing all the difficult decisions you’re about to make and in evaluating how successful you’ve been. And don’t forget our earlier point about return on investment versus achieved objectives – we’ll talk in Chapter 5 about evaluating ROI, return of objective (ROO) and cost of objective (COO) which can only happen 6–12 months after a show (unless you’re lucky enough to be actually selling at an event). The benefit of setting these objectives is that it will give you an immediate review of how effective your tactics have been at the show long before any business has been done.

The top three sales-related objectives at trade shows are related to relationship management and engagement. Above all else, exhibitors want to meet with existing customers, key customers and prospective customers according to CEIR.

(Thimmesch, 2013)

3.2 Which show?

Were you baffled by the number of global exhibitions we mentioned in Chapter 1 – 31,000 globally certified every year (UFI, 2014)? And that’s not counting all the smaller regional and business networking events you might get the opportunity to participate in. So how on earth do you decide which is the right show for you? Well, the good news is that if you’ve worked out what you want to achieve from investing in a trade show, the process of selecting one (or several) should be much easier and then it’s just down to research, research, research! Think you don’t have time to do the research? Isn’t it better to spend 2–3 hours researching the right show rather than waste the time, money and energy involved in being at the wrong show for three days?

One point to clarify before we proceed is the terminology around trade shows and events, which can be confusing, even to exhibitors who have been working in the industry for years.

• Exhibition: Quite often confused with a public installation or museum collection, but in this context, an event with a number of organisations with similar interests, products or services in a central location, with the aim of attracting visitors who are interested in purchasing those products or services. May also include some elements of live theatre or knowledge exchange.

• Trade show: Can be used interchangeably with exhibition in this context, although little ‘trading’ is actually done in modern trade shows, with the emphasis being more on meeting contacts and establishing relationships.

• Seminar: Content-led events or elements of trade shows that focus on sharing expertise and adding value through educating and engaging with a visitor.

• Conference: Speaker-led event where the primary reason for delegate attendance is to hear from a range of experts or industry stakeholders regarding the latest news, insight and developments in a specific industry. Smaller exhibitions may take place around a conference venue from leading suppliers to the industry.

• Vertical trade show: Focuses specifically on an industry attracting only suppliers and exhibitors within a particular industry; e.g., automotive manufacturing show that only features those exhibitors who have a product or service which is used in the supply chain for making cars.

• Horizontal trade show: A broader show focusing on a wide range of industries that may be of interest to a general population; e.g., a regional business show that features a range of exhibitors over various industries attracting visitors with a wide range of interests.

Who?

In selecting the most effective trade show to meet your aims it will help if you can match the attendees with the ideal customer you want to attract. Any event organiser should be able to give you detailed information on who attends their shows (and if they can’t you should really question the quality of their data). This gives you an idea of their visitor’s general nationality, buying responsibility, type of organisation, etc., which will help you determine whether that’s an audience you’re interested in or not. By understanding who you want to meet and engage with, you should be able to align whether the audience of a specific show will bring you what you’re looking for. Additionally, you may want to consider the size of the audience that a show attracts. It is tempting to invest in a show that quotes the biggest audience, although these can often be the most expensive. A note of caution, however; quoted audiences are just that and past performance is no guarantee of future success so just because an event organiser says they have ‘20,000 registered’ visitors it doesn’t necessarily mean they will get 20,000 through the door. If you want to know more about an event’s visitor numbers don’t be afraid to ask the organisers. If they’re doing a good job of getting people through the door they shouldn’t be afraid of sharing the details with you. And don’t always discount the smaller events, these may be more economical and if they’re less busy this may give you a better opportunity for deeper conversations with visitors.

A great source of insight into which events might be most appropriate for you are your existing customers – consider asking them which their ‘cannot miss’ events are. Quite often exhibitors focus only on meeting new prospects at trade shows, completely forgetting about their current contact base. Trade shows provide a fantastic platform for showcasing your latest product or service and building relationships with customers, as well as demonstrating your investment in the wider industry. The opportunity for your senior team to meet several contacts in one place over a couple of days can be massively more efficient than trying to organise individual one-to-ones in the field. Equally, busy stands always attract more people – we’re generally pretty nosey people in business and scared of missing out, so if you invite existing customers to your stand it all helps to make it look busier and attracts more passers-by. Referring back to our previous point about exhibiting where your competitors are, it’s worth researching which events they are investing in to see whether there is any potential for your business.

The quality of attendees was ranked above the numbers attending a show when looking at how to select the right event according to research carried out by CEIR: The Changing Environment of Exhibitions with a score of 84%.

(Thimmesch, 2013)

Where?

These days international events are much more achievable (see Chapter 7) and the opportunity to sell to global markets is more attractive than ever. Before you take the plunge and sign up to exhibit abroad, however, remember that the majority of visitors to most shows will be from the domestic market. If you’re not able to service the market, or if the market doesn’t exist in the country you’re looking to exhibit in, then it’s worth seriously considering whether that’s the right trade show for you. If you decide to exhibit at an international trade event you will also need to clarify exactly who you’re looking to connect with at the event – is it a distributor or agent or are you looking to service the market yourself directly? It is also worth considering which markets international visitors are coming from and whether you have the resources to service these markets – if 40% of visitors are coming to a show in Europe are from South-East Asia but you don’t have the capacity to service that location, would it be worth you investing in a show that for 40% of visitors you cannot supply? Aside from just the implications of visitor origin, there’s also significant additional cost and complexity involved in exhibiting at shows outside of your domestic market, so any investment needs to work harder than ever.

How?

In researching potential trade shows it’s useful to understand how the event organisers advertise and recruit visitors and how hard they are going to work on your behalf. Event organisers want you to have a successful event as it increases your likelihood of rebooking, as well as acting as an advocate to other organisations in your network – so don’t be afraid of asking relevant questions. Organisers should be happy to share what they’re planning on doing and how they’ll get people through the door, as it’s all part of the package you’re paying for. If they’re reluctant to talk about what their marketing plan is or give your vague references about campaigns it might be worth questioning whether they are a partner you want to work with. It’s worth reviewing who their previous exhibitors were and even asking for contact details so you can get some feedback from companies who have previously exhibited. GDPR regulations permitting, if you can get the details of a couple of visitors to speak to about their experience and what they are wanting from the show this will also add insight to your decision.

Reviewing the list of speakers at an exhibition will give you a good indication of the how well the event is respected within the industry – are the speakers likely to be of interest to or influence the type of customers you’re hoping to meet at the show? If it’s not in the public domain then ask the event organiser to send you through the seminar programme and speaker bios of previous events – if nothing else, this gives you details of industry leaders that you might want to contact ahead of the show and invite to your stand if you do exhibit. In these initial engagements with an event organiser you should also get a sense of their culture and how supportive they are going to be in helping you achieve your objectives. In the budget planning section, we will talk more about how you can stretch your budget through asking for added value elements such as speaker slots on live features, or inclusion at networking events and these initial discussions with organisers will give you a flavour of how open they are likely to be to such requests. All good quality event organisers will be keen to work in collaboration with you to help you achieve your objectives rather than just sell you space – after all if you add value to their show by being creative, it all benefits their visitors.

In addition to the general marketing campaigns that the event organisers will run, it is also useful to research who the media partner is. If there isn’t one, this eliminates another channel through which you can publicise your participation in the show and it is worth questioning why the relevant trade publications aren’t covering the event – is it not seen as credible, is it not newsworthy? If there is a media partner this gives you a fantastic opportunity to speak to a broader audience about why they will benefit from coming to see you at the show as well as driving brand exposure to a much wider audience (see Section 3.8, pre-show marketing).

Researching a show is going to take a bit of time and some clever questioning of the event organisers, customers and previous exhibitors but if you are thinking about investing significant sums of money then you want to be sure you’re investing it where you have the highest potential returns… which brings us neatly onto budgets!

3.3 Budget planning

We may have mentioned it before, but trade shows cost money, there’s no escaping the fact. When it comes to budgeting it’s not about how much money can you save, but ensuring you have a realistic budget in the first place and making every single penny work as hard as it possibly can. Trade shows aren’t the place to cut costs as it will show in every element and reflect on your brand image, but they are the place to get creative and find efficient solutions.

Most of a trade show budget is spent by the marketing function of a business. However, few company marketers have had formal trade show or lead generation training and 38% turn to colleagues for the best information on how to do their jobs better – Source: Tradeshow Week Magazine survey.

(Skyline, 2010)

Trees provide a useful analogy to think about budgeting for trade shows in demonstrating the amount of invisible cost that goes into delivering an event. Yet only with solid roots and investing in some of the non-visible elements can the branches and leaves flourish.

Whether you’re a business owner setting your own budget or working in an organisation and having to influence a senior team to invest, it’s crucial to consider the root costs that can all have a huge impact on your show delivery and hence your return. For example, if you don’t take the time to train your team on the SMART objectives, stand operations and opening lines, how will they know what they’re trying to achieve and how to engage with visitors. Equally, you may design a high-impact and engaging stand but if you don’t factor in any costs to transport or build it, how do you intend to get it from the warehouse to the show floor? Businesses don’t react well to surprises or uncertainty so in ensuring that you have all the elements factored into your budget you’re at least informed, even if it is a scary number. And it’s a much scarier number when no one is expecting it and it only reveals itself as part of the final evaluation.

In starting to pull together an approximate budget, it’s helpful to start at a macro level and think about how much you might allocate to each of the key areas of budget. Here’s a guide that outlines an average breakdown at that level:

Element	% of budget
Buying space	30%
Stand design and build	25%
Additional services	10%
Staff and travel	20%
Promotional	10%
Miscellaneous	5%
Total	100%
Contingency	20%

Buying space

The next section will focus on the process of booking space and how you can add value to your budget in this area. On average the rates for booking space at UK events are around £300 per square metre and shell schemes around £350–£400 per square metre. For more detailed explanations of shell and space options jump ahead to the next section, but shell schemes often come with a number of additional features such as walls, lighting, power, etc., making them more expensive than just buying the physical space. If you’re considering investing in space only, the overall cost of delivering the whole show is often estimated at around three times the cost of the space. For example, investing in a 5m × 4m space at a rate of £300 per square metre = 20 × £300 = £6,000. Therefore, the budget expectation for delivering at this scale could be around £18,000, giving you a grand total of £21,600 including a contingency element.

For shell schemes, the average spend is roughly double the cost of the space. For example, investing in a 3m × 3m shell at £375 per square metre = 9 × £375 = £3,375. Therefore, a total budget expectation for delivering at this scale could be around £8,100 including your contingency pot.

Stand design and build

Again, we will discuss some of the elements to consider when briefing an agency on developing your presence at the show, but from a budgeting perspective it is sensible to allocate around 25% of your funds for this. Even if you are investing in a shell scheme it’s important to invest in creating graphics boards and displays that reflect your brand personality professionally. We’ve seen A4 print outs stuck to dirty grey wall panels and they really don’t look impressive. This chunk of budget also mentions ‘Build’ as we’ve worked with clients who blew all their cash on creating beautiful stands but had to sacrifice a member of staff on the stand as their travel and accommodation expenses covered the shipping and building of the stand that wasn’t in the original costs (and yes this is bad practice from the agency who didn’t include these costs in their proposals).

Additional services

The one that always catches exhibitors out and ends up becoming a money pit if you leave it to the last minute. Depending on what you negotiate when you’re booking your stand you may or may not get a whole range of services such as power, electrics, flooring, furniture, etc., included in your package (more often than not, it isn’t included). Equally you may design a stand incorporating the latest tech that requires good broadband access without realising this is all to be paid for. There are a whole host of things that crop up under ‘additional services’ that you might need, and if you leave it until the day before the show opens they can cost you up to 20% more than booking in advance.

Staff and travel

Just to be clear we’re not talking staff salaries here as this is just about the costs you need to add into your physical budget, but don’t underestimate that’s a less visible cost to the business. However, if your staff do require additional or enhanced payments for working weekends/Bank Holidays, these and any associated costs will have to be accounted for within your budget. As good practice some organisations also include any costs associated with backfilling essential roles vacated by stand members while at the show as this is a legitimate cost to the business.

If you’re not sure how many staff you need, a good estimate is one person per eight square metres with an absolute minimum of two. So, taking our 20 square metre example from above, the ideal number of people would be two or three and with nine square metres you would need two. In addition to the on-site costs of travel and accommodation, it’s worth allocating some cost within this budget for staff training – even if that’s only two of you, take the time to review your plan before arriving on-site. Any more than four members in your team and it’s worth getting everyone together in one place around two weeks prior to the event for a full briefing.

Promotional

As much as the event organisers will work hard to get visitors through the door, it’s your job to get them to your stand. We’ll talk in more detail later about pre-show and at-show marketing, but it is advisable to allocate some funds for this, whether it’s creating giveaways for the stand or placing adverts in relevant trade magazines. Thankfully in our digital age there’s a lot that can be done for free (apart from the cost of time) on social media and with online marketing that can help you and save money on this element. Included in this section would be any samples (including transportation costs) you plan to distribute and the cost of any promotional activity or deals you will be running.

Miscellaneous

Having a miscellaneous line in your budget just gives you some breathing room for ‘stuff’ that will inevitably come up, such as a networking dinner or client entertaining, additional venue charges, etc., that you can plan for but don’t know about until you start really getting into the finer detail of the preparation.

Contingency

We’re suggesting 20% contingency, which is an absolute ideal. If you can only stretch to 10% then it’s still a great safety blanket for when your new MD decides he wants to attend all four days and needs accommodation at the best hotel in town (it happens) or when one of your staff drops the iPad on the first day and you need to replace it to actually capture all the brilliant prospects you’re meeting (this also happens). The most frustrating use of contingency we’ve experienced is when a major, global food producer with a well-known brand created an amazing ice-cream parlour as the heart of their stand. In 2019, if you book power it is usually for 24 hours but there were times when you had to be sure you ordered a round the clock supply otherwise the electricity to your stand got switched off at 6pm. Unfortunately, the exhibitor hadn’t read the Exhibitor Manual and didn’t book 24-hour power and despite a massive budget and an impressive stand, they were serving milkshake instead of ice-cream on day two of the show. They had been delighted with themselves that up until the show opening they hadn’t spent any of their contingency – it soon disappeared as they went about ordering new show stock via a rapid overnight courier and paying for additional power (at a 20% premium above the pre-show booking rate!). Things will crop up, things will go wrong, that’s just exhibitions, but with enough planning and some contingency you should be able to sort them out relatively easily and cheaply.

Once you have worked through your estimated total investment and allocated costs to each of the elements then it’s time to start really drilling down into the detail of where you’ll be spending your money. If you’ve bought this book alongside The Exhibitionist Project Manager Journal we’ve included some budget templates in there that should help you start to plan how and where you’re going to spend your money – but keep it flexible as things will change. After the show, it’s always worth hanging onto your budget trackers both for evaluation purposes and reviewing what you need for trade shows in the future.

Money pits

There are ways you can really waste money on trade shows so here are our five key watch-outs to help avoid wasting budget on non-value adding activity:

1. The last-minute service orders: Power, furniture, lighting, etc. will all cost significantly more once you get on-site, or even when you’ve missed the deadlines! Understand what you need early on and get it ordered at the best (early bird) rates.

2. Consumables: Most event venues will offer basics such as cleaning materials, wipes, paper cups, etc., all of which you’ll be able to buy much cheaper from local stores. If you’re taking your own stand, lob a hygiene box in the car with a few essentials for wiping down at the end of the day. If an agency is building your stand, ask them to pack the essentials on the lorry and bring it with them.