Networking, thought leadership, speeches, education, and a nightcap at the ritzy hotel bar while hanging with your colleagues and new connections. We’re talking about our favorite time of the year: trade show season.
We all attend them, allocate budget for them, and hope we can compete in the sea of other hopefuls. Although HIMSS and AHIP feel like they’re a long way off, it’s important to start developing a game plan now.
While your success at a trade show depends on several factors, the one thing that has the biggest impact is your trade show booth. Think about it:
Your sales rep dives into the ocean of prospects, works their magic, and generates enough interest to get people to visit your booth. Once the prospect is there, do you want them to say, “Wow, yeah, we totally need to work with these guys,” or would you rather they glance around and say, “I’ve got a meeting, but I’ll come back.”?
We’ll help you aim for the first response in this scenario. Here is how to create a trade show booth that gets your target audience’s attention— and gets them to stick around for a pitch.
Design for your audience
When most companies design a trade show booth, especially in healthcare, they believe that splashing their logo and color palette on the space is enough to attract their audience. You probably feel like you must ‘stay in the box’ to be taken seriously.
The trouble is that almost everyone does this, so there is no head-turning, no standing out; you just end up looking like everybody else but with a slightly different theme.
Instead, try thinking about what would make YOU decide to stop at a booth and have a look around. For example, if you’re a wearable tech company trying to attract CIOs from large Payers, try infusing your design with interactive elements.
Think of ways to engage your audience with your wearable; how can you make them stop and say, “That looks cool, I want to try it.”?
Business collateral, but make it fun.
We all love a brochure with a business card stapled to it, but how can you take this a step further? When that CIO drops your brochure into their cloth trade show bag, you want them to remember your company enough to fish for that brochure when they get back to the office.
One great way to do this is to use clever copywriting. Yes, words matter as much as the visual appeal of that trade show booth. Instead of letting your prospect drop that brochure in their bag without a second thought, get a chuckle out of them, incite some emotion, and help them remember you.
Great copywriting could also be used on the booth itself. Maybe get them to stop with a bold statement and a challenge. Print the results of their challenge and add that to your brochure. This is just one idea of an interactive way to go beyond traditional marketing collateral.
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Get creative and be fearless.
The most memorable trade show booths in healthcare are the ones that take prospects out of the traditional box. Whether that’s by using clever design strategies or getting creative with words. If you’re already allocating a lot of your budget to visiting trade shows, why not allocate a little more to making a bigger splash in the networking ocean?
If you want to level up your trade show experience, contact us to learn more about what the right creative partner can do for you.
