Major cities and major trade shows have something major in common.  What, you ask?

Traffic management.  Think about it: in major cities, there are large roads that move huge amounts of traffic quickly and efficiently to specific areas of town, and from there, the roads get smaller and more truncated to feed shrinking amounts of traffic into the neighborhoods.

Just substitute the word “aisles” for “roads” and you’ve described the traffic flow of shows like HIMSS, CES, ISC WEST, MAGIC, KBIS and NAB SHOW.

But that’s not all they have in common.  Small neighborhood  businesses–who don’t have the advantage of being located on a major road– work extra hard to attract customers. And if you’re a company whose exhibit is located in a trade show “neighborhood,” you know exactly how this feels.

MYDISPLAYSOURCE understands this challenge, so here are three ideas/strategies that we use to help our “neighborhood” clients compete with Main St.

Hanging Signs or Banners

Hanging signs send a powerful message to prospects, clients, and the competition; you’re here to get noticed and do business.  “High identification” also helps you stand out in a sea of exhibits and frees up valuable booth space. Sure, there will be a few cost and logistical challenges, but an experienced exhibit design house (ahem) can easily help you solve them.

Reskinning

While this often sounds like a topic for late-night infomercials, one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways you can perk up your existing exhibit it to update the graphics and fabric (known as “reskinning””)  It immediately energizes your brand and gives your structure a vibrant, new look, at very little cost.  An experienced exhibit design house (ahem again) makes “reskinning” surprisingly easy.

Lighting, lighting, lighting

Amidst a sea of distractions on a show floor, if you want your brand image and message to pop, consider LED backlit displays.  The low-heat, vivid colors, and flexibility of today’s LEDs enable you to light just about anything in your exhibit, inside and out. And while the wash of white fluorescent light from the ceiling will enable attendees to see your booth so they don’t bump into it, it will be the focused, colorful, and artfully-designed LED lighting that will give your exhibit the shape, depth, and impact that will help draw attendees in. (Do I need to mention you can get help with this from an experienced exhibit design house?)

Of course, pre-event marketing is also a great tool to drive traffic to your exhibit.  But let’s face it … there will still be a great number of attendees you will not reach pre-event, so while you can’t always control where your exhibit is located, you can control how it looks.

Do that and you could become the new neighborhood “Hot Spot!”