Your Exhibition Stand – Your Website Personified

• Kelly Edwards (Nimlok Portable)
• Monday 6 January 2014

Are you treating your exhibition stand with the love and care you give to your website? Today, online marketing is a key element of any promotional activity. With a generation of marketer used to the instant interaction and response of the online world, it's important to remember that exhibitions face the same marketing challenges. But the scope of an exhibition is also very different, as instead of being lost in cyberspace hoping to get found, you're physically surrounded by potential clients and interested onlookers.

But in both cases, your goal is (or should be) identical. You want to increase visitors (traffic) in order to convert them to customers. So your exhibition stand deserves every bit as much care and attention as your website.

Catch the Customer's Eye with Something Interesting To Look At

In both cases, websites and exhibition stands are there to inform and attract. It's easy to simply throw out some words about how excellent the team is and how great the service is, anyone can do that. But unfortunately the human mind doesn't absorb fat blocks of text particularly well. This is why design is so important – visual impact counts.

A great looking professional stand or website exudes confidence and reliability. This generates trust. Well-presented information is much easier to digest, whether it's your websites headers and infographics or your exhibition stand's displays and graphics.

Measuring success

Identifying distinct customer behaviour as "conversions" is probably the best measure of success. So for your website, it's likely to be purchases, calls to your helpline or newsletter subscribers. Translated to your exhibition stand, this is probably going to range from sales, to making contact with a qualified lead to simply taking basic contact details. In both cases, all this information contributes to developing a propermeasure of your return on investment. If you can't measure your ROI, you can't tell whether the exhibition was a success or failure and if your website is working or not. If you can't do that, you can tell if your marketing activity is paying its way.

The Crucial Ways Your Exhibition Stand Is NOT Like a Website

It is now possible to integrate direct customer service into your website through webchat type tools, but this is never going to beat the direct face to face interaction of staff on an exhibition stand. On the other hand, if you're on the end of a webchat conversation, you can't see your advisor multitasking, getting distracted by Twitter or Facebook or chatting to his colleagues in between calls. But you can see a bored, distracted sales team casually chatting amongst themselves or playing on their phones at an exhibition. That's just worth bearing in mind.

At an Exhibition Your Audience is Already a Qualified Lead

Apotential customer won't arrive at your stand at an exhibition unless they've already invested time, and probably money, to get there. This is a self-selected, pre-qualified audience and is therefore likely to be a much warmer lead than someone who stumbled across your websiteduring a random online trawl. You also have the ability to create additional qualified leads by arranging to meet potential clients at your exhibition - a level of customer service that just isn't possible online.

But this doesn't make it a given that your live "bounce rate" will be better than your online one – exhibition visitors are every bit as likely to walk straight past your stand as they are to jump straight of your website. Which takes us straight back to why your site and your stand both need to be enticing.

Same but different

These similarities and differences should help your approach to your marketing strategy – particularly if you're an experienced exhibitor creating a website or if you're a digital marketer attending your first exhibition. The technologies may not be the same, but the strategies are. Once you appreciate this, then it becomes so much easier to integrate both into a seamless marketing plan - before, during and after your exhibition.

www.nimlok.co.uk/portable-displays

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