Consider the benefits and risks to your business when deciding to exhibit your product or services. These will be different for each event, however, there can be a lot to gain from directly promoting your product in person.

Benefits

Exhibitions and Conferences are generally targeted at an industry and the people involved are interested in that industry. Exhibiting at a trade show is a great way to directly communicate with your target market and create brand awareness.

Exhibitions are open to a large and sometimes diverse range of audiences (including the general public). This provides you with the perfect platform to promote your product or service to a broader group that may have little or no knowledge of your products and services.

Depending on your type of business, product and market testing can be carried out at trade shows and exhibitions to gain industry or general opinion about your offering.

Being involved in a trade show or exhibition can provide you with opportunities to branch out to business-to-business trading and create a customer database from the visitors to your display booth.

Risks

It is also important to ensure that you have thoroughly researched attending a trade show or exhibition, including your key staff members, suppliers or business advisers in your decisions.

There are risks involved and you need to be aware of those during the planning stages, including:

• Most Exhibitions or Trade shows require 4-5 days of your time.
• Travelling to trade shows can be costly.
• Displaying at a trade show can also be costly.
• There will probably be quite a bit of competition at all shows.

Choosing the wrong trade show to exhibit your business’s products or services can result in displaying to the wrong audience at an expensive cost to you . Poor promotion, or Exhibition Display can mean the costs of attending the trade show outweigh any revenue you gain.

Deciding to attend

You might find attending trade shows is worthwhile if you have:

• enough funds to cover attendance, exhibition display and other associated costs
• worked out how many prospects and clients you’ll need to obtain to generate a return on your investment
• visited a trade show at which you’re contemplating exhibiting and you’re confident that a suitable number of contacts attend
• worked out a way to capture people’s attention
• sufficient product literature.
• follow up post event.