Getting the Most Out of a Trade Show Booth: 22 Tips

The founder of Silicon Alley Reporter and Mahalo.com offers pointers to entrepreneurs who are planning to run a booth at an industry event

By Jason Calacanis

Editor's note: This column is adapted from a recent e-mail Calacanis sent to his newsletter subscribers.

The following points about getting the most out of a trade show booth are general and are intended to apply to everything from working a generic folding table at a 50-person SIG (special interest group) event to a custom-built booth at a trade show such as the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This list is far from comprehensive, but I did query several event executives to get their insights. If you have ideas to add, please e-mail me or post a comment, and I'll include them in a follow-up.

1. Define your goal. To maximize your investment in a trade show booth or conference table top, you must define your goals. A booth is but one of many ways to obtain value from a conference. In fact, even attending a conference can be a way to help your company grow. It's important that your entire team, from marketing to product to the CEO, agree on the goals long before committing to an event.

The most frequent reasons I've heard for hosting a booth are:

a) To obtain leads or clients

b) To develop relationships with existing clients

c) Branding

d) Educating people about your company and products

e) To support your industry or the people throwing the event

f) For the fun and enjoyment of the team attending the event (i.e. "a junket")

g) Recruiting

h) Courting investors

Since your goals are going to determine your strategy, you need to think about which one or two of these are the most important to you. Most companies will look at the list above—the same list that's in the marketing materials that sold you on getting a booth—and say: "Yeah, we want to do a little of all of that."

If you focus equally on each of the goals above, chances are you're not going to succeed in any real way at any of them. You need to prioritize them. I like to force myself to define one clear goal, such as "We're here to find an investor," or "We're here to get press for the latest version of our Web site, " or "We're here to find a CTO."

As an exercise, consider forcing your team to select your top three goals and assign a percentage of importance to each.Then ask your team to select, hands down, the most important single goal. If you have too hard a time with this task, you probably shouldn't be hosting a booth—unless of course it's 1999 or 2000, and you feel like burning through venture capital money as quickly as possible to take your company public.

2. Pick the right event. The goals mentioned above are specific and they target specific categories of people: venture capitalists, clients, employees, or the press, for example. Now that you know your goals, you need to find out which conference to sponsor. Most professional conferences will either provide a list of companies represented at the event or a nice shiny pie chart with demographics.

You can take their word for it, or better yet, you can do your own research. The best way to figure out what trade show to go to is to ask the types of people you want to meet what trade shows they love.

For example, developers might tell you about eTech (sorry to hear it's not returning), SXSW Interactive, or Gnomedex.

If you're looking to meet angel investors, you might hear back about TechCrunch50 or Web 2.0. From CEOs, you're gonna hear the The Wall Street Journal's D Conference or TED. You get the idea; ask the people who actually put their money down for tickets about which events they love.

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