Exhibiting at 50 or more trade shows a year can boost your corporate brand with key audiences across multiple industries, and fill your sales pipeline with viable opportunities all year long.

But if your program is hampered by inefficiency and inconsistency, you risk squandering your sizable investment and leaving money on the table. Not to mention leaving you personally frustrated and burned out.

Here are 8 ideas to help you maximize the value of your trade show program when your calendar is jam-packed with shows:

1. Standardize Processes

Rather than start from scratch when planning for every show, save time by having a proven process that you follow over and over again.

• • The most basic way to do this is with master checklist of your pre-show, at-show, and post-show tasks. You reuse a proven list of all the activities you need to do, and then check them off as you get them done.

• • Templates save you time having to recreate the documents, spreadsheets, forms, and emails you repeatedly use to manage and communicate your program needs.

• • Going the next level is putting all that into a timeline, which is shorter for smaller shows (two or three months) and longer for larger shows (6 months to a year). And then building all your shows’ activities into a single calendar.

• • Even better, leverage the greater efficiency and results generated by organizing, tracking, and reporting your trade show tasks with project management software. This will help you better communicate and collaborate with your team, plus stay focused on your tasks, resources and deadlines. It’s an investment that can reap huge rewards in higher productivity.

Another powerful way to standardize your processes is to organize your shows into tiers. You create a standardized plan, agreed upon ahead of time by management, on how you will support shows in each tier level:

• • Tier 1 shows are your main industry shows or top vertical market shows, that get the most budget, larger exhibits, heightened management involvement, larger booth staff teams, and substantial marketing support.

• • Tier 2 shows are your medium-sized or medium opportunity shows, where you exhibit in a small island or a 20- or 30-foot inline exhibit. They can be the larger booths at smaller industry shows.

• • Tier 3 shows are 10×10 foot booths at small, regional, and vendor shows, where you bring a portable display to reach the small audiences at most of the events on your schedule.

2. Delegate When You Can’t Go to the Show Yourself

With dozens of shows on your schedule, there is no way you can attend all of them. Here’s how you can still ensure consistency:

• • Appoint a trusted on-site lead (salesperson, marketer, product manager) with clear authority to make decisions at the show.

• • Prepare a show plan and manual, including exhibit layout, activities, giveaways, schedules, contact info, lead handling instructions, troubleshooting procedures, etc.

• • Confirm all logistics early: shipping, drayage, electrical, internet, setup/dismantle labor, and lead retrieval.

• • Preview the exhibit at your exhibit house, and track its shipment to ensure it arrived at the show hall, and then to your booth space.

• • Give either in-person or remote booth staff training before the show happens.

• • Beyond your point person, also define who does what: demo responsibilities, customer meetings, social media updates, tech support, etc. This may include extra support from your exhibit house. Provide credit card authorization if purchases or emergency rentals are needed.

• • Prepare for emergencies by documenting what to do for lost displays, technical problems, missing badges, and the like. Make sure every team member knows who to escalate issues to on-site.

• • Ensure the show’s leads are entered into your company CRM and properly followed up.

3. Streamline Logistics and Vendors

You don’t have time to mess around with a rotating cast of inexperienced logistics vendors. You need partners who get it done right the first time.

So, consolidate your exhibit shipping, storage, and show services with preferred partners who have earned your business through their consistent reliability.

Then negotiate multi-show contracts for even better rates.

4. Design Your Exhibit(s) for Flexibility

With so many shows on your schedule, using the same exhibit design for every show is going to be less effective, because the exhibit shape and graphics won’t fit your goals or audiences. Instead, create a flexible library of exhibit structures and graphics that lets you better adapt to a variety of needs, booth sizes, and messages:

• • Flexible Layouts: Our clients who exhibit in island exhibits at many shows often choose a mostly modular exhibit structure (with some custom accents) that reconfigure into a variety of footprints. That lets them choose open exhibit layouts for lead generation, and more enclosed meeting spaces for conferring with clients, partners, and key prospects.

• • Flexible Graphics: Here’s the balancing act with exhibit graphics: Using the same graphics for all shows saves money and keeps your brand consistent, versus using new graphics for every different vertical market or industry show to better tailor your messages to appeal to each audience. Fabric graphics on modular exhibits let you more easily swap out large format graphics with greater visual impact.

• • Match Your Exhibit Structure to the Opportunity: Bring your best exhibits (custom and custom modular) to your biggest shows with the most valuable audiences. Then choose modular exhibit for your mid-level shows, and portable displays for your smaller shows with the smallest potential ROI.

Centralize your exhibits and graphics within a cloud-based asset management platform to reduce redundancy, avoid reorders, and ensure the right exhibits are used for each show.

5. Create Multiple Reusable Marketing Campaigns

When you have dozens of shows, it’s common to get so overwhelmed with the logistical details that you simply skip pre-show and at-show promotions. That would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater, as promotional activities are often the key to a successful show.

That doesn’t mean you have to create a new campaign for every show. When you find a campaign that works for you (for example, our clients have succeeded with educational presentations, gamified product demonstrations, giveaways and drinks themed to their brand) you can reuse the campaign at different regions or different industry shows. The campaign will be new to them, even if you’ve already done it 10 times.

So, rather than having no promotional campaigns, or dozens of different ones, aim for a handful of reusable campaigns that help you achieve key goals:

• • When brand building is the key goals for certain shows

• • When lead generation is the main focus, and

• • When strengthening relationships is your main motivation

• • When introducing new products is your top objective

For example, you could offer a chance to win a prize playing a game to drive more leads, or invite clients to enjoy a cocktail party to strengthen key relationships.

Have scaled down reusable campaigns that are easy to execute for your Tier 3 shows, too.

6. Offer Multiple Ways to Train Your Booth Staff

You will need an ever-changing army of booth staffers for your big trade show schedule. The sheer volume of booth staffers requires multiple training solutions:

• • Train overall booth staffing skills in person a week or more before the show, especially if your company employees are all local.

• • Train over video conference, especially with distant booth staffers and hired exhibit staff.

• • Train in the show hall or exhibit early the day of the show.

• • Train with recorded training videos, or interactive training modules.

• • If your company is spread out geographically but gathers once a year for an all-employee meeting, ask if you can offer an in-person booth training session there.

7. Consider Centralized Lead Capture and CRM Integration

Make it even easier on your booth staff by providing them with a universal lead capture system, so they don’t have to learn new lead retrieval software for every show.

You can also set up your universal lead capture system to synch with your CRM for standardized lead scoring (if you have Marketing Automation), and auto-routing to sales and marketing workflows.

Your trade show leads will be quickly categorized, followed up, and reported on consistently.

8. Continuous Measurement and Improvement

Keep an eye on budgeted versus actual costs. Pull all your trade show expenditures into a single, master dashboard showing real-time spend versus budget per show and year-to-date. Be able to drill down into budget categories like freight, labor, travel, and more.

To better manage your big show schedule next year, it’s even more important to identify shows that deliver great results, and poor-performing shows that warrant dropping.

Evaluate all your shows against your agreed-upon business KPIs:

• • Which shows provide the greatest ROI?

• • The most brand exposure?

• • The lowest cost per qualified lead?

• • The most meetings with current customers?

Then, measure what worked or didn’t work to achieve your KPIs:

• • Which booth staffers took the most qualified leads?

• • Which promotions and activations brought in attendees, and which were duds?

• • Which parts of your exhibits were well used, or ignored?

• • Which vendors were reliable, and made things right when faced with challenges?

Some of this will come from your measurement data, and some will come from post-show debriefs with your booth staff team.

Pull this all together in a consistent format, and report to management your wins, gaps, and improvement actions.

Building Your Scalable, Repeatable Trade Show Program

We hope you adopt the proactive planning shared in this article, and that it helps you generate greater efficiency and higher ROI with your multi-show trade show program.

If you are looking for an exhibit partner well versed in helping large trade show programs succeed, contact us to learn more.