“Why do we go to tradeshows?”
Chances are good that the question has come up more than once in your planning meetings. Money-saving pop-up kits can provide substantial savings over building a custom booth, where costs can quickly run up to $150/square foot. But when you add that to the cost of a booth rental space, travel, premiums, staffing—it all adds up to a considerable sum. By some estimates, trade show spending tops $24 billion every year in the US alone. So the justifying the expense can sometimes be a challenge.
That said, trade shows can be one of your company’s best opportunities all year long to get your product or service out in front of potential customers. Plus they’re an easy way to do a little low-level recon of your competition to see what they’re up to.
So you need to to get the most impact possible out of your trade show spending. Which means maximizing your opportunity to create a lasting impression. Let’s take a look at how custom flags can punch up your presence at trade shows.
Use Custom Flags to Get Found
Trade shows can be bewildering. The sights, sounds, and hundreds (or thousands) of people gathered under one roof can be a lot to take in. From mammoth industry expos like the annual Consumer Electronic Show—where 4500 exhibitors and 182,000 people gather in Las Vegas to check out the latest in tech—to your local business expo, trade shows are all about getting noticed.
So as you think about how to best use your trade show presence, consider the impact that custom-designed flags or banners can create. Sure, your customers can always track you down using the printed map in the show brochure. But giving them a high-visibility landmark to look for when they arrive dramatically increases your chances of being found.
Use Custom-Printed Banners to Freshen Things Up
With even the simplest trade show exhibits costing $1,000 and up, doing a complete redesign of your booth every year is typically well outside the range of most small- and medium-sized businesses’ annual budgets. But to show your brand off in its best light, you need to be able to maintain a fresh, current appearance.
Updating or upgrading your booth with banners and flags brings new visual interest and color to your booth without breaking the bank.
Advanced digital printing techniques and a wide array of durable, long-lasting fabrics in nearly every color imaginable mean that you can likely match your new banners to your existing booth fixtures to maintain your brand’s consistency. Too, advances in display hardware make replacing the flags and banners themselves quick and easy.
This means you can update your look for different shows, or you can change out messaging based on promotions, events, and more. In a short time, you can have a collection of interchangeable flags and messages you can use.
Use Custom Flags or Banners to Drive Show Sales
To add some excitement and sales velocity to your trade show presence, you could use a series of flags or banners at a trade show touting a show-pricing-only discount. You might start with a 15 percent discount on day one, then decrease the discount by 5 percent each day. By “putting some teeth” in your show pricing, you may be able to get more out of your trade show presence than just a handful of business cards.
Punch Up Your Visual Impact
Flags and banners can up the visual impact of your trade show presence by drawing viewers’ attention up and through your display. The color, shape, and motion of freestanding popup flags help set your booth apart from the competition. Your customers and prospects are more likely to see your branding, products, and people.
Compare this to the relative sameness of a table covered with a black tablecloth and product with by a logoed backdrop and it’s easy to see how much visual impact a flag or banner can add.
Frame Your Pitch
Flags and their fixtures create a distinct visual space for your brand. Like a good picture frame makes a portrait more memorable by adding borders on the right and left of the image, a flag’s vertical elements help draw your prospects’ eye toward your display and away from those on either side.
Flags Are Cost-Effective Makeovers
The cost-effectiveness of custom flags and banners cannot be overestimated. Instead of a total booth makeover, adding a few elements to your existing fixtures will bring new life to your investment. Creating high-definition, high-quality graphics is as easy as uploading your graphics to BestFlag. Or you can use Best Flag’s in-house designers to bring your ideas to life. Once you put your flags to work, updating them for whatever reason is a highly cost-effective way to update your look.
Trade shows aren’t cheap. But you can control costs and maximize your impact with colorful, high-visibility flags, banners and signage from BestFlag.com.
