Powerful Exhibit Marketing: The Complete Guide to Successful Trade Shows, Conferences and Consumer Shows

By Barry Siskind

A complete guide to successful trade shows and exhibitions

Trade shows, consumer shows, product launches, sporting events, and other opportunities to interact face-to-face with customers have become an important part of the marketing mix. Recent studies show that the percentage of the total marketing communications budget spent on event marketing ranged from over 9% to a staggering 29%. In 2003, North America alone hosted over 13,000 trade and consumer shows, each one with hundreds of exhibitors, and thousands of visitors. Beyond traditional trade shows, there are countless other opportunities for exhibitors to interact with their customers directly and improve the bottom line, such as mall displays, corporate events, road shows, and permanent displays.

Well chosen and executed events can shorten the sales cycle significantly and put you miles ahead of the competition, but you need to have an exhibit plan that's well thought out, organized, and executed. While some large organizations have a dedicated exhibit staff, often the role of exhibit management lands on the desk of an unsuspecting, overworked, or unwilling sales or marketing person who needs to get results from their exhibit investment, but doesn't know where to start. The Power of Exhibit provides the step-by-step advice you need to exhibit successfully. This definitive guide to trade shows and other event marketing shows how to set objectives, budget for your event and measure its success in ROI, choose the right show and find the right audience, turn leads into business, design booths, work the show, gather information and intelligence, and much more.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0470834692
• ISBN13: 9780470834695
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Wiley
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.6" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Very Helpful, worth reading and extremely valid tips provided in easy to understand language.

Easy reading with valid tips. There is not much more to say. This book really helped us with our trade show planning strategies. We purchased 2 books and this one was by far the better one. We could not even get through the first chapter in the other book.

Everything it promises!

This book is fabulous! I recently attended my first tradeshow with some business partners. We had less than two months to prepare for the tradeshow and very little money. We relied almost entirely on this book to prepare us for the show... and it did! The book does an excellent job of outlining the types of folks you meet at a tradeshow and how to handle them to maximize your qualified leads. It also discusses how to prioritize your spending. There were no surprises when we got to the show and we were amazed at how on target the book was. We felt more than prepared. I highly recommend!

Excellent Hands-on Exhibition Guide

I find this book an excellent guide to exhibition and exhibit marketing. The book gives an in-depth review on exhibit marketing, which is quite a unique area in marketing that you do not usually find on regular marketing textbooks. It also provide an A-to-Z guide and tips to participate an exhibition. One thing that is very interesting about this book is that it was written based on factual figures and statistics from the field. On each important "quote", it usually comes with backup figures. So it does looks somewhat like reading an academic thesis or research article, but with an relaxing written style, still the reader can feel as if the author were casually discussing the issue in front of him/her. The author seems to want the reader to know that he is not making those issues up, but he has taken them from the real world. It is a must for experienced exhibitors, who wishes to seek new advices or ideas on how to continue improving their success at the fairground.