When placing your brand in front of an audience, such as at a trade show; how much attention do you think you will draw when your presence is identical to last year’s show? Just like women’s fashions, stale presentations get stale responses. You need to stay RELEVANT with your graphics & displays to stay in the game!

What’s even worse is when your prospect wanders into your space to discover what’s new, and you have no supportive visuals. Did you expand your product line? Did you rebrand your corporate appearance? When an established customer visits you specifically to see what’s new and trending, will you be equipped to fully illustrate this to them? Since 2008, the recession challenged and changed our world, while the digital world simultaneously increased competition with easy access information sharing. The good news is beginning in 2013, home sales were shown to be increasing in many parts of the country, new jobs developing; encouraging all of us to stay in the game and compete.

There really is no choice but to stay relevant in this  tweeting, vining, and basically, millisecond infomation-sharing world!

Tradeshow exhibit halls are the places where pre-launches and promos are typically launched into the market.  If your company exhibits no change from last year, then what message are you sending? When you do this, you actually ARE sending a message; but its likely not the one you want to be heard. It may be more obvious than you think, as others can see you are in a holding pattern, including your competition.

One of the easiest and most economical ways to overcome this problem is to give your booth a new skin. Give it a fresh set of graphics! You may not have re-branded your company logo, but you still need to share relevant graphics. What about reconfiguring your booth? Might you also subtract or add a little to give it a fresh new look? Add some attention grabbing element to your exhibit (scantily-clad women are no longer considered acceptable), add splash in perhaps your give-a-ways or a surprise element to your space.

Just like the locomotive pace of digital technology, you will need to stay on that train and move forward in a way that is relevant to the world today. Just like in the start up days of your company, a leap of faith was taken. In a somewhat similar manner, you will need to hit the REFRESH button with your presence at trade show exhibit halls. Hopefully, you’ve added  social media marketing techniques to your marketing approach as well. Are your tweeting new messages about your new product and are you sharing pics on FB and Pinterest, sharing shots of this years’ booth? You must look alive and vibrant, and you must engage! Social media is the way to go for “inbound marketing.” However, know there is nothing that replaces the value of “outbound marketing’s” face-to-face relationship building. You need to draw on both these techniques to remain successful in the marketplace. Have great-looking graphics that POP, hit the’Refresh” button this year! The graphics on your booth typically will  adapt to becoming lobby graphics for the times in-between shows. Either way, this small investment in graphics and displays for gaining new customers and maintaining your current ones should be labelled mandatory in your marketing toolkit!