Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Trade shows are deceptively simple looking. They appear to be no harder than popping up a display, standing in your booth space, and then waiting for all the buyers to waltz in and give you their money. If only it was that easy.

What It Takes To Succeed At Trade Shows

The reality is that trade shows require a wide array of skills, including marketing, planning, organization, communications, team-building, and more. You need an eye for details, and the people skills of a diplomat. You need the creativity of an artist, and the financial drive of an entrepreneur.

You also must build your ability to do specific key tasks for your trade shows to succeed: trade show logistics, booth staff selection, training, and staffing; exhibit design; pre-show and at-show promotions; lead management; and measurement of your program’s results.

Build Your Budding Trade Show Skills

This book provides you with the tools you need to get started on all these areas. Most of all, it provides you with a base level of expectations you can take to heart about the challenges and potential to succeed at trade shows. These insights will allow you to shorten your learning curve and feel more comfortable, even at the beginning of your trade show journey.

Just remember this: all trade show exhibitors were new exhibitors at one time. And while trade shows look daunting at first, you will get through this, and eventually become a veteran exhibitor yourself.

This book contains 25 articles previously published in the Skyline Trade Show Tips blog, and is one of three books in a series for exhibitors at different levels of trade show marketing skills.  The three books are:

Trade Show Tips for New Exhibitors

Trade Show Tips for Inline Exhibitors

Trade Show Tips for Island Exhibitors

New to trade shows? Or have a colleague who is? Then get your free copy of the new book, Trade Show Tips For New Exhibitors, by clicking here.

Need help right now? Contact me: [contact-form][contact-field label=’Name’ type=’name’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Email’ type=’email’ required=’1’/][contact-field label=’Phone Number’ type=’text’/][contact-field label=’Comment’ type=’textarea’ required=’1’/][/contact-form]

Candidly speaking, most exhibiting companies fail to measure the return on their trade show investment due to the fact that there has not been a step-by-step process to calculate it. This may have been overlooked when the economy was booming but is no longer acceptable when budgets are being scrutinized.

At St. Louis Trade Show Displays, I provide my clients with a Marketing ROI CD entitled “Measurement Made Easy!”. The program is embedded with calculators that allows my clients to measure the success of their trade shows & events.

Some of the calculators built into the program include:

• Potential Audience
• Return on Investment
• Cost per Qualified Lead
• Cost per Current Customer Visiting
• Cost per Attendee Demonstration (Introduction of a New Product)
• Cost per Distributor Recruited
• Cost per Visitor Reached
• Cost per Visitor Impact

I’m offering this CD to you at no charge. And, I’ll even provide a brief training to demonstrate its capabilities and discuss how it relates to your trade show marketing plans.

For more information or to receive this Marketing ROI CD, click here.