It’s a mixed bag when it comes to large companies and trade show planning, with many teams opting to hire outside help while others decide to make a go of it themselves. While this decision naturally depends on the available internal expertise and resources you have, there are always clear benefits to working with top creative firms. If you’re looking for trade show advice to up your game (and your results), here’s why engaging a qualified partner can make all the difference.
Maximizing Value
Every business leader cares about their ROI, and trade shows are no exception. Well, there’s no better way to maximize ROI than by ensuring every person involved is spending their limited time working on their unique strengths. But, this isn’t always what happens.
When an enterprise organization, for example, tries to tackle their trade show planning internally, the wrong people often end up handling tasks for which they’re not equipped. Your marketing manager may have to offer trade show booth design tips, while their real expertise is in digital marketing. Or even if you have a trade show specialist on staff, they might be required to set an overarching strategy rather than focus on their real strength, execution.
The point is – keep your people contributing the most value they can by engaging a third-party creative partner to take care of the rest. This way, your partner will know exactly what they’re doing and can loop you in as needed. In the meantime, you and your team can stay focused on your most important work and out of the weeds. Case in point: would you rather handle the work in which you’re most skilled, or take care of details like submitting electrical layouts and hiring labor? We thought so.
Gaining Access To Cutting-Edge Trends
Unless you’re actively entrenched in the trade show and event industries, it’s easy to miss hot trends. For instance, you may have heard about virtual reality (VR) and wanted to get your hands on some of this tech for your next show. But, upon digging into the details, you found the options are seemingly endless and the details overwhelming. Instead of this trend becoming the next best thing to get you major trade show results, it became an enormous waste of your time and left you behind the ball with all of your other activities.
This is another area in which the top creative firms shine. Not only do we have our fingers on the pulse of innovative ideas, but we also know the ins and outs of how to execute them. If you’ve heard of cool trends you want to try, we can turn them into reality. Or, we can inspire you with ideas we have in mind and then bring them to life, too. Either way, you get the benefit of being able to successfully tap into fresh approaches and lead the pack, without having to learn about every new trend yourself.
Buying Experience
They say you can’t buy love, but you can certainly buy experience – and all the advantages that come with it – when you work with a creative partner. No matter how many trade shows your internal marketing team has helped with, there’s no way they will have as much experience as a creative company with decades of dedicated trade show strategy and execution under their belt. Specialists have immense value in any area, and the same holds true with trade shows and events.
For one, an experienced partner has worked with countless clients over many years. As a result, we have immense breadth and depth of firsthand knowledge about what works and doesn’t work at shows. We also have amassed industry-specific insights that you simply can’t access unless you’ve had the same level of experience.
For example, a client recently wanted to incorporate a massive hanging sign into their booth design. Since we knew the venue well, we knew it wasn’t equipped to handle such a sign and were able to advise them to take a different path. They saved a great deal of time and money through this one instance, which came directly from our years of experience.
When it comes down to it, some of the best trade show advice is to work with a top tier partner who knows the space backward and forward. Looking for the top creative firms? Give us a call!