Damion Angus, MD of Montgomery, discusses how organisers and venues are ensuring exhibitors perform to the best of their ability at exhibitions, through exhibitor training or briefings, to improve the visitor experience.
We have always felt exhibitor training is of paramount importance and we have constantly strived to integrate this into our events. Twenty five years ago we produced our first of three videos ‘How not to exhibit’, aimed at helping exhibitors understand how to effectively attract, engage, process and follow up potential clients in order to ensure that both parties get the best out of a face-to-face environment. In a quest not to make it too dry (and to ensure exhibitors watched it!) we heavily invested in the production using comedians such as Jack Dee and John Cleese to get the message across. This worked extremely well.
While an organiser cannot force an exhibitor to watch educational content or attend a briefing, I believe it is in our interests to ensure that we provide some medium that at least allows our exhibitors to get hold of this information should they wish to do so.
In the UK we work with specific agencies and people who specialise in exhibitor training and we offer this service free of charge to our clients, on all our big shows.
In South Africa, we are lucky there is a culture of attending exhibitor briefings and we hold these for almost every event we run. With a bribe of a free breakfast or lunch, some entertainment and the chance to network, we get up to 75 per cent of our local exhibitors attending. While a proportion of the briefing focuses on the operational and logistical aspect of exhibiting, we ensure we have dedicated teams talking about the value of marketing to the visitor and how best to maximise their experience.
We try to inspire our exhibitors, and get them to ensure their objectives for the show tie-in with the expectations of the audience. The message we try to get across is that if you focus on your visitor this should result in higher lead generation and ultimately a better ROI. A point both exhibitors and organisers need to take on board.
This was first published in issue 4/2013 of EW. Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
