Creating Your Booth Flow and Attendee Journey in 2023

One of the most impactful and strategic moves you can do for your trade shows in 2023 is to Create your Booth Flow!

If you’re not familiar with the term Booth Flow, it’s just what it sounds like – how to get show attendees to flow through your booth. Another way to say it is the Attendee Journey! And it’s possibly the number one thing you can plan and orchestrate which will make the greatest difference in your results!

The reason Booth Flow is effective is because it incorporates the most critical parts that will make or break your success at a show.
How to engage attendees
What info to capture
How to capture it
What you want people to leave your booth with
The Booth Flow is your game plan!! It includes just three key components:
- First – Get attendees into your booth
- Second – Capture Your Key information – What do you want to capture, and how will you capture it?
  - Is everything you need on a business card? Probably not. Then you need to identify all the info you need and want.
  - How are you going to Capture that info? Figure out a system.
- Third – What do you want them to leave with?
  - Literature/Marketing materials
  - Giveaways
  - What do you want them remembering?
  - What do you want them to experience?
  - How do you want them feeling?
  - Orchestrate how your attendees will enter, experience and exit your booth – and that is the secret ingredient to maximizing your results.
  - Your Booth flow, just like everything else, starts with your Goals. Your goals will help determine your flow.
  - It all starts with making that first contact with an attendee. Don’t rely on attendees walking up to you. You need to have a strategy for engaging attendees.
There are three ways to get people to stop at your booth:
- #1 – Pre-show marketing. Advertising, social media, direct mail, etc.
- #2 – Games, giveaways, attractions, or promotions. Nothing attracts like a spinning prize wheel, a magician, or something that delights the senses.
- #3 – Actually engaging people and inviting them into your booth. This can make the biggest difference in the results you get from your show.
Now you can do all 3 options together to increase your odds of getting more people into your booth, but #3 is by far the most important.
- Never assume that attendees who walk past your booth got enough information to tell they don’t need to stop.
- You may have the best products, innovation, display and employees. But it doesn’t matter if people don’t stop!
- Top 6 things to NOT do in your booth:
  - Give a simple greeting like Hello, how’s it going or how you doing.
  - Asking any sort of yes/no question that has nothing to do with your company OR doesn’t make the attendee think.
  - Say nothing! Just stare at the attendee, have a big smile, and say nothing.
  - Be on your phone and ignoring attendees. Put your phone away while you’re in the booth!
  - Talking with other booth staff
  - Leave the booth Empty. Unless you’re by yourself and have an emergency – NEVER have an empty booth!!
Switch to this one simple technique which will lead to more people stopping and having meaningful conversations with you and your staff.
- For every attendee that is walking by your booth, Ask them a question relevant to your business that stops them in their tracks. One that makes them think even for a split second.
Needs to be a question that gets you a quick answer.
Can be a YES/NO question, but only if it qualifies the attendee.
If they don’t qualify and won’t do business with you, don’t spend your time talking to them. Let them walk away.
- But If they say YES to your question, then great! They qualify and you want to talk to them. Now get them right into the next step of your booth flow.
- The key is this – don’t pick and choose who to ask the question to. Ask everyone you can! As soon as you’re done talking to one person, ask the next one you see.
- In Episode 002 on Staffing Your Booth, talked about running your booth like a restaurant. Restaurants have a front of the house and a back of the house. The front of the house is responsible for greeting, seating and serving the guests. Back of the house takes care of the food prep, presentation and other details.
- Break your booth into two areas – front of the booth and back of the booth.
Front of the booth is where you will first engage the attendees, bring them into the booth and qualify them.
Back of the booth answers questions, conducts product demos, hands out information and more.
- Assign specific roles to everyone working.
- Just like a restaurant, you have to figure out a flow for your attendees. For example, who greets them first, what does that person say to the attendee, what do you want the attendee to do, who do they go to next and why, etc.
- Next step is capturing all the information you want and need. Ask more questions, have them take a survey, give a demo, enter them into a drawing, etc.
Find out the person’s role in the Decision Making process
- Capture the info – determine who will capture the info and how
- Third part of the Booth Flow – what do you want them to leave with. If you have a new product or service you are promoting, then they should know all about it, leave with literature about it, and be signed up for updates.
- The key to all 3 parts of the Booth Flow is consistency! Ask the same questions, capture the same info, put them through the same experience, and have them leave with the same stuff.
You may have 2 or even more flows you put attendees through based on their answers, what type of customer they are or some other variable. Just remember to stay consistent.
- So your homework assignment is to start creating the Booth Flow for your next show! Take your time, train your staff, stay consistent in execution and this can pay off better than anything else you will do!

Want to Create the BEST Booth Flow for your next Trade Show, Expo or Conference?

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