If you’re like most trade-show exhibitors, you’ve winnowed down your shows to a chosen few – or The Chosen One. You approach this show every year with a mixture of hope and dread. Hope, because you’ll get to press the flesh with people who are interested in what you have to say and sell. Dread, because after committing your blood, sweat and employees to the time-sink known as the modern trade show, what if you can’t get their attention?

(And those pens and mouse pads aren’t getting any younger. Time to ditch the mouse pads, by the way.)

Here’s the deal. You already know that your trade show is a target-rich environment and home to a captive audience, or you wouldn’t be there. The very good news is that very few exhibitors – your direct competition included – know what to do with this fact.

This no time for half-measures – and the perfect time for a little creativity.

Say your new technology can genuinely beat the pants off your competitor’s old technology. Easy to say, but tough to get it to register. But what if you bury that old technology – with a casket, New Orleans style funeral procession, funeral service, mourners, eulogies, the works? That’s what we did for a lighting client, and it lit up the joint, tickled the folks working the show and generated a ton of appointments. (We pulled it off a few years ago, and people are still talking about it.) See some pictures from the event below, just click a thumbnail.

When you think about it, all you need to expand the size of your booth to the size of the show is an idea you can run with. Same client: Different year. Before The Sopranos hit the screen, we came up with a gangster theme that was a huge hit. (Or ‘whack.’ Whatever it was, it killed.) See the The Offer You Can’t Refuse.

Here’s the deal (part 2).

Alpha prospects are busy people with agendas of their own, but they’re people first and prospects second. If you can entertain them somehow, while remaining conceptually connected to your sales proposition, they’ll have a heck of a time forgetting you.

Deploying an awareness & engagement strategy at an industry or consumer event – like we do for clients all the time – can significantly increase your ROI.

So next time, given the kind of scratch you’re laying out just to be there, give them something to remember you by – besides a tote bag. We can show you how.