Exhibition events offer you and your business a chance to reach a large number of people with your brand and messaging. However, this is only successful if you attract attendees to your stand, which can be difficult in a sea of stands and competitors. The design of your stand is critical in attracting an audience and standing out from the crowd, which is why a bespoke exhibition stand design is often the way forward.
By using a bespoke design, your stand will be engaging and completely different to your competitors, drawing attention to your company.
At Extreme Group, we have designed hundreds of memorable stands for a range of industries, helping each company steal the show. In this blog, we take a look at how to design a bespoke stand that will help you captivate your audience and be the star of the show.
Understand objectives
Before starting your design process, you need to understand what it is you are trying to achieve at this event. Ask yourself “What are the results of a successful show?”
This could be simply talking to a lot of people, capturing the data of a set number of people or getting a certain number of sales.
Your objective will direct the design of your exhibition stand, so you need to make sure you are clear on this before delving in.
Understand your audience
With objectives understood, you then need to think about who you are trying to attract. Again, this will direct your design of the stand.
Often one of the best ways to do this is to create personas of your audience. Create three, four, or even five fictional people that encompass the characteristics of your audience.
For example, a running brand trying to sell shoes at a sportswear exhibition might have one persona that is the following:
- Male
- Advanced runner
- Competing in marathons
- Middle-aged
- Married
- Competitive with himself and always trying to beat his Personal Bests
By creating these personas, you can put yourself in their shoes and think about what they might want from an exhibition stand.
Think about key messages
Now you have an audience in mind you need to start thinking about the key messages you want to get across in your stand.
An exhibition stand can be limited in space, so it is unlikely that you will be able to fit everything about your brand and products in it. Write down a few messages that you think are relevant to your audience and then prioritise them.
This will help you later when it comes to the layout of the stand.
Start working on layout
Once you have all of the above sorted, you can start working on the actual design of your stand.
The first step of this would be to think about the layout of your stand. For this, you will need to know how much space you have and where your stand will be.
Understanding where in the exhibition arena your stand will be is incredibly helpful because you should make the most of it. If you are on an inside corner or in the middle, can you put information on either side of your board, or if you are at the side, how will you separate yourself from those next to you?
When designing the layout of your stand, you want to refer back to your objectives because this will determine what sections you have. If you are looking to capture attendees’ information, you will likely want stands where you can do this, either in person or through an iPad or interactive screen. Alternatively, if you want to sell items, then you will need to display your products.
Create a floor plan of all the elements so that you can visualise how your stand will work and think about the journey an attendee will take throughout the stand to ensure it makes sense and is easy to navigate.
You want your stand to be dynamic once you have an audience member there, so include interactive elements or utilise some experiential marketing strategies to get people to engage with your stand and representatives.
Information layout
You might find that this next step happens naturally simultaneously with the previous one because they can often work together.
When you have a rough idea of the floor plan for your bespoke exhibition stand design, you should start thinking about content placement. Where will you put each piece of content, and how will you demonstrate it?
If it is a chunk of text, where is the best place to situate it so that people can read it without getting in other people’s way? Where will you put images so that they make the most impact? Or where will products sit so that they are obvious, and attendees can reach them?
This process will determine how much information you can have in your stand and will get you thinking about the flow of your stand, making sure you create a journey that makes sense.
Refer back to your list of messages, and use the prioritisation to figure out where to put each message. If needed, drop one. Don’t try to shoehorn something that won’t fit because it could make your stand feel cluttered.
Put together visuals
Of course, all this work will mean nothing if you can’t capture your audience’s attention.
Humans are visual beings, and colours and images will capture their attention. So once you have an idea of where everything is going, you need to start thinking about how you will use colours, images and your branding to grab attention.
You will need to use your brand’s colours to create a brand identity so that audiences who know you will recognise you and new audiences will recognise you in the future. While doing this, also think about the placement of your logo; you want to make sure people will see it from every angle, so make sure it is in more than one location.
Imagery is also essential to your brand. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words, so make sure your pictures match your message.
Finally, think about how you are going to light your environment. Use backlighting to highlight your logos or spotlights to highlight key pieces of information. Don’t rely on the lighting from the venue as this is likely to drown you out. Lighting will draw people into your stand.
Get expert assistance on your bespoke exhibition stand design
Designing a bespoke exhibition stand can be hard, as there are so many elements that need to be balanced while avoiding the pitfalls. This is why hiring our team of experts can be incredibly beneficial.
We will design and build a custom exhibition stand that will capture your brand identity and messaging in an engaging and dynamic way that will grab the attention of attendees and encourage them to visit your stand to learn more about your business.
Extreme Group provide a comprehensive service that includes working with you and your team to design and build the stand, as well as ship your stand to where it needs to be and manage the stand at the event.
We have years of experience creating bespoke exhibition stands for a range of clients that work in a number of sectors. We use our knowledge and experience to create attractive stands that will convert.
Get in touch with us to discuss your requirements and learn more about working with us. Call us on 01202 620550 or complete our enquiry form to request a callback from one of our experts.
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