What are the benefits of using a booth agency?

Lydia Owen • 7 min read

What are the benefits of using a booth agency?

Anyone who takes responsibility for planning expo and congress attendance knows what it feels like when that first email comes in from the organisers, telling you it’s time to choose your plot from the floorplan of the upcoming exhibition.

Even if you’re an old hand at congresses, the prospect of producing an exhibition project can feel slightly overwhelming because there’s no doubt that exhibition attendance can take a significant amount of time, planning and effort. This can be slightly stress-inducing if you already have hundreds of other tasks on your daily to do list.

This is where enlisting the support of a specialist booth agency can prove invaluable. Not only will they have the experience of navigating their way through all the initial documentation — the exhibitor manual, the health and safety documents, all the communications from the organisers, and the venue and so on — they will also likely have the expertise to help you strategically plan your attendance to really maximise your spend.

From helping you select the booth plot that best suits your objectives and suggesting the optimal flow for delegate traffic, to devising and producing delegate engagement activities and creating really impactful branded booth content, an experienced booth agency will know exactly what questions to ask to ensure that your booth stands out in a crowded exhibition hall.

So, whether this is your first time exhibiting, you’re making the leap from a shell scheme to a larger space only plot, or you’re a seasoned professional who’s managing multiple booths all of the time, it can be really helpful to have an agency on board who can provide an end-to-end service; a team who you can effectively hand over your exhibition booth project to — allowing you to get on with what you do best!

Here’s a summary of the tasks you can realistically expect your booth agency to take off your hands.

Scoping the project — and planning the delegate journey

Typically this will include:

• Digesting your brief.
• Confirming what your overarching goals are for attending the exhibition.
• Potentially providing recommendations for plot selection.
• Confirming what type of booth you’re going for e.g. shell scheme, modular or bespoke build.
• Confirming what additional services you might need such as booth hosts, lead retrieval systems etc.
• Confirming what features you want your booth to have:
  • Do you need to zone areas?
  • Is a split required between the medical, commercial and corporate teams if this is a pharma booth?
  • What space is needed for print and digital content?
  • What AV do you need?
  • What type and style of furniture do you want? Is any other dressing needed?
  • Do you need storage space or separate meeting rooms?
  • Do you want some kind of delegate engagement activity to help draw attendees onto your booth?
  • Do you want dedicated catering?
  • Does there need to be some kind of demonstration area?

There will be lots of initial questions but all this information needs to be factored into the booth layout right from the start — for both budgeting and design purposes.

Comms with the congress organisers

As mentioned, an experienced exhibition agency will know exactly what questions to ask the congress organisers so there are no nasty surprises for you further on in the planning process — or when the crew turns up onsite to start the build! They’ll draw on past experience as they start the planning process and they will be asking questions that might not seem immediately obvious:

• Is your booth overlooked? Will you need a muslin ceiling over your store cupboard so that delegates looking down on your stand won’t have a line of sight into any closed off areas?
• To what height are any neighbouring stands building? Do they need to make sure they bring something with them to site to cover any discrepancy in height between your booth and your neighbours?

Constantly liaising with both the congress organisers and the venue from start to finish, your agency will:

• Review exhibitor manuals, technical floorplans, and all the other congress documentation.
• Produce 3D booth visuals, structural drawings and all the other associated health and safety documents for submission.
• Confirm approval of the booth visuals.
• Book all the stand services and onsite logistics to ensure the onsite installation goes smoothly and without a hitch.

Booth design

Your agency will be able to bring your design to life in three dimensional form. We often get clients coming to us with a fixed idea in their heads and that’s fine; we can work with that! But I think any agency worth their salt should be expected to come to you with some creative ideas of their own to add to the mix.

Your agency will be able to develop a booth concept for you that maximises your impact in the hall and helps draw delegates onto your stand — factoring in any content you need to display and any engagement activities you might have planned.

They will be able to create 3D visuals for your review which, once approved, will be sent on to the congress organisers — and potentially to the venue too — for their approval, along with the accompanying technical drawings.

They will also create graphics plans to help you — and any other third parties involved, other design agencies and so on — to plan the placement of your printed content and ensure the hierarchy of any messaging has been taken into account.

Content creation – print, digital and experiential

Your booth agency will be able to help you plan the best execution of any print, digital and interactive content — and also potentially design and produce it for you.

If they are a specialist agency like OSP, they will also be able to advise on what is code compliant in the host country, should you be attending a pharma or medical congress.

They can design and produce any delegate materials (leave pieces, handouts etc) and branded giveaways required, if that’s appropriate for your industry.

They should also be able to devise and produce impactful delegate engagement activities. We’ve done plenty of these ourselves at OSP from flight simulators, to hope trees and coin polls. A great means of encouraging footfall (particularly if you are not launching a new product or service, or you don’t strictly have anything new to shout about), activities like this help to drum up interest from the aisles — setting your booth apart from the rest.

Logistics planning

Exhibitions involve consideration of multiple moving parts so being organised is critical to the success of any live event.

Your agency should:

• Produce timelines to keep all the parties involved on track — these should include all the key congress deadlines and also factor in time for your internal approval processes. At OSP, we send out weekly deadlines trackers to everyone involved to flag the next imminent deadlines we need to meet in the week ahead.
• Manage all pre-show and onsite logistics for you — you should effectively be able to turn up at the handover meeting at the end of the build safe in the knowledge everything has been taken care of.
• Manage transportation and handle any Customs carnets required.
• Keep a close eye on budget control — at OSP, we keep an ongoing reconciliation on booth projects and if anything happens that’s outside of the original project scope (e.g. a stand service coming in at a higher price than the manual suggested), this is flagged and discussed with the client as soon as it comes to light so we can agree the best way forward.

Comms with any third party contractors

It may be that you need to bring in some external services on your booth e.g. a barista service, specialist AV, or some very high end furniture. Your agency will be able to source the right supplier for the job, contract to them, and handle all the logistics around having this element onsite.

Onsite installation

Once all the planning is out of the way, the pre-build is complete in the workshop, the lorries are on their way to site, and the exhibition is just around the corner, your agency will be able to provide the onsite crew to install — and also take down — your booth.

They should also be able to provide standby crew, technicians and booth managers for the duration of the event so that you have onsite support from start to finish, if you need it.

Post-event metrics reporting

Once it’s all done and dusted, the delegates have gone away marvelling at your booth and what you had to say to them, your agency will be able to gather and review any metrics. This invaluable data should be packaged up in a post-show report that helps demonstrate your Return on Investment — highlighting exactly why it was worthwhile your business attending!

Whatever agency you choose to work with on your exhibition booths, they should be able to tailor their service to suit the way you want to work and what you want to achieve.

So, if you’re looking for a team to provide you with a seamless, end-to-end exhibition service, give us a call. We can be as hands on (or off!) as you need us to be but we always aim to take the stress out of exhibition planning — so you can get on with your day job.