When you’re selling your event to exhibitors you will find that they all ask the same 5 questions to you before deciding to sign up.
You can avoid delays in contract signature by ensuring that you have the answers to those questions included in your exhibitor sales brochure.
1. How Many Attendees Will Be There?
This is the pre-qualifier question. Exhibitors use this statistic to estimate how big your event will be and how popular it could be. They won’t sign up to you based purely on this number.
It is important not to be over zealous when stating this number. If it is your first event, then this should be your conservative estimate on the number of people you’re confident of bringing to your event.
If you have previous event experience, then use the numbers from your last event and your event growth history to project a more accurate prediction.
The worst thing you can do is over estimate. Remember exhibitors will hear whatever number you tell them and that then becomes the minimum target for them.
I have seen exhibitors cancel their participation at events because the organizers have over cooked their predictions and numbers are far shorter than the exhibitor was led to believe.
When providing this number, it is important not to conflate different types of people that will be at your event as ‘attendees’.
Attendees aren’t exhibitor staff or your staff, or your speakers. Attendees are people who are there with the sole purpose of browsing the exhibition floor and attending seminars.
Exhibitors will discount staff and speakers from their numbers.
Using Just Attend you can look over your event performance and previous events to see how many people have attended and what their roles are within your event.
This will help you provide better predictions and information to your exhibitors that won’t leave you with egg on your face.
2. What Type Of Attendees Will Be At Your Event?
This is the most important question that perhaps carries the most weight in an exhibitor’s decision to sign up or not.
Each exhibitor will have their own idea on what type of person is their ideal customer. They will want to know how many of their ideal customers will be at your event.
This is a tricky statistic for an event organizer to produce because each exhibitor has their own idea of what type of customer they are after.
However, you should be able to provide high level information about your attendee demographics that will at least enable exhibitors to use that information to determine their ideal customer probability.
You get this information from your attendee registration fields. It is important that you construct this form to collect all the information that will enable you to answer this question confidently.
Exhibitors will want to know:
- Job titles / job roles
- Company Names
- Company Size (either number of employees or turnover)
- Job responsibility e.g. engineer, business owner, business decision maker etc.
- Business vertical e.g. healthcare, logistics, manufacturing etc.
- Business operating model e.g. are they B2C or B2B
- Reason for attending e.g. for networking or because they have a project need to fulfil
You should work with your exhibitors to find out what information is important for them and then construct your registration form to capture this information.
Using Just Attend you can create your own registration fields to capture the information you need.
As your registration grows you can choose when to share your attendee demographics to your exhibitors through the exhibitor area so they can see at a moments notice the types of attendees that are attending your event.
You can also access this information at any time in your organizer portal to use in any promotional activity you’re running or to answer direct questions.
3. How Many Attendees Will Turn Up?
This is quite the estimate if this is your first event and have no data to base it on.
Using data available to us on events using our platform for onsite check-in, those that charge an entrance fee attain on average 93% attendance vs registrations received.
Events that offer free registration average around 60% turnout vs registrations received.
You can use these figures to predict your own actual attendance based on your registration model and as long as you promote your event effectively there should be no reason why your stats will be vastly different.
You can use this information to provide more detailed analysis to your exhibitors if you’ve used Just Attend before. In our platform we break down your attendance by attendee demographic so you can tell your exhibitors exactly how many business owners checked in on day 1 of your event and day 2 for example.
Exhibitors can use this information to ensure that they staff their stand with the right type of people to engage with the type of audience your event days are attracting.
4. How Many Leads Will I Get?
Whenever I get this question I chuckle a bit to myself because this is such an impossible question for an event organizer to answer.
The number of leads an exhibitor will generate will depend on several factors, most of which are within their own control and destiny, such as:
- Their stand setup and graphical messaging
- Whether their staff members are on their stand at the right time
- Whether their staff members are actually looking engaged and not glued to their laptops
- Whether their products are on display and easy to see
Other factors that can affect lead generation that are within your control as an organizer are:
- Where the exhibitor is on your floor plan. Footfall and flow is a major contributor to lead generation
- Who are exhibiting next to them. Too many similar exhibitors together have a negative effect on leads generated by the same type of exhibitor
- Overcrowding, if there is a pinch point or a fellow stand is too busy, attendees will bypass the bottleneck
- Software used for lead generation can be too difficult to use that takes too long
So what can you as an organizer do to answer this question?
You can use Just Attend to evidence how many leads are generated by exhibitors at your previous events.
You can also break these leads down to show them how many leads are generated by exhibitors with similar product offerings.
This should give them enough holistic information on their chance of generating leads to answer this question.
All the exhibitors want to know is “are your attendees engaged enough?”.
With Just Attend you can also provide them with a mobile app that includes the ability to scan and generate their own leads.
5. When Will Be The Busiest Time For Leads?
This question is asked because they want to know when they need to ensure that they have the maximum number of staff on stand in order to not miss opportunities.
This should be very easy to predict because you can estimate this based on how your event schedule is laid out.
If you’re organizing seminars and exhibitions you’ll know that when seminars are running lead generation opportunities on the exhibition floor will be lower than when there aren’t any running.
You may have dedicated exhibition floor times or you may run exhibition and seminars side by side all day.
If you do, then exhibitors will be concerned about lead opportunities, so using data to your advantage you can evidence when their opportunities are most likely to occur.
Using Just Attend you can showcase your lead generation activity over time to predict when exhibitors are most likely to be busy.
You can also show them the types of attendees by demographic that they’re most likely to talk to.
Conclusion
Using Just Attend as your event management tool allows you to answer these 5 common questions confidently when selling your exhibition space.
As a result, the right exhibitors for your event are 70% more likely to sign up directly from your exhibitor pack information rather than asking you for qualifying meetings.
Having the right exhibitors at your event boosts your overall event satisfaction for attendees and exhibitors that makes selling your next one a whole lot easier.
If you’d like to find out more about how Just Attend can help you plan your next event, book a demo with us below.
