Becoming an Exhibitor

We attended our first two exhibitions as actual exhibitors in the last 3 weeks. The first was the Best of Bristol event at the beautiful Lakewood Centre at Blagdon and the second was the Andover Business Expo held at The Lights in Andover. These were both quite small events but still professionally run and excellent for dipping toes in exhibition waters. For a young company like BizView.tv, the expense of exhibiting can be daunting, and a stand at the NEC or Earls Court would blow our current marketing budget to smithereens. These smaller local events though are a great way of meeting a lot of new people very quickly and they do give you a chance to show off that spanking new pop up banner. Of course in our case we have to show some moving pictures as well, so a decent sized flat screen TV must be hauled onto the stand as well. One area in which these small exhibitions are identical to their larger cousins is in the effect they have on your feet. At least these local events last only a day. My feet were seriously aching by the end of my measly 8 hours on the stand. One interesting point of contention was the claim of one of the exhibition organisers that many of the best visitors/prospects will visit your stand in the last hour of the show (between 5 and 6pm in this case). This turned our to be nonsense as there were virtually no visitors left by that time and most of the other exhibitors had voted with their very sore feet and packed up and gone by 5.15. You live and learn.