Trade Show Booth Merchandising Strategies: A Beginner’s Guide

By employing some powerful trade show booth merchandising strategies and retail psychology, your company can improve its merchandise sales performance dramatically. Start by determining whether a showroom or storefront-style trade show booth display is most effective to merchandise your specific products. If your products are portable and customers will buy and carry them away, use storefront-style merchandising. Showroom-type merchandising is for products that customers order on the spot and receive later. It’s a common mistake among trade show exhibitors to use showroom-style merchandising for portable products, leading to lost sales. Here’s how to display merchandise at your trade show booth.

A Balancing Act

Showroom-style merchandising uses displays to showcase one example of each product. This style of merchandising is appealing because it makes it easier for you to keep the shelves neat. It also prevents items from being broken or stolen. Unfortunately, it is also a deterrent to buying if your product is something customers expect to buy and take with them. Customers are more likely to purchase what they can touch and examine. They are less likely to buy things that a salesman has to retrieve for them. When selling portable products, put multiples of each on display and let customers handle them. Add staff to your booth if you need help keeping an eye on things.

Set Your Display In Motion

Repeated studies on retail sales and merchandising demonstrate that including a kinetic element in a display increases sales. Motion attracts attention. So if your product moves, be sure your display includes a prominent spot, like on a display table, where visitors can see the product in motion. If safe and feasible, allow guests to touch it and check it out for themselves. For product that moves but isn’t something you want people picking up, create a physical barrier that still allows them to watch. Accentuate products that don’t move with a purely decorative kinetic element; consider placing it higher, so it is visible from farther away.

Prevent Traffic Jams

Having too many people in your booth is both a great thing, but a problem that can cost you sales if your trade show booth design isn’t adequate. When your floor plan creates a bottleneck, people get stuck blocking the merchandise booth display. Prevent this issue by laying out your exhibit in a way that creates a route for people to enter and exit without having to backtrack. Placing large shelving units perpendicular to the aisle also helps ensure that some of your merchandise will be visible, even when the booth is crowded.

Prepare For Checkout

Equip every member of your booth staff with a portable payment-processing device. This means they can be ready to check out customers as soon as they’re done shopping. Helping your guests move along faster makes room for more people to come in and look around. This also prevents customers from getting impatient with the wait and leaving before making their purchase.