Moving your staff across the country can be one of the largest portions of your convention budget. It can also seem one of the easiest to cut out, helping your company to maintain a competitive exhibition schedule even in financial hard times. For some companies, staffing their trade show exhibits with locally based professional convention promoters is a successful, money-saving tactic. For others, trade show displays staffed like this have been markedly less successful. Understanding what types of industries can benefit and which usually need more experienced staff immersed in their industry will help you understand which choice is right for you.

Technical Trade Show Exhibits: Your Staff Is A Must

If you have a particularly technical product, or are involved in a field where advanced technical knowledge is assumed or required for promotion, don't leave your team at home. Bring the people who were directly involved in development and choose those who are most knowledgeable about all aspects of your technology. They should have a basic knowledge of marketing, but that should be secondary to their knowledge of the actual function of your product. Whether it's a new computer part or a totally new developing technology, your visitors will enjoy being able to discuss the steps of development at your trade show displays.

Hiring staffers inexperienced with your technology will cause you to miss out on a lot of potential face-to-face interaction with visitors. Even the best professionals won't be able to absorb the entire design process and all the technical details that your developers will know offhand. Technology is quite complex, and you might not even be able to find a professional with the required background knowledge to understand what you're marketing. If you have a specialized product, bring your own team to trade show exhibits.

Building Your Brand? Bring Your Own Crew.

Developing companies should always use people that are familiar with the company to staff their trade show exhibits. While hired hands can learn about the genesis of your company and the products you offer, you are far better off letting your own employees talk to your visitors. When you're just starting to attend conventions, you want everything about your booth to be as unique as possible. In this situation, it is better to bring your own employees rather than outsourcing.

Large Conventions And Large Trade Show Displays

When size is more important than an individual touch, hiring staff from the area near the convention is the perfect solution. Your product should be easily understood, and the design process should be fairly simple. Depending on the goods and services you provide, design and technical details may be irrelevant; if it's not of interest to visitors, your hired hands don't need to know about it. If you simply need a large number of people to be on hand answering questions and discussing your products, then hire everyone you need locally. They'll provide efficient representation at your trade show displays, and they'll also be much less expensive than flying in your own crew and sustaining them at a hotel for the entirety of the convention.