If participating in any trade show or event, it becomes extremely important to plan months in advance. This is crucial to ensure the amount and time invested at the venue offers better ROI. There are different aspects that should be taken into consideration to make the event a grand success. Budgeting is one such vital part that should be evaluated carefully.

Establishing budgeting goals for the exhibition

The fact is that not every company will have similar goals and objectives when participating in trade shows. Hence, determine your company’s goals can help outline effectively your budget planning. It also ensures meeting shortcomings even before the exhibition starts. Thus, the aim to set is to plan a realistic budget that meets perfectly your set exhibition goals.

Questions to ask yourself

There are lots of questions that you may ask yourself considering budget planning for the trade show. Some of the crucial ones are given below:

1. What exactly are your objectives and goals to participate in a particular exhibition?

2. What kind of products do you plan to display at the exhibition? Based on this, you are to order for Exhibition display stands .

3. Which vendor do you plan to hire to design and deliver your exhibition booth?

4. What number of staffs do you desire for the stand at the exhibition?

5. How do you intend to carry your products to be displayed at the venue?

Set up an estimated budget

You need to estimate the budget to spend for the exhibition. This definitely should depend on the amount you can afford to spend. Do not exceed it to create stress on your business or curtail other business promotion strategies. Budgeting is essential even before you start to search for hiring an exhibition stand company. Thus, you cannot go wrong with your selections.

Exhibition booth budgeting

Setting up a budget for the exhibition booth, generally, is classified into 4 different segments. These are stand booth staff expenses, service cost, marketing cost and stand cost. They are vital components and provide a clear estimation on the areas to allocate the money to spend the money. Without proper budgeting, you might only exceed your expenses.

Cost breakdown

Estimated budget should be calculated using the exhibition’s actual budget. Next, distribute resources appropriately. Budget is to be set in the following manner:

Exhibition stand staff along with related expenses: Staffs monitoring the stand will be the ones who will represent your business. 20% of total budget should be allocated to stand staff transportation, wages and other expenses. This percentage might increase if your company is participating in any international exhibition. It will involve to and fro flight, hotel accommodation, transpiration, dining and other expenses.

Exhibition stand: It is indeed one of the most important aspects required to ensure success in the trade show. Its size also plays a vital role in the cost. Bigger the size more is the expenses. You can find them of different sizes. Customized stands are quite expensive, but can represent your business well in all types of exhibitions. Allocate 40% of the budget for the stand.

Shipping and Drayage: Set aside 10% of the budget for warehousing and shipping charges. Besides this, drayage cost is likely to be equal or more than the shipping cost involved in sending the stand booth to desired venue. Try to hire a reputed stand contractor who can offer stands and also deliver it to the venue.

Trade show services: It will take about 19% of the budget. This is because reputed exhibition I&D company or stand design company is likely to charge a good amount for providing services. They will offer an expert team offering professional services ranging from stand booth designing to constructing it. The booth should accommodate your staff, have more space for displaying your products.

Marketing and miscellaneous costs: For marketing allocate 5% and miscellaneous expenses about 5%. Plenty of content will be desired ranging from giveaways, pre-trade show posts and product demonstrations. Other expenses to bear are maintenance charges, Wi-Fi connections, lead retrieval system cost, staff food, unforeseen expenses, etc. Miscellaneous amount will be useful to tackle additional expenditures.

Follow these tips

If you have failed before or participating in any exhibition for the first time, do consider the above budgeting tips. They can prove to be useful to ensure you move on the right track and achieve your set objectives.

Author's Bio: 

Panache Exhibition Pvt. Ltd. is a world-class exhibition stall designing company, offering complete range of exhibition design solutions in India and European countries, having our own manufacturing units in National Capital Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai.