Attending a tradeshow as an exhibitor does not come without a cost; there is the fee charged by the event organizers together with your costs of attending and setting up your display together with any associated marketing collateral and getting the word out that you will be exhibiting.
Tradeshow exhibition fees can start from as low as a couple of hundred dollars and rocket upwards to hundreds of thousands. How much a tradeshow organizer is going to charge will be determined by demand amongst potential exhibitors and the likely expectation of revenues that will be generated by exhibitors.
Remember, you should look at exhibiting at a tradeshow as a profit making exercise and not as a cost item!
There is also the associated costs of travelling and manning the tradeshow exhibition which are going to vary depending on how far away the event is from your base of operations.
The booth itself is not going to represent a significant chunk of change which runs contrary to most people’s expectation. When you consider the cost of a display is also to be spread over several tradeshows as it will be used repeatedly, the cost becomes a very small fraction of the overall investment.
A standard table top display with professional business graphics can cost as little as $615 and provide a very inexpensive but highly professional display. For a hi-tech, state of the art booth you can pay anything up to around $20,000 and typically this will be covering approximately 300 square feet.
Where you will fit in respect of your investment will be largely determined by your bank balance of course, but where money is not a major constraint, then by your perception as to how profitable tradeshow exhibitions are going to be.
It is not unusual for newcomers to start off with a table top display together with accessories and marketing collateral that comes in at a budget under $1,000 but within a few months or a year, or returning to order much more expensive booths, displays and kiosks. This reflects the underlying value that exhibiting at a tradeshow represents for businesses and is the reason why we continually urge you to look at the activity as one which is making you money rather than costing it.
At the basic end of the market, a display or booth is likely to be manned by you or your staff; modern displays are simple to set-up and require no skills (a table top display is likely to take no more than five minutes to set up). As you become more experienced and start looking at how you are going to attract even more attention to your presence, you will probably consider bringing in other staff to help with manning the exhibit such as entertainers (magicians are a favorite) or using free gifts and giveaways.
Many of the costs of exhibiting at a tradeshow are discrete costs which you control and only incur as and when you wish, but the answer to the question, “How much will this cost?”, simply becomes meaningless as you can spend until you have no money left!