networking

Last month, I had the opportunity to showcase my personal styling business at the Four Chamber Business Expo in Palo Alto! The event was hosted by the Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, and Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce organizations. As a business owner, you can purchase an exhibitor table / booth at the expo, which is held during one evening.

I wanted to write this tutorial for those of you who may be wondering about this method of advertising and promotion. Sponsoring an event or purchasing an exhibitor table at a event can be a great way to spread awareness about your business and meet potential clients or collaborators in the community.

In this current age of digital advertising, I think there is still a lot of value in meeting people face-to-face and building a relationship on that foundation. It doesn’t necessarily scale as fast, but if you have the time and financial resources, it can be a marketing option to explore.

Last year, as my first year in my business, I had setup a booth at this event as a children’s book author to promote my first book.

This year, I came back with a different career, haha! My booth was for my business as a personal stylist. I offer styling packages for helping clients upgrade their wardrobe with closet consultations and shopping trips.

Honestly, when you’re figuring out whether to invest in having a business booth, you first need to figure out whether the cost makes sense to you. Depending on the event, it can cost several hundred dollars and beyond (even thousands of dollars) to have a table at an event. For this event, it cost $200 for a 6′ table. You should weigh the cost of how many products / services you must sell in order for the cost of the booth to be worth it. It’s easier when you have higher-priced services like coaching or styling, as opposed to lower priced items like books. You’ll just have to sell a lot more books to be equivalent to the cost of selling a couple of the bigger service packages.

But of course, marketing can’t just be measured in short-term returns on your investment. There’s also the benefits of increased awareness and exposure, so people even begin to realize that you and your business exist. This is harder to measure and takes a lot of persistence and consistency – to keep showing up, so people can start to associate your business with solving a certain problem they may have in their life.

Part of maintaining that consistency is to collect business cards (brought a jar for that) and email addresses to build up your mailing list. Then you can continue to send out useful information to interested people.

Mailing List

To increase the incentive for people to sign up for my mailing list, I decided to do a giveaway. Chocolates and cookies are a popular giveaway, but may not help them remember the specifics of your business. On the other hand, schwag like pens or water bottles personalized with your business logo is useful, but can be pricey. At this point in my business, I’m not ready to buy branded schwag yet. I don’t even have a formal logo yet!

I wanted to go with something fashion-related, so I decided on lint rollers! They’re fairly inexpensive and I had seen them on sale at IKEA, so I went and picked up a huge pile of them! So if someone signed up for my mailing list, I’d give them a handy dandy lint roller. These were pretty popular, so in the future, if I had budget, I may get them personalized with my name as schwag.

Business Info Materials

The next thing I had to prepare was the actual handouts / materials with my business information and services. That included business cards. I used a template and same-day printed them with Office Depot.

I wanted to prepare a whole bunch of pretty materials and pamphlets on my process and services, but alas, I ran out of time. So at the minimum, have some handout about your services that people can take with them. I created a one-pager that listed the 3 different tiers of styling packages that I have, with pricing information and a special event discount for anyone who signed up that day.

If you want something a little fancier, you could use the free tool Canva to design brochures and flyers. They have great template designs. (I wrote a Canva tutorial for social media graphics earlier on my blog.)

Anyways, I came up with that handout, then rushed to Office Depot to get a stack of copies printed. Speaking of printing, if you’re going to do marketing for your small business, you’re probably going to have to print frequently. Luckily, the Mountain View Chamber of Commerce has a great partnership with Office Depot so members can get discounted pricing on printing. It saves a bunch of money!! Printing costs can add up!

Client Testimonials

Another thing that new customers love to see is your work in action, a.k.a. your portfolio. Since my work is very visual, and people would be passing by the booth fairly quickly, I decided to print out before/after photos of 3 of my clients.

Speaking of printing, in my experience, Office Depot does a great job with black & white copies (and they’re very fast with turnaround time). But their color copies don’t turn out as great. The color looks weird – too yellow or something. Hence I opt to go to FedEx for my color printing jobs, which is a little pricier, so I use it more sparingly.

By the way, it’s easier if you have the email addresses of Office Depot and FedEx on hand, so you can email them the files instead of bringing a USB there directly.

I sent them the copies and printed them. I trimmed them to fit my clear frames, which I had bought earlier at Michaels.

I also included before/after photos of my own style transformation!

The photos were quite a hit, people liked seeing the transformations.

Payment Methods

Another thing I prepped for is to accept payments in-person. I use a Square payment reader with my phone. I setup the Square app with the items that are available for sale. Last year, it was the book (and I had to make sure the sales tax percentage was correct for the city I was doing the sale in). This year it was the styling packages with the discounts applied. I also tested out the reader with my own credit card to make sure the whole process would go smoothly and that the receipt looked the way I wanted.

This should be setup as early as possible. Last year, I panicked because I was going to use a PayPal reader but then my account wouldn’t activate, so I rushed to get a Square reader on the day of the event. Avoid those last-minute scares!

Decor of the Booth

The last part is the fun part of adding the decorative finishing touches onto the booth.

I had actually envisioned what the whole booth would look like as step 1 of this whole process. I sketched out what I wanted the booth to look like (see below). I thought about what props I already had from last time or around my home that I could reuse. It helped me to also think about what I needed to purchase/create.

Some decorative items I used were: some faux flowers in a vase, some twinkling lights, basket for the lint rollers, a vase for the business cards, a trinket tray for my business cards, Vogue magazines, velvet clothing hangers, candles, jewelry box holder, heels, fashion tape, and fashion books.

I also got a letter board from HomeGoods (where I got a lot of decor items for last year’s booth), where I could display my name and title. Otherwise I didn’t have a big sign with my business or name on it.

Get Yourself Ready

After all the work of running around and getting your booth ready, don’t forget to get yourself ready! I planned out my outfit ahead of time, did proper self-care and grooming, and allowed enough time to do my hair and makeup before the event. Since you’re representing your brand and your business, you want to look polished and professional – even if it’s been a frantic day, ha!

Extra Hands

If you’re a one-person business owner, try to find a friend or family member who can help you out at your booth. I asked Vince, my fiance, who I am grateful for. He helped me move and setup everything, as well as talk to people at the booth with me. It’s hard to handle all of that as one person! Let alone, sometimes you need to go to the bathroom and don’t want to leave everything unattended! Thanks babe!

Conclusion

To summarize, this is the process of how I designed and prepared my booth to promote my business at a local business expo. Overall, I thought it was great exposure for my business. I met many new contacts in the community, and have leads that I’m following up on now. It is a lot of work, so it’s not something I would do on a frequent basis, but it’s a good marketing tool to use every now and then. And once the primary legwork is done for setting up a booth, it’ll be easier for me to do the same setup for a booth at a different event.

I hope the article helped you understand what the experience is like and helps you decide whether you would want to do it in the future for your business! Again, in early stage businesses, it’s important to pay attention to costs (me learning from my mistakes) so be cognizant of how much you invest in the price of the booth and the materials so that you can get the most value from the experience!

Celebrate

After the event, we were exhausted and starving, so we went out for a little impromptu dinner date. Sushi, yum! Cheers to a successful event!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this article, you can check out more tutorials on business topics on my blog.

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