How To Make Social Distancing Easier On An Exhibition Stand?
Live tradeshows felt like an afterthought, but with their return, you may wonder how sickness might affect your designs. To encourage social distancing and improve hygiene, most shows have new protocols in place. This means that exhibitors need to learn how to adapt their stand layouts to the new regulations. Here we offer a few tips on how you can promote social distancing at your trade fair stand.
It is small space challenge of social distance.
Social distancing suggests that people should maintain a six-foot distance between themselves and others. Practically, it also means avoiding contact with people and things whenever possible, such as using contactless payment systems and avoiding shaking hands.
For exhibition exhibitors, this can be a challenge. In an exhibition stand that's only 20 x 20 or 20 x 30 metres, there's not much room to manoeuvre, especially with displays and furniture. To make the most of your exhibit, you'll need to streamline your booth design, restructure the space and perhaps consider additional staff training.
Improve flow by reorganising your stand
Except for in-line booths, most exhibit designs have multiple ways to enter and exit and don't necessarily have an organised flow from one area to another. Implementing ways to get in and out, and managing flow, can help facilitate social distancing by strategically organising your space.
- Create designated (and obvious) entry and exit points, rather than bidirectional entry/exit points;
- Limiting the number of visitors in your exhibit at any one time by monitoring entry and exit points;
- Creating "rooms" with display elements or seating;
- Think what people will be doing most of the time when they visit your stand and make those spaces Larger to avoid bottlenecks
Create space with your exhibition design
A good exhibition stand design is an important part of creating an environment in which your staff and visitors will feel at ease. When entering the stand, guests will want assurance that they can interact safely. One way to signal this is by how you're laid out: A clean, tidy and spacious stand is one that people feel safe visiting.
- A minimum of six feet between stand elements, including counters, demo tables and displays - this may mean planning a larger exhibit. See our ideas for maximising 6×9 or 6×6 exhibits.
- In places where distance is difficult, use clear partitions for face-to-face meetings and to separate rooms.
- Remove interactive exhibits, such as touch screens, to free up space and reduce the number of high-touch surfaces in your stand.
- To free up floor space, swap floor displays for wall-mounted ones.
- Remove extra demo stations if you have several - If you're limiting visitors anyway, you won't need as many as usual.
Make your stand a double-decker
The simplest way to make it easier for the people in your exhibition stand to maintain a social distance from you is to give them more space. If your budget permits, the obvious choice is to add more stand space, especially if you've been considering expanding anyway.
Use digital technology
You may decide it's better to skip the face-to-face networking and sales meetings. But you don't have to do without. Virtual tools are sophisticated enough - and accessible enough - to swap those meetings for video calls. This also works for hybrid events, as video calls can serve both your live and virtual visitors.
Train stand staff
Your stand staff will benefit from a short training session before you start attending exhibitions again. This will help you to set out your expectations of how you want them to deal with hygiene and safety issues.
- What is the lead flow of sales in the field?
- Which side to enter, from which product to start the introduction, experience, communication
- How to distribute the gifts on the spot, the process of receiving the gifts.