Building Crowds at a Trade Show in San Diego

In November, I worked with Agilent at AAPS to build crowds at their booth. This turned out to be one of the most interesting trade shows that I’ve attended. Our booth was far from a main isle and we had a two person conference room directly in front of us that made our booth hard to see. On top of that, the flow of traffic on our isle was blocked with a roped off computer station and meeting area. Our isle was effectively a dead end.

Luckily, I had a few tricks up my sleeve to still build crowds. I always use a microphone when I’m presenting magic and educating the crowds. So, I turned up the mic volume so that the people walking down the main isle could hear us. I then asked our team to gather around the booth so that it looked like a crowd and I pulled in every person who walked by. Usually, it’s not too difficult to build a crowd because there is enough traffic that people will stop. In this case, since there was no one around, I performed longer shows as I waited for more and more people to find us and come over. This allowed me to work up a big crowd and then talk about the company at the end of the show.

This strategy worked because people are naturally curious and want to know what’s happening around them. When they see that people have stopped at a booth and are laughing and smiling, they will walk over to see what’s happening. To top it off, the other booths around us were happy since I was bringing in traffic to the otherwise dead area.

This article originally appeared on GatherCrowds.com which is dedicated to my trade show performances.