You may have seen cluttered booths, booths packed with too much information, puzzling marketing messages, confusing images, booths so packed with products that they looked like a mini-mart, booths with a color scheme that made you want to forget lunch and small booths armed with too many sales people. Ouch!

What did you do? Did you keep walking by and try to avert your eyes?

As an exhibitor planning your first trade show display, how can you avoid this? What are some basic ideas that need to be part of the booth design?

Best Practice #1 Don't overload your booth!

Let's start with what you place into your booth first. If you have an inline 10'x10' trade show booth there isn't much room to work with. Don't over pack it! It is very easy to bring every little thing you want to display, be it products, laptops, brochures, extra tables, extra brochure stands, seating and so on. Keep the number of sales people manning your booth down to a minimum. You don't have to bring everyone in the company, just have key representation with enough bodies to handle attendees interested in your offering. The same idea works for large island exhibits. Some of them turn into small cities with everything that is packed into them.

The idea is to only have what is necessary to make the largest impact. For the 10'x10' inline example, one idea is to have a 10' curve pop-up with flooring, a meet and greet counter near the front, something to hold brochures and maybe a couple of directors chairs for seating. Don't add that a conference table, two banner stands and a demo station. There simply isn't enough room. If your booth is well organized with minimal contents and a strong marketing message or offer, you will see better results than if it is so filled with stuff that people can barely enter it.

Best Practice #2 Keep your message simple!

They say you only have a couple of seconds to grab a trade show attendee's attention as they come upon your booth. What can ruin this brief moment of opportunity? Information overload! This can happen when there are simply too many graphics with too many marketing messages in one booth. Unless there is a huge interest in what you are trying to say, most people will not absorb even one of the messages.

Try this exercise, take your ten most important points you like to make with potential customers about your products or service. Take those ideas and distill them down into three. Choose the top idea from those three that truly represent the core of your business.

This top idea becomes your main marketing message. Turn that idea into your largest graphic. It can be a graphic mural on the face of a 10' pop-up display that is quick to the point in drilling this idea into the minds of anyone walking up to your booth. This idea is the first thing people see. The second & third most important ideas can still be part of the main graphic mural, but make them smaller for those people that make it inside your exhibit. This way, you are feeding your marketing messages in steps.

What to do with the other seven points you like to make with prospects?

Be creative...wear badges or caps printed with other ideas you want to share with attendees. Have brochures & marketing materials ready to give away. The point is that if you are able to successfully get people into your booth, you have more time to pitch your company benefits.

Best Practice #3 Use color to promote your message!

There are many ways to use color and light to get and focus attention. There are also many ways to turn off potential customers who see your booth by using colors ineffectively. Your eye is drawn to the area of highest contrast in any scene. Suppose you are looking at a huge black wall with a small dot of yellow paint near the top right corner. The yellow is the area of highest contrast on the wall, so your eyes are naturally attracted to it. You can use this concept to help focus attention on a core idea when designing your booth. Now what if the colors of your booth were all black except for your core marketing messages, which was yellow. Anyone seeing this wouldn't be able to stop themselves from looking at your message.

People also like to feel comfortable when they enter a booth. If you use color combinations that are difficult to look at you may turn off attendees. One example I can give you for me is red text on certain tone of royal blue. When I see those colors together it is very hard for me to read the text. What works better for me is white text on royal blue. Since I brought up blue, think of Microsoft blue. What kind of feeling does it give you? The post office uses nearly the same color and these hues of blue are supposed to evoke feelings of trust. Since color is so subjective, which colors work for your particular trade show exhibit must be carefully thought out. Think about what kind of emotional response you want from people seeing your display and what colors would be the best way to achieve that response. That's not to say that you only want to use colors that make someone feel comfortable there are many instances when you want the opposite to occur.

Of course, these practices do not apply to every trade show display being used. There are numerous examples of great exhibits that break all the rules and are extremely successful at the same time.