What printing you need for your next exhibition or convention

Exhibitions, conferences, trade shows, and conventions are networking gold mines when done correctly. They are great for creating physical connections with potential clients and customers and building networks with other businesses. With this in mind, it’s important to make the best impression you can with your exhibition stand or display.

Must haves in exhibition printing

You often have a limited amount of space when exhibiting your business at these events. These limitations however can facilitate creative solutions to make your business stand out. There are three categories of print items often seen at conventions; the booth display, marketing materials and freebies.

Booth Displays

This includes the overall structure and visual impact of your display. The backdrop can be a branded media wall, pull up banners, and posters that are attached to a booth wall. Being your largest printed products, these pieces are the main visual element of your expo stand.

Posters for exhibitions

Posters can be made in any size. The standard A sizes (A0, A1, A2) are the most cost-effective posters for your displays. These posters are usually made from paper or synthetic stock and hung up using blue tack or Velcro dots.

Wall size posters can also be created to cover the walls of expo booths. They offer a low-effort way to fully cover any area you are given when exhibiting.

Click here for more information about our poster printing.

Pull up banners

Pull up banners are the classic go-to for exhibitions and conventions. They are relatively inexpensive and easy to travel with, set up, and pack away. If you are tight on budget but still want to make a big splash, a pull up banner is a great way to get that big impact without needing to make more expensive specialised print pieces for your expo booth.

Click here to view our printing options for pull up banners.

Media Walls

Media walls are like pull up banners but with attitude. They tend to be more permanent in their construction and can take a little time to set up depending on the style of media wall you get. Most come with a frame that you set up at the convention location and attach a printed fabric wrap or fabric banner to create a solid barrier as your backdrop. They tend to be more on the expensive side and are not as travel friendly as a pull up banner, but they sure do make an impact when they are set up.

Click here to review our signs and displays options.

Custom Tablecloth printing

Custom table cloths are essential to bringing the whole area together. Having a plain table cloth can appear less professional, especially when surrounded with bright and colourful pull up banners and marketing materials. They can also be reused again and again at future conventions and other events.

Floor Graphics

Exhibitors often forget that the floor is another avenue to promote their brand. You can use custom floor mats or removable floor stickers to create a space 100% your own from top to bottom.

Marketing Materials

Marketing materials usually consists of printed items that’s contain important information about your business. This includes business cards, flyers, brochures, and catalogues. These can be handed out when interacting with people during the event or included in give-away-bags that also contain other branded goodies.

You can also create name tags or lanyards for your team to keep them looking professional and to encourage communication with other exhibit attendees.

Make sure to keep your branding message consistent across these items and to avoid unnecessary information.

Branded promotional items

Everyone loves a good freebee, and the people who attend exhibitions and conferences are no different. These fun promotional items can include anything from; pens, stickers, hats, sticky notes, notepads, USBs, candy, and more! Don’t just go for the cheapest option for these items. Any promotional item that carries your logo is an extension of your brand. You don’t want to get cheap pens that break easily to be associated so closely with your business. Here it’s worth the extra investment to create quality branded products that people will actually use. The goal is to make a positive lasting impression with unique free items that are both fun and practical.

Design tips for creating exhibition printing

Have a clear concept. This will help to keep your printing materials consistent and cohesive visually. Don’t introduce a new concept with every piece of marketing. Instead, have them build off each other to create a clear picture of what you have to offer as a business.

Be creative with your design. Give your posters and banners some artistic flair to set you apart visually from your competition. This doesn’t mean to throw every creative idea you have at the wall but instead to make active decisions about what you want to show during the event. Often a single message or image can get a point across more efficiently than a wall of text or images.

Make your design easy to read at a distance. Not everyone is going to come up and talk with you during the exhibition or convention. For this reason, you want to make sure the main message to easy to view from a distance. A good design rule it to limit yourself to at most 2 types of fonts on one promotional poster/banner and to use high contrasting colours. An easy way to test if there is enough contrast between your message and the background is to convert the image to greyscale and see if you can still read the letters clearly.

Have a clear call to action. This point is essential for converting the attention you have received into actual customers or clients. Be clear with what you want people to do when they visit your booth. Do you want them to sign up to your e-newsletter? Visit your website? Enter a competition? Whatever your goal, make the action that you want the viewer to make clear and accessible. QR codes are a great way to facilitate these actions, especially now with most people having at least one qr code app on their smartphones. Read our recent article on QR codes in printing to find our more.

Don’t compromise your design with bad printing. A poor-quality print job can retract from all the effort put into creating a good design for your exhibition. Make sure you find a printer you can trust (like us) to ensure that all your printed materials come out looking spectacular. Good printing can enhance your design with custom print options like specialty paper stocks, UV inks, metallic inks, and more!

Click here for a downloadable pdf exhibition checklist!

Need help with your exhibition printing?

Here at Q Print Group we can help you create and print everything you need for you next exhibition or convention. Our team of highly skilled designers are here to help make sure your business makes a splash with custom designed printed items.