So you are considering booking a magician for your exhibition stand, but is it really worth it? As a magician I should say "Yes it is", but actually there are times when it is not suitable to have a magician on your stand.

Here are 4 questions you should ask to determine whether it is worth having a magician on your stand at the next show.

1) Is There Suitable Footfall Quantity?

My clients tends to only book me for the larger shows that they attend. The reason is that the more footfall there is walking past the more potential customers I can engage with. For the very small shows with low footfall, it is not always worth having a magician as there are less people for the magician to engage with and give you a good amount of leads. The exception to this rule is if you have a very high value product and just one or two customer acquisitions would more than justifying paying for the magician to be there and help engage with more people. But as a general rule though, use magicians for the bigger shows.

2) Is There Suitable Footfall Quality?

When I work on a clients stand I make sure that the people who I stop and connect to their sales team are "high quality", and by high quality I mean that they qualify as a potential customer. There is no point engaging with people when there is not the prospect of them becoming a customer. That is where magic works well, I can identify the quality of the lead by qualifying them during the conversation around my magic and only pass on potential customers to the team. If the quantity of footfall is high but the quality is low, then there won't but many people who qualify as potential customers, so having a magician won't be worth it. But to be brutally honest, if an exhibitions footfall does not have a heavy density of potential customers you should be questioning whether it is worth exhibiting at the show at all!

3) Is This The Right Magician?

When considering whether to use a trade show magician you need to make sure you are picking the right magician for the job. There are different types of exhibition magicians who provide different sorts of services. Also, there are lots of magicians out there who are good performers but don't have sufficient trade show experience, but they say its a service they provide because they want more work. Performing at trade shows requires a different mentality and approach to performing at other events and it is only worth booking a magician if they can demonstrate that doing exhibitions is a specialism they have.

4) Do I Have Suitable Plans & Workflow?

Having a good magician on your stand will increase the amount of leads you chat to. But these conversations are only worthwhile if you can convert them into customers. To convert these into maximum sales you need have suitable plans and workflows to convert the leads. This includes considering things like; which employees man the stand and how you brief them, how you capture data, the process you put leads through when on the stand, the communications workflow for marketing to captured leads etc. I cover these things in much more detail as part of the blog post How To Increase Exhibition Leads.

Ultimately, if you pair high footfall quantity and quality, with suitable stand planning and workflows, then the right magician will be able to greatly help you increase the amount of leads you capture and turn into paying customers.

If you have any upcoming shows, then I would love to meet with you to discuss how I can be part of your team and use magic to help you achieve the ROI you are aiming for. To request a quote please click here.