Show me your booth?

What To Do With Your Trade Show Booth

The only thing as hot as AI right now is IRL.

Events are back and if you’re selling B2B there’s a good chance events are a big part of your 2026 marketing playbook.

But today we’re going to double click on events and talk specifically about everyone’s favorite topic: THE BOOTH (!)

What should we do with the booth.

Because it needs to drive revenue — you’re under pressure to actually book meetings and make sales conversations happen at the tradeshow. So everything is in-play. Scanning badges. Handing out frisbees. CEO dunk tank. Whatever it might be. The booth needs to work. Just like any other marketing effort.

Satire about the frisbees and dunk tank aside; this is one of the most fun creative challenges in marketing. We’re not just designing a landing page here, we’re doing something in real life.

But that also makes it one of the hardest to get right. With digital, you can run 10 variations of an ad and see what hits by Thursday. With a booth, you have to pick one thing. You have to get everyone to agree on it. You have to order it, build it, ship it, and show up with it. There’s no A/B test. You’re committed. Events are a bigger line item in the budget. So the pressure to get it right is real.

One of our members posted this question recently: What was the last booth activity that actually stopped you in your tracks during the dreaded exhibit hall walk of shame? And I thought this would make for a perfect newsletter topic. So check this out. If you’re planning your next event and feeling stuck on what to do with your booth, here are four concepts to think about. You don’t need the perfect idea. You just need a starting point. I hope this helps.

How to Actually Stand Out at a Trade Show Booth

1. Turn your booth into a game.

The ideas that got the most energy were all physical and competitive. One marketer shared a reaction ring game (think: test your reflexes, see your name on a leaderboard) that pulled in everyone from students to senior executives at a healthcare conference. Another brought up pop-a-shot basketball, which they called “a slam dunk” two years running. Someone else saw a chess grandmaster at a booth where attendees could sit down and play on the spot.

The pattern: give people something to DO, not something to read or stand at your booth. Get people involved. A game creates a reason to stop, a reason to stay, and a reason to talk to the person next to them. If there’s a leaderboard, even better. People want to see their name at the top. Gamification always seems to win in marketing doesn’t it…

2. Food! Feed them something they actually want.

I thought this was simple, but genius. Conference food and snacks are hit or miss. This is your opportunity! Two members brought up the same play independently: hire a barista, rent a high-end espresso machine, and run a pop-up coffee bar out of your booth.

Both said the same thing. They had lines wrapped around the booth. Then everyone also sees the line and starts wondering what’s going on over there and you become a destination at the event. People come to you. And they’ll stand in line for three minutes, and you can send the friendly sales team down to say hello.

3. Rethink your swag entirely.

The best swag ideas in the thread weren’t “swag” in the traditional sense. One member highlighted a company giving out branded dog chuck-its at a conference. Smart, useful, and memorable. Who said the swag has to be for humans? Do you know how many startup t-shirts and branded Yeti mugs I have in my office at home?

Another mentioned a pencil-sized flashlight that they still actually use months later. Not sexy, but useful. I think the ultimate test for swag is: will this end up in a hotel trash can tonight, or will someone bring it home and use it next week?

4. Gamify everything.

One of the most interesting threads was about adding a workout competition to the booth. A member was considering a pull-up bar (I love this idea btw) but was worried their audience of finance leaders wouldn’t want to put themselves out there like that and bang out pull-ups in public.

Here’s the advice they got. Back to gamification again: make it a competition with a leaderboard. This gets people to stop, check in, see how many pull-ups other people got and have a prize at the end of the day. Get your pull-ups in before 2 PM. Or you could tie it to a charity donation so there’s a purpose beyond business. Pull-ups for a cause.

I loved this idea because even as I’m writing this now I can think of a bunch of variations of this idea. Shoot hoops (get one of those pop-a-shot arcade games). Any type of video game! Pac Man high score. 1 minute to vibe code something. Gamify the booth, get people involved. I love it.

Tradeshows often mean money, but think through all of the ideas from above. None of these require a massive budget or a six-month planning cycle. They just require thinking about what would actually make you stop if you were the one walking the floor.

What’s the best booth experience you’ve seen or built? Hit reply and tell me. I want to hear what’s working at events right now.

– Dave

P.S. I also want to know how you’d measure this. Would you be badge scanning everyone who is waiting in line for a coffee? Scan a badge and you get a coffee? Scan to enter the Pac Man competition? But then what? Email them later? Tell me what is working for event follow-up…

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