The exhibition business in the minds of many people is something not entirely serious, similar to an entertainment show. However, in fact, this market segment is an entire industry with huge turnover and high profitability. Experts estimate the annual turnover in this business area at about 700 thousand dollars a year. Such serious money speaks of the importance and attractiveness of this direction.
What makes commercial firms and entrepreneurs spend so much money to participate in various exhibitions?
First of all, it is an opportunity to convey information about yourself to direct consumers and potential partners. This is an opportunity to evaluate the achievements of competitors and understand the trends that are taking place in the industry. This is a great tool for studying demand and marketing research.
It is known that more contracts can be concluded in a few days of the exhibition than in a year of hard work of marketing services. Therefore, most enterprises and entrepreneurs perceive participation in the exhibition as an opportunity to receive additional income, and are ready to spend money on this event. For the organizers of the exhibition, on the other hand, it is a source of quite a lot of money, and the potential for new exhibitions in the future.
The exhibition business has its own characteristics, it can hardly be called a simple and easy business.
It has very high competition. It often happens that exhibitions of similar themes are held one after another, which significantly reduces the interest of participants and visitors to them. Therefore, the organization of the exhibition must be approached as seriously as possible, carefully planning all your actions and conducting marketing research.
A certain complexity of the exhibition business is the timely rental of space for the event.
In principle, the essence of the organization of the exhibition, as a business, is to rent premises, conduct an advertising campaign, and sublease the rented premises to exhibitors with a significant margin. Since the profitability of the exhibition business is 70 percent or more, there are a lot of people who want to use free space for exhibitions. Owners of suitable space often organize exhibitions themselves so as not to share rental income with other market participants. Therefore, as a rule, all the most attractive topics of exhibitions are planned for years ahead.
It is quite difficult for a private entrepreneur who does not have his own space to enter the exhibition business.
Therefore, it is more correct and profitable for them to organize thematic exhibitions for individual industries or the economy. The organization of such an exhibition requires special knowledge, good knowledge of the specifics of the industry and the main market participants, potential customers. To hold such an exhibition, it is highly desirable to draw up a portrait of the target visitor and do a lot of work with the participants. On the other hand, holding an industry exhibition is less attractive to competitors, since it is a rather laborious task, and, as a rule, it takes a lot of time to prepare an event. Nevertheless, holding even two or three exhibitions a year can bring serious income to the organizers and cover the costs associated with the work done.
It should also be noted that the development of the exhibition business is facilitated by the low workload of the exhibition space.
Even in large centers, the workload of space is estimated at only 60-70% of the possible. For regional exhibitions, the space occupancy is less than 50%. This allows you to plan the organization of exhibitions without having your own space for their holding and receive income using someone else’s territory.
It is often difficult for private entrepreneurs to compete with large participants in the exhibition business. Therefore, some of them follow a completely unusual path, carrying out all the preparatory work to determine the composition of participants, market research, topic planning, and then resell the prepared work to larger participants in the exhibition market. This allows you to get good income for quite hard work, without spending your own funds on advertising events, printing information products and renting exhibition space. Of course, such work requires good qualifications, creativity, knowledge of the market and the specifics of the industry.
As for the costs of holding an exhibition, their size strongly depends on the venue and the cost of renting exhibition space. In some places, the cost per square meter may not exceed $200, in others it can reach $3,000 or more.
However, it should be borne in mind that the fees of participants in the venues of the exhibitions also differ significantly from each other. For a small exhibition, with the participation of 20-30 exhibitors, costs ranging from 15 to 100 thousand dollars may be required.
The profitability of the exhibition business allows you to recoup the costs often already during the first exhibition. If the exhibition schedule provides for the organization of several or dozens of events per year, then the profit can be in the millions of dollars.
To create an exhibition business of this level, a detailed business plan is required , which can be ordered by sending an application to our website.