A booth at a trade show can have greater success per marketing dollar than many other ways of advertising, due to the higher ratio of potential buyers as attendees. To make the most of this, your booth needs to do two things: catch the eye of your most likely buyers and help them remember your business when they’re ready to buy. All trade show preparations should support those two goals.

For your booth to catch the buyer’s eye, your business name needs to be visible and eye-catching. The best booths have their name on a banner above the booth and on their table covering (promotional-tablecloths). I’ve seen some businesses use a plain table cover, but I think that is a marketing mistake. Repetition helps people remember. Booths can blur together at a huge trade show, and a name repeated twice will help it be remembered. A name repeated twice will help it be remembered. See? It works with everything.

I recommend that you include your motto or byline on both imprint areas. A well-chosen byline will say something about what your company does—and that’s important in order to attract the people most likely to buy what you’re selling. Best if it’s clever, it is important your byline is brief. And if your byline doesn’t tell people what you do in one sentence, fix your byline.

People will decide in a glance whether or not they should stop at your booth. So be prepared to help them want to stop. Of course eye contact and a smile get people to pause, but the classic candy bowl cannot be overrated. People like free candy, we all do, and we’ll look twice at booths with candy on the table (to see if the candy looks good enough to stop).

If your booth has inviting places to sit, more people will stop and listen to you, just so they can sit down. Use it!

People get thirsty, so a water cooler looks very inviting. Have a sign that says Free Water (the word “free” is very eye-catching). Don’t give out bottles, use paper cups. People will stick around the booth to drink from a paper cup longer than they would with a water bottle, since the water bottle is so conveniently portable. Plus, you can talk to the person as you fill up their cup—and creating ways to engage a potential buyer in conversation is whole purpose of a trade show booth.

Use these trade show booth ideas to connect to trade show attendees and help them remember your business when it’s time to buy.