Industry trade shows are like red carpet for businesses. Everyone puts their best foot forward, presenting beautiful and on-brand outdoor displays that showcase their business’ latest products, services, and developments.
Stand above the rest by choosing one of the nation’s leading large-format graphics printers for your next trade show: SpeedPro. SpeedPro has the experts and equipment to create your complete, top-to-bottom outdoor event booth and display, in-house and available to bring exceptional trade show exhibitions to life.
What Are Outdoor Trade Show Exhibits?
Outdoor display or exhibition booths are the complete set of materials, furniture and items that make up your company’s trade show set up.
These branded booths offer a snapshot of your organization. Often, it’s the first time fellow industry professionals, entrepreneurs and influencers may experience your company. It’s imperative to make these first impressions count, creating a lasting positive association with your products, services, brand, company culture and overall “personality.”
Represent yourself to the fullest with premium-quality graphics and fabric installations printed exclusively for outdoor industry events — by a partner with a finger on the pulse of trade show booth trends and design best practices.
What Goes Into a Good Outdoor Event Booth?
SpeedPro is one of the country’s only G7 Master Qualified large-format printers. Our certified line of outdoor graphics provides premium quality booth and display items, which, together, complete your trade show kit.
- Tent: Tents serve as home base for your organization at its next industry event. SpeedPro offers pop-up, inflatable and tubular tent frames in a range of sizes, fashioned from portable and easy-assembly aluminum frame systems.
- Canopy: Tent canopies are the vinyl or canvas coverings stretching over the top of your tent. They’re functional as well as aesthetically appealing, with branded canopies giving your booth its signature look while also providing protection from rain, wind and heat.
- Outdoor Signage: Pitch custom signs at or around your outdoor event display to relay branded messages, ask questions, showcase products or highlight event-relevant calls to action. SpeedPro produces half a dozen outdoor sign types ready for trade show usage.
- Banners and Flags: Outdoor banners and flags add further color, texture and eye-catching movement to your trade show booth. Banners and flags help you “pop” even when surrounded by industry competition, drawing attention and traffic right to your setup. Select from nearly 20 types of commercial flags and banners, each with customizable graphics, materials, sizes, shapes and finishes.
- Counters: Custom-printed fabric counters complement tent and canopy graphics. They also create intuitive spaces to mix and mingle with event attendees, showcase new or updated products or offer hands-on demos.
- Product displays: Embellish your outdoor trade show booth with specialty collapsible, fold-up panel and mixed panel display kits custom designed and printed exclusively for your products. Show off merchandise in style, then easily take down the display kits during event wrap-up, storing them safely in totes until next time.
- Interactive elements: Feature interactive areas or components at your next industry event. From digital touchscreen signage to step-and-repeat banners, fabric iPad stands and much more, create a memorable experience for all booth visitors with these hands-on features.
- Tent embellishments: Decorative tent embellishments push your trade show booth into its next level. SpeedPro can create architectural fabric additions, modular product display kits, table and kiosk runners and many other structural graphics to make your booth truly one of a kind.
Why Customize Outdoor Displays for Trade Shows?
Customizing your outdoor event displays brings a range of business benefits.
1. Helps You Stand Out
Make the most of your assigned space at industry events — particularly B2B-focused ones where the competition is heavy, and attention spans are short.
These industry events offer an exclusive opportunity to interface with the movers and shakers in your field. From thought leaders and acclaimed speakers to new vendors, suppliers and contractors, you need to draw important personnel to your booth and have them be impressed once there. Anything less is a missed opportunity.
2. Creates a Sense of Professionalism
Think of your trade show booth as an extension of your place of business. You want a bright, clean, inviting and well-branded environment, one that is distinguishable from your competitors. You want both employees and visitors to feel good when walking into that space. Most importantly, you want that environment to showcase your professionalism — exuding industry authority and purpose.
Trade show attendees will be far more likely to show interest and engagement with your brand when you put your best foot forward. Custom outdoor trade show displays are one excellent way to do just that.
3. Complements Current Marketing Strategies
Outdoor displays and booths align with current marketing campaigns as well. When done correctly, your organization presents clear and consistent messages to the public across important PR occasions, including B2B and B2C events. Others begin to associate your business with the cohesive collateral — such as your distinct color scheme, logo, slogans, sound signatures and more. You and your brand visuals become inseparable, which is one of the key goals of successful marketing and a hallmark of brand recognition and recall.
4. Surprises and Impresses
Consider the most impressive trade show booths you’ve seen in your career. Chances are, they didn’t pull punches. Instead, there were likely full-fledged, canopied inline displays, multimedia presentations and outlets, colorful counters and islands, product kiosks, fabric structures like archways and pillars, and a signature perk when you stopped by, too. Free food maybe? Or a picture with a mascot? These companies knew how to present themselves for maximum impact. And it worked! Years later, you still remember them.
5. Improves Networking
Sharpen your networking savvy by wielding a smarter, more strategic and aesthetically enhanced exhibition.
Trade shows are already a prime place to expand or deepen your professional network. With high-quality outdoor exhibition booths, you encourage that network to approach you. Gone are the days of tracking down old and new contacts alike, working the room event after event until you meet. With outdoor display booths, you’ll draw in relevant personnel and make organic connections effortlessly.
6. Best Represents Your Brand
Put your best branding foot forward with outdoor trade show displays made exclusively for you. SpeedPro is a full-service printing partner with the equipment and expertise to execute nearly any customization you need. This means we provide end-to-end assistance throughout every step of your order, from assisting with display component measurements and submitting designs through our online portal to printing, finishing and kit delivery. We take particular pride in creating custom graphics that bring our clients’ ultimate brand vision to life.
Types and Features of an Outdoor Trade Show Exhibition Booth
SpeedPro’s extensive line of outdoor trade show booths contains all the items needed to set up your most impactful display to date.
Explore our catalog of outdoor event displays, then get in touch with your local studio to hear more about specific printing services.
1. Tents
SpeedPro fabricates two types of outdoor display tents:
- Pop-up tents: Pop-up tents contain a standard, four-leg frame treated for water and rust resistance. They’re so named because the legs simply fold out and lock into place, no tools or specialty assembly instructions required. The four legs support a metal canopy frame where the tent’s covering is ultimately stretched and tied down.
- Tubular tents: Tubular tents feature individual aluminum legs that snap together to create the overall tent’s frame. The tent’s canopy and any additional fabric pieces are then slipped into or pulled over the conjoined frame. Unlike pop-up tents, assembling tubular pieces will require a standard toolset. However, tubular tents can support more weight than pop-ups, making them ideal for large trade show displays and industry gatherings.
In addition to tent frames, SpeedPro can also print custom tent accent walls and partitions to further designate your space from nearby exhibitions:
- Backwall accents: Tent backwalls can serve as backdrops as well as accent pieces to adorn and embellish your overall booth. Backwalls provide extra shade for tent visitors, plus an elevated professional appearance compared to working in an entirely open-air tent.
- Half-walls: Tent half walls are fabric partitions made from cast, calendar and mesh vinyl or canvas. Installing half-walls allows your tent to maintain a sense of openness and approachability while still keeping it separate from the competition.
2. Branded Canopy
Branded canopies are the customized, graphics-filled top coverings for your trade show tent.
SpeedPro can print branded canopies on cast and calendar mesh alongside stretch canvas. Each of these substrate types contains its own unique fabric properties. For example, calendared vinyl is slightly thicker than cast vinyl or canvas — between three and six millimeters, on average — so it is a bit heavier to transport and lift. Discuss available canopy varieties and functionalities in more detail with your local SpeedPro studio.
Customize your tent’s canopy by selecting:
- Canopy size
- Canopy colors, using either a SpeedPro stock color scheme or a custom color scheme within a 95%-matching range of CMYK Pantone color standards
- Vinyl canopy finish (matte, gloss, etc.)
- Canopy text
- Canopy image or icon graphics
3. Signage
Outdoor trade show signage brings form and function to your booth. Use custom signs to welcome guests, advertise trade show promotions, showcase social media handles or even share a unique event hashtag.
SpeedPro’s line of outdoor event signs are made for quick assembly and portability, as well as printed using UV and water-damage resistant inks. They won’t fade or discolor if they are adequately cared for, ensuring multiple uses across the years.
Pick from SpeedPro’s catalog of outdoor trade show signs, including:
- Sandwich board signs
- Standalone/mounted signage
- Barrier signage
- Arch signs
- Digital signage
4. Flags and Banners
Like event signage, custom flags and banners are eye-catching additions to your outdoor trade show exhibit. They bring color and movement to typically static tents. Hang banners at tent openings, or install a series of flags with branded messages, pictures of products or other colorful, high-impact graphics along sidewalks to draw attention to your booth for all the right reasons.
SpeedPro produces flags and banners in several customizable outdoor templates:
- Retractable, or roll-up, banners
- Telescopic banners and banner stands, which are adjustable in both length and height
- Spring-back banners that feature supportive rods at the base, top and behind the banner
- Fitted fabric frames with made-to-fit vinyl graphics
- Boulevard flags
- Freestanding flags with a variety of base mounts
- Grommet-hole hanging flags
Each flag and banner comes with your choice of aluminum or plastic pipe framing to keep graphics in their desired upright position. For a more durable frame, opt for steel truss framing systems or SpeedPro’s line of custom illuminated fabric frames, each long-lasting and portable.
5. Bars, Counters and Tables
SpeedPro’sPopup™ Bars are durable, wheeled multi-use stations explicitly designed for mobile outdoor needs.
Whether you’re serving snacks or providing a product demo — or merely exchanging business cards and a handshake with a new contact — do it over SpeedPro’s unique outdoor table kits. We offer five core trade show bar, table and countertop varieties:
- Modular counters: Great for standalone product displays as well as small desks or stations for your employees to interact with booth visitors.
- Fabric counters: Smaller, more customized tables and counters for themed functions within your tent.
- Minibars and headers: Built to serve beverages, snacks or hand out product freebies to trade show attendees.
- Large bars and headers: Larger, walk-up versions of snack, beverage or product freebie counters ideal for interfacing directly with booth visitors.
- And more tent-friendly tables and counters.
6. Table Skirts, Tabletoppers
Add a professional finish to your outdoor counters and tables with custom-made table skirts, alongside other enhancements that make your displays pop.
Coverings come in a range of sizes and materials. Pick from SpeedPro’s line of table-topping accents, such as:
- Table skirts: SpeedPro produces printed fabric, imprinted fabric and table runners in 12 dye-sublimated fabric colors and 21 vinyl color options.
- Popup tabletop displays: Choose from over eight categories of portable, easy assembly tabletop displays to showcase brand messages or promote products. Each is made to order to enhance your outdoor booth’s overall aesthetic. Plus, they come fashioned from lightweight materials for simple transport, set up and take down.
7. Interactive Exhibition Elements
Few booth additions make your outdoor trade show more memorable than interactive elements.
Breakaway from your competitors’ setups by creating a truly immersive, interactive booth visitors want to participate in — and can’t ignore. No more relying on traditional trade show booth gimmicks and features, ones you’ve seen deployed across the trade show circuit for years.
SpeedPro studios can help bring these exhibition elements to life through our line of custom experiential graphics. Our experts ensure each is made for maximum outdoor functionality, able to weather the elements and keep your outdoor event display the talk of the trade show:
- Step-and-repeat banners: Step-and-repeat banners make your booth guests feel like they’re walking the red carpet. These custom vinyl backdrops serve as a guest photo or selfie station, which you can complete with quirky props or a branded hashtag to share on social media.
- Fabric kiosks and iPad stands: Add multimedia displays to your tent. Guests can take custom quizzes, watch videos, explore digital look books and so much more, right there within your tent.
- Visitor-created wall murals: Let booth visitors sign or add graffiti-like doodles to a canvas wall installed at your tent. Murals serve to draw in curious booth visitors. They also add color and texture that make your outdoor display stand out all the more.
Find Your Local SpeedPro Studio to Get Started on Your Custom Outdoor Display Booths
When you’re ready to maximize your presence at industry trade shows and conferences, reach out to your local SpeedPro. Our nationwide network of studios specializes in large-format commercial graphics primed to make your brand pop. Let’s get started today.
