The following are six of most important marketing rules that exhibitors need to undertake to ensure their next trade show is a success.

1. Market Prior to Show

Four weeks before event, invite your prospects and current customers to visit you at trade show.

Ensure that you design an invitation that gives delegates a real incentive to come over and visit. Think of a distinctive approach to promote your company. For example, you could provide demonstrations of latest technology that can benefit your audience. People love to look at what newest thing is and how it will save them time and money. If you have a new food product, offer free tastings and samples.

2. Create an Eye-Catching Booth

Your exhibition booth is perceived to be a reflection of what you are like as a company. Make sure it is warm and inviting and that it stands out from crowd.

Signage must be clear and kept simple. Clearly write your business name on your sign and state your unique selling proposition. You only have 10 seconds to grab attention of attendees as they walk past. If people cannot work out what you are selling they will keep on walking.

3. Provide Promotional Materials

Brochures and leaflets are typical promotional materials that need to be freely available. Make sure your contact details and web address are printed on everything.

Set up a DVD player in your booth that continuously loops your marketing video. Make sure that DVD you receive from your production house has this loop feature built in. We're all little kids at heart and colour and movement can be a great way to grab attention.

Over years, I have been given many failed corporate communications videos to watch and have found that they all suffer from one or more of following problems.

1. A poorly written script

This would have to be one of most common problems. The script provides backbone to any video project and it must be perfect. It needs to be to point, clear and interesting.

Often scripts get written in-house resulting in wordy and highly detailed pieces of prose that do not translate well onto screen. Quite frankly, they are boring. Unfortunately, pretty shots and expert editing cannot hide a tedious narrative.

Worse still, is when script goes back and forth and content is played out in an illogical sequence. This results in no viewer being able to quickly understand your core marketing messages, if they can understand it at all.

Ideally, a script conveys most important pieces of information that your target market wants to know and is written with an objective in mind.

2. The video is too long

In this day and age of high speed broadband and other time-saving devices, very few of us have attention spans that can handle information for more than a few minutes.

Any video over 10 minutes is destined to lose viewers after first few minutes.

Yet, surprisingly there are many marketing videos today that are well over 12 minutes in length.

The best marketing videos are short and succinct. Yet, it is far easier to cram everything into a video than to make a short and concise one. In words of Blaise Pascal, "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter".

3. "The "look mum I'm on TV" scenario

While some of us may cringe at thought of a camera placed in front of us, there are many people who relish opportunity to show their face on television.

This can result in corporate heads droning on incessantly about how wonderful their company is (and what a great job they are doing). Sadly, this does nothing else but soothe corporate egos and turn viewers away.

Few people realise that talking to a camera in an appealingly manner is a skill in itself. Having a CEO spieling boring corporate fluff while looking dumbstruck and awkward in front of camera does not a good video make.