Trade shows and conferences are an excellent way to get to know your customers in person, meet potential new ones, and network with other companies and businesses with whom you might be able to partner in the future. You can scope out the competition, learn new techniques and the latest technology, and have some fun, too.

What you definitely should never do, however, is run out of your marketing materials at any time during the conference. Many a vendor has found itself short of critical business cards and brochures halfway through an event and has had to frantically have their home office FedEx a box of fresh supplies at great expense. A bare table devoid of your company’s sparkling catalogs and business cards is not the kind of image you want to project to customers or visitors who happen to pass by.

When you invest the kind of time and financial resources that conferences and trade shows require, you want to make sure that you’re getting most bang for your precious buck. Here are a few things that should never be left behind at the office when you leave for the event:

• Business cards. Bring a whole box, if you have it. You probably won’t use them all, but you never know how many people will stop by your booth and want to know more about your company. Don’t let them walk away without at least this piece of critical information: how to contact you. After all, you didn’t order them just so they can sit idle in the bottom drawer of your desk, did you? Be generous and give them away to anyone who asks for them.
  

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• Plenty of brochures. In this current economy, many companies try to skimp on their marketing materials by limiting the number of full-color, multi-page, glossy catalogs they distribute, preferring instead to reserve them for their most valued prospects. That’s certainly reasonable, but you should at least have short, attractive brochures that visitors to your booth can take away. Take a whole box of them, if not more, depending on the length of the conference. More than likely, you’ll go home with extras, but that’s infinitely better than having to turn people away because you ran out on the first day. You can always use the extras for future trade shows and to distribute to customers back at the office. The cost of shipping is negligible compared to what you could potentially earn from future business. Plus, most large and even medium-sized trade shows now offer easy shipping so that they take care of all the logistics to get your materials to the site and back to your office at the end of the event.
• Catalogs. You don’t have to bring as many of these as you would the brochures, but you should definitely include these in your trade show marketing budget. Many, many companies send their executives to these events, and you want to make sure that you can put your company’s products in their best light and in these influential people’s hands. You can leave a dozen or so fanned out on the table, with the rest in a box hidden away so that you can pick and choose to whom you want to distribute them.
  

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• Posters and/or Banners. Trade shows, because of their nature, require larger-than-life graphics to help you stand out from the enormous crowds. Make sure your booth’s posters have bright, colorful, eye-catching graphics, with your logo clearly marked throughout. Reserve plenty of time the day before the event to set up any posters, banners and the like on their stands, so that you can make sure that they’re installed properly and that the area is clean and ready to display as soon as the doors open the next morning. Bring an extra poster or two, in case you want to change your booth’s look or something happens to your original materials, either in transit or during the event itself. It happens.

Once you have all these elements in place, prepare yourself for a successful trade show.