In many industry’s expo’s and show’s are the primary way to meet new clients and drum up new business. The wedding industry is no different, but there needs to be some light shed into the events themselves in order to fully understand how successful, or unsuccessful they end up being. It also matters who is the one getting the success: clients, vendors, or the producer of the show.

Lets start with the stats that producers typically inflate or lie about in order to get vendors signed up, and make their show sound big. Numbers for expos are usually never what they say they are. The reason for this is because majority of shows give their tickets away to improve attendance. The producer of the show can see how ticket sales are doing, and 99% of the time they don’t have enough tickets sold, so they give them away. Many shows (even the most popular & most established) in the area usually give away 1/2 of all their tickets to fill their event. This is terrible for the vendor because this attracts people who aren’t serious, and don’t really have money to spend. If you give your tickets away the guest doesn’t really care about the show because they aren’t invested in it, unlike someone who bought the ticket.

Recently some local shows said that they had record attendance. When you break it down you can start to see the “real” numbers. The producer might state that they had 1000 attendees. Then you ask other vendors, brides, and people who went to the event to check it out, and you hear very different numbers.

Even though a show or expo has around 1000 guests registered, they gave away a quarter to half of their tickets, and so only about half the registered attendees showed up. Out of the half that showed up there were actually only half of those attendees who are getting married. Those brides had an average budget of less than $10,000, so a majority of the attendees cannot afford hiring anyone at the show. Vendors were booking clients at the show, but the ones that got booked had the cheapest prices.

Majority of vendors aren’t getting any inquiries from many of these expos and shows. In fact the biggest problem that vendors voiced about many of the shows was there were too many DIY brides taking pictures and video of the decorations and backdrops. The brides picked the cheap vendors and the other 90% didn’t get anything.

Is this the kind of success that most people are looking for? The whole point of a show or expo is to get vendors bookings that they normally wouldn’t get. It’s great if you are a bride not planning on spending to much because you have smaller budget, or you’re the producer of the show itself making money primarily off your vendor booths. If your a vendor though, you get the short end of the stick.

As a vendor these are the questions that you should ask the producer of a show:

• Whats your demographic?
• How are you marketing to them (traditional media, social media, print, online, etc.)
• How many vendors typically book, and how much do they book?
• What is your budget for marketing?
• What is the average wedding budget for the attendees?
• How many tickets do you give away?