Run a fun festival booth

October 3rd, 2014

Running a booth at a local festival can be fun and help let people know you exist. You will find that the thread that runs through all of my “Ugh… Marketing” posts is ‘let people know you exist’. Sadly many indies, even ones with awesome games are never noticed because nobody knows they exist.

Here are some tips I put together after running a booth for both Two Scoop Games and our local Louisville Kentucky game dev community GameDevLou at the Louisville Mini Maker Faire.This is by far not a comprehensive list, but they are things I have picked up from others or experience that helped me!

Here are my tips in order of least important to most important at the end.

Barrow what you can

Some equipment like TV stands can be very pricey. For one of our events we rented TV stands from some other entities which helps them offset the cost of buying the stands and also helps us. The Indie dev Community tends to be very generous and open to sharing, be the same way and you’ll go far.

Don’t loose things

Mark your cables especially if you’re sharing a booth with other people or studios. This just makes it so much easier to spot which ones are yours and grab them quickly when you’re packing up.

Power helps

You can never have too many extension chords and surge protectors. You often don’t know where your booth is going to be until the day of, so if your spot is far away from power you might need a long extension cord.

Focus

With how overwhelming the conference or festival already is, you don’t want your booth alone to overwhelm a visitor. Try to have a couple of focused things that you’re showing them. Don’t try to show too much. This ties in with the next one a lot because you want them to leave focused on what you wanted them to see.

Call to action

Have a call to action for visitors to your booth.


Examples (Pick one or two max and stick with it!):

  • Download our new game.
  • Give us your email for our newsletter.
  • Vote for this game on Steam Greenlight.
  • Help fund our kick starter.
You don’t want anyone to leave your booth without having something on their mind that they need to go do, and it’s even better if they could do it right there at your booth so they don’t forget.

Thanks and let me know if you have any great tips I didn’t think of!

Have a question or suggestion for this or a future article?
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