SocialPoint Digital Solutions for Events Blog

8 Preventable Trade Show Lead Retrieval Mistakes

It’s unfortunately far too easy to make mistakes with trade show lead retrieval.

That’s because trade show lead retrieval systems and booth staffers are often different from show to show, and because it’s not something you manage every day.

But because trade shows leads are some of the most valuable sales and marketing investments your company makes, it’s so worth your time to prevent making these mistakes.

Here are 8 preventable trade show lead retrieval mistakes we’ve seen our trade show game clients make. We’ve even made some of these mistakes ourselves (fortunately not anymore)!

1. Not capturing trade show lead data

This is the most basic mistake you can make: You exhibit at a trade show, but don’t capture the lead data at all! Sometimes this is because your staffers are interacting with attendees, but don’t have any formal way to gather lead data. Sometimes (such as at regional trade shows) it’s because your booth staffers gather business cards, but don’t send the leads back to the central office. Sometimes it’s because there are more booth visitors looking around your booth than you have staffers to handle.

2. Not qualifying leads

Your sales team is often overwhelmed by the flood of leads that arrives in their lap right after a trade show. If the leads aren’t qualified and prioritized by lead quality, then your reps will make calls to some poor-quality leads. After a few discouraging conversations, some sales reps will assume ALL the leads are the same poor quality and stop calling ANY of those show leads. But if your booth staffers qualify the leads (hot, warm, cold), and capture that rating with your trade show lead retrieval system, then your sales reps will first call the hot leads. They’ll be rewarded with more sales, and you’re generate a higher trade show ROI. Our Lead Manager app lets you quickly rank leads from 1 to 5 stars.

3. Asking too many, too few, or the wrong questions

There is a balancing act to asking booth visitors the right amount of questions. Ask too few, and you won’t be able to tell if they are a good lead, and if they are, what matters to them. Ask too many questions and you risk making them feel like they’re visiting The Spanish Inquisition. If you ask the right questions first, your booth staffers can recognize poor quality prospects quickly and disengage, rather than continue asking them more questions that wastes everyone’s time. Here’s some more tips on writing questions for your trade show app.

4. Not getting enough contact data with your trade show lead retrieval

One area that you should err on asking more questions are to get contact data, if you are not getting that info from a badge scan. While you may or may not need their physical address, you will definitely need their phone number and email to let both sales and marketing do effective lead follow up. But hey, you don’t need that fax number anymore, so that’s a plus! Booth visitors will more willingly give up their contact data when they play a trade show game.

5. Not taking notes or comments

Trade show lead retrieval isn’t all about multiple choice questions. Often the best insights you can capture are a few sentences that tell the story about what problems your booth visitor is facing, and what they liked best about your potential solution. Too many booth staffers skip writing notes, either because they don’t want to take the time, or they lack the time, or they are only gathering business cards that lack space to write sufficient notes or comments. Don’t be like them. Write notes.

6. Not identifying next steps

At the end of each conversation with booth visitors, your booth staffers may think it’s time to go on to the next lead. But there’s an essential step: Record by writing a note on the lead form or a checkbox on a list of choices what the next step with the lead. That way, your marketing team knows if they should send a certain product brochure, and your sales team knows to set up a requested demo or meeting.

7. Not training staffers to use each show’s trade show lead retrieval system

At each show you could use the trade show’s supplied lead retrieval app, or lead capture machine, or a paper lead form, or another lead management app. Each system has different ways of capturing lead data. Plus, you will likely have new booth staffers, and new data you want to capture. That means you need to train your booth staffers for every show on how to use the lead retrieval system.

8. Not getting captured trade show lead data quickly to sales and marketing

You didn’t capture all those trade show leads just so they could sit in a box on the corner of your desk. You’ve got to quickly get those leads into play. Marketing needs the lead data fast to fulfill product literature requests, and sales needs their hot and warm leads so they can convert those leads into sales. Here are a few tips for getting trade show leads fulfilled faster by sales and marketing.

Trade show lead retrieval isn’t the easiest thing you’ll tackle today, but it isn’t rocket science, either. With some planning, experience, and by following these tips, you can avoid making costly lead management mistakes and therefore boost your trade show ROI.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and capture leads with our fun interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate a serious increase in excitement, crowds, and leads.

Posted on 6 Jul 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In Trade Show Lead Capture

17 Reasons Why You Need A Tradeshow Game

It seems like such a little thing, adding a tradeshow game to your booth. Just an idea you are considering to make your trade shows a little better.

Yet, adding a tradeshow game to your booth can make a surprisingly huge positive impact to your company’s booth traffic, booth staffers’ success, company brand image, lead counts, lead data gathered, sales generated, R.O.I. — and much more.

So if you’ve ever asked yourself, “Why do I need a tradeshow game?”, here are 17 reasons a tradeshow game will make your trade show program vastly better:

1. A tradeshow game drives more booth traffic

Driving more booth traffic is the top reason clients tell us they want a tradeshow game. Attendees walking the trade show floor become a little jaded after the third or fourth aisle, and so they gravitate towards a game as a way to win a prize, enjoy themselves, and re-start their bored minds. So a game gives you more traffic in your booth.

2. A tradeshow game gets shy people out of the aisle

One way tradeshow games drive more booth traffic is that games pull in shy people that would otherwise pass you by. A game gives a shy attendee a way to enter your booth without having to engage a booth staffer about product right away. With our interactive games, the game itself becomes the initial focus of conversation, fanning the flames of an eventual lead. We call this the digital ice breaker.

3. A tradeshow game helps your booth staffers

News flash: booth staffing is harder than it looks. Many booth staffers lack the will and skill to reach out into the aisle and drag attendee after attendee into your booth. So they don’t, and all those potential leads keep walking down the aisle. Your average booth staffer gets bored quickly, and disengages from even trying after a while. But with a tradeshow game bringing in more traffic, your booth staffers don’t have to work hard to pull in attendees. So your booth staffers will stay engaged all show, and be more willing to staff future shows.

4. A tradeshow game makes your booth fun

Simple as it sounds, a fun booth is a good thing. When your booth is fun, attendees are more likely to walk in, more likely to talk to your staffers, more likely to stay in your booth longer. And with all those people having fun in your booth, other attendees will want to join in, because nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

5. A tradeshow game enhances your company image

One of the top 3 goals for companies exhibiting at trade shows is to boost or change their company image. So if you want to change perception of your company from a stuffy, stodgy, fuddy-duddy company to a fun, modern, approchable company, try our digital tradeshow games. Attendees enjoying themselves playing games are creating positive memories and associating them with your brand, updating their perception with every spin of the wheel or trivia question they answer.

6. A tradeshow game increases attendee engagement

We hear a lot of exhibitors tell us they want to increase engagment with attendees in their booths. Which is one strong reason why our Challenge Bar Trivia game is our most popular: because trivia keeps attendees in the booth longer, and fosters a dialog between the attendee playing and the booth staffer giving them hints and clues. And the most valuable part of that attendee engagment? Educating buyers about your products…

7. A tradeshow game educates buyers about your products and services

All tradeshow games can attract and entertain booth visitors, from mini golf to a pop-a-shot. But few games do this: Our trivia game educates attendees about your products and services as they play. That’s because we customize our game with your own trivia questions. Questions that challenge your booth visitors to guess about the capabilities, strengths, benefits and advantages of your company, your products, and your intangible services that are so hard to promote. Attendees gladly learn all this to win prizes and high-score bragging rights.

8. A tradeshow game cross-sells to existing clients

Again, this is another strength of our Challenge Bar Trivia game that few other games can offer. When companies exhibit at a trade show populated by mostly their customers, they want to make them aware of all the other products they sell that their customers could also buy. However, the exhibiting company’s own sales rep may not have educated their existing clients of these other products. With a well-written set of trivia questions, exhibitors can cleverly cross-sell their broad product offering to their existing clients attending the show.

9. A tradeshow game gets more impact from your trade show giveaways

Trade show giveaways are extremely popular, but often their full value is not obtained by exhibitors. Rather than just set them out on the table or shelf, or hide them away from quick hands, exhibitors can integrate their giveaways into a fun, promoted prize wheel game that gives them more drawing power and helps increase lead capture data. Let’s talk more about lead data:

10. A tradeshow game gathers more lead data

It may sound surprising to pair up the fun of a tradeshow game with the nerdiness of capturing more lead data, but it’s so true. Tradeshow games (playing for fun, prizes, and bragging rights) provide the incentive for attendees to share their contact data. Not only that, but they will also answer a few qualifying questions that help you prioritize them for faster lead follow up. And with our Lead Manager app, you can also get your leads’ photo, social media profiles, and company profiles. You can gather leads easily at shows even if the show doesn’t offer a badge scanner.

11. A tradeshow game can include analytics to prove your trade show success

Again, this is a surprisingly nerdy advantage from our tradeshow games: analytics. After each show you get charts and graphs that report how much activity your games had. These analytics are great for sharing with management to demonstrate success. And when you use our games show after show, you get great data to compare the traffic, engagement, and leads amongst your entire show scheule.

12. A tradeshow game jumpstarts all phases of your attendees’ buying cycles

At the start of this article I wrote how little the idea of a tradeshow game seemed. Yet here is an extremely important strategic value tradeshow games provide: Many island exhibitors design their exhibit around the entire buying cycle of their booth visitors. Adding a tradeshow game helps bring in more traffic, that can then, after the game, be directed to expand engagement at all phases of their buying cycle. Here’s more about that, with expanatory infographics.

13. A tradeshow game recovers otherwise lost leads from small booths at regional trade shows

Another surprisingly valuable strategic advantage our digital tradeshow games can offer is helping you regain control over your regional trade shows. Often these shows are staffed by field reps who won’t send back any leads they gathered, so you can’t drive sales, prove the show’s value nor judge which regional shows are worth keeping. With our Digital Fishbowl game, you get those regional show leads immediately, allowing you to follow up on leads, track sales, and intelligently evolve your regional show schedule.

14. A tradeshow game retains otherwise lost leads during busy show times

As exhibitors, we’d all like to magically have the exact number of booth staffers needed to talk to the varying flow of attendees. The reality is that we bring as many staffers we can afford – which is usually too few during the busiest times of the show. Potential leads can’t find an open booth staffer to talk to, and they are too impatient to wait. You can still retain some of these otherwise lost leads with our Digital Fishbowl game. Attendees will provide their contact and qualifying data for a chance to win a prize, and you retain leads that would otherwise be lost.

15. A tradeshow game generates more sales leads

It’s only natural that as you get more booth traffic, more of that booth traffic turns into leads. (Here’s a story of one exhibitor that nearly doubled their lead goal with tradeshow games.) And for many exhibitors, lead generation is the top reason for exhibiting at trade shows. Our clients regularly tell us they boost lead counts from 30% to 100%. These leads saw a demo of your products and services in your booth, so they are more likely to close than leads from other marketing sources.

16. A tradeshow game can increase your trade show ROI

When you boost lead counts from 30% to 100%, but only increase your overall trade show budget by hundreds or a few thousand dollars (our games cost less with an annual plan), you can significantly boost your tradeshow ROI. We even hear from clients how they replaced a more expensive, and less effective promotion with our tradeshow games, actually saving money while boosting results.

17. A tradeshow game quickly creates a proven, customized promotion

When you are tasked with managing many trade shows, plus often many other marketing activities like social media, web site upgrades, lead management, and more, then it becomes problematic to plan and create a new promotion for your important trade shows. Who has the time? Fortunately, our tradeshow games are easily customized in 2 weeks on our configurable interactive game software platform. You quickly get a proven promotion that delivers results at your shows.

I hope you now realize that when while looking for a fun promo idea for your tradeshows, in considering tradeshow games you have uncovered a gem of an idea that will significantly boost your results in a myriad of ways.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and capture leads with our fun interactive tradeshow games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate a serious increase in excitement, crowds, and leads.

Posted on 29 Jun 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, trade show

How To Write Effective Qualifying Questions For Your Trade Show App

More and more exhibitors are ditching paper and instead using a trade show app to capture lead data from their in-booth conversations. They often use the show’s provided lead retrieval app, or else use a rented or purchased lead retrieval app or trade show game to capture lead data.

While there are advantages to using a trade show app in terms of saving time entering and exporting data, too many exhibitors fail to go one more crucial step, and include valuable qualifying questions in their digital lead capture.

That’s understandable, as it takes time to customize the app with your company’s qualifying questions, and there is suspicion that the booth staffers still won’t use them. Yet getting answers to qualifying questions is so worth the effort!

Here’s how to write qualifying questions for your trade show app – questions that will advance your business goals and that your booth staffers will actually use.

Write as few qualifying questions for your trade show app as possible

Nothing is as daunting to a booth staffer than a laundry list of questions to get answers for, when they’re faced with restless booth visitors who are itching to resume walking the show floor. Give your booth staffers too many questions and you won’t get answers for most of them. Or, you’ll get annoyed prospects and more data than you can actually use.

Instead, only ask questions that will help your sales people prioritize and engage with their leads, and that your marketing team will use to select marketing follow up.

What kinds of questions to include in your trade show app

Ask your sales management to supply the 3 to 5 questions they would want to ask a prospect to define their needs and to rate how qualified they are.

These questions are the select few that veteran sales people know will help understand each lead’s specific needs and determine which of your product offerings are best. Answers that will help determine what market segment prospects belong to. Answers that will determine the rate and level of sales and marketing follow up.

These questions can be about which of the product families they are interested in, the level of their consumption of your product type, or the date of an upcoming event that is driving their purchase.

Chances are, your sales and marketing team will brainstorm a list of 10 or more questions. Once you have that list, be ruthless about eliminating questions that are secondary, and keep questions that will truly be used to understand, qualify and prioritize leads.

Getting BANT answers without asking BANT questions

Perhaps the most popular formula for qualifying leads is called BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Time.

Budget: Does your lead have the budget set aside to buy your product already?
Authority: Do they have the authority to make the purchase?
Need: Do they have a strong need to buy your solution?
Time: How soon do they plan to make the purchase?

Questions that revolve around answering these questions are great to ask – except they can also make your booth visitors recoil. Work with your sales team to write questions that help to reveal budget and need (some size or use amount parameter, their vertical market, the key problem they are trying to solve) without having to directly ask the budget question.

How to format answer choices for your trade show app

When you can, make your qualifying questions multiple choice that booth staffers can simply check a box to define the answer. Even better, those same question and answer choices are already being used by your sales and marketing team in your database, so you have apples-to-apples comparison to other prospects and can quickly import the show’s lead capture data and use it right away.

For example, you can rate each lead’s quality and simultaneously define follow up activity with one question that asks the next follow up step:

Have a Sales Rep contact for a demo or call
Add to newsletter list
Send product info
Send a whitepaper or e-book

Reevaluate your trade show app questions for every show

Hopefully you can use the same questions and answers at every show and save yourself time in making changes. But verify you can use them every time. Your company may have introduced a major new product or be exhibiting at a different vertical market show. For both of these reasons you would benefit from asking new questions on your trade show app. Fortunately, you won’t have to spend as much time as the first time.

Adding effective qualifying questions to your trade show app may seem like a small thing, but it can produce oversize results for the effort. A few easily answered questions will vastly improve your ability to prioritize and follow up on leads, boosting your results and trade show ROI.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and capture leads with our fun interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate a serious increase in excitement, crowds, and leads

Posted on 22 Jun 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, Trade Show Lead Capture

4 Ways To Boost Your Trade Show Giveaways Impact With Our Virtual Prize Wheel Game

Chances are you’ve used trade show giveaways to drive more booth traffic. It’s a time-honored tactic that gets attention and lets attendees go home with a souvenir to remember you by.

But your giveaways can do even more to help increase your trade show results. You can boost their marketing impact in 4 powerful ways, by combining your giveaways with our Virtual Prize Wheel.

Here’s how our Virtual Prize Wheel adds impact to your trade show giveaways:

1. Make your trade show giveaways more exciting to attract more visitors

When you show a colorful prize wheel on a big flat screen monitor, complete with photos of your big prize, it clearly signals to attendees that there’s a fun and beneficial reason to visit your booth. Attendees get more excited to try to win a prize – even if it’s the same giveaways you would have given them anyhow! And attendees love to smash the big button that drives the prize wheel on the screen. As people spin to win, their enthusiasm and squeals attract attention from other attendees. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd!

2. Leverage your trade show giveaways to capture more lead data

Ever have an attendee walk into your booth, grab your giveaway, and leave? It’s your trade show booth, not Halloween! You can set up our Virtual Prize Wheel on one or more iPads, where attendees enter in their contact data, answer a few qualifying survey questions, and then hit the button on-screen to win their prize. Now you are capturing your booth visitors’ valuable lead data, uploaded to the cloud, immediately available to you, even if you’re not on-site!

3. Enhance your brand while offering trade show giveaways

It’s common to customize your trade show giveaways by printing or embossing your company logo on them, or by choosing giveaways in your company colors. The best giveaways are thematically linked to your marketing message, helping attendees better remember your company and benefits. You can go one step further with our Virtual Prize Wheel game, because we customize the screen visuals to your brand. You can pick the wheel and background screen colors and font, add in your company logo and brand images, plus any show-specific images or messages. Plus, the Virtual Prize Wheel adds a patina of modern cool to your brand, especially compared to a regular prize wheel.

4. Better manage the proportion given of major and minor trade show giveaways

While a pile of $5 giveaways can bring in some people, offering a bigger prize will entice even the most jaded attendees to walk in. But you don’t want to give those valuable prizes to everyone, lest you go broke. With our Virtual Prize Wheel, everyone can spin the wheel to have a chance at a big prize that your feature on your game graphics, but you can set the proportion of big prize winners to whatever you want. Let most attendees win smaller prizes, yet get more attendees in.

Trade show giveaways work, which is why exhibitors continue to use them. But with our Virtual Prize Wheel, your giveaways will drive even more traffic, facilitate lead data capture, and enhance your brand. So you get more leads, sales, and profits from your trade show investment.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and capture leads with our fun interactive trade show games like the Virtual Prize Wheel, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate a serious increase in excitement, crowds, and leads.

Posted on 13 Jun 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In Branding, games, prize wheel, trade show giveaways, Trade Show Lead Capture

How To Follow Up On Your Trade Show Leads Faster

Data suggests that only 18% of trade show leads are followed up after a show. Further, hot leads and warm leads turn cold the longer you take to follow up with those leads.

If you are B2B exhibitor – then you are probably doing the following:

Investing a sizable portion of your marketing budget on trade shows
Measuring your success based on leads captured and sales closed

Time is money, my friend. Speed is the name of the game. If you are struggling with trade show lead follow-up, then here are some strategies that will help you succeed.

1. Capture trade show leads digitally instead of with business cards

By capturing leads digitally, you can be ready to follow up with leads in minutes instead of the hours and even days it will take you to data enter the business cards manually. To capture leads digitally you should use a badge scanner, lead capture app or a tool like our Digital Fishbowl. These tools will help you capture leads, ask qualification questions, and make notes.

2. Identify the appropriate trade show lead follow-up options before your event

Keep trade show lead follow-up simple. I recommend that you pick up to 4 options to follow up with a lead. Here are the four that I would use: (1) Have a Sales Rep Contact for a demo or call. (2) Add to Newsletter. (3) Send Product Info. (4) Send a Whitepaper or e-book. Depending on your organization’s sophistication, you can add more. In fact, we can embed this question into our interactive trade show games – so the attendee can self-identify where they fit in the follow-up process.

3. Create a trade show lead follow-up plan

Document and communicate your follow-up plan before the event. On our team, we use our Lead Capture App to ask qualification questions, make notes and rate the leads onsite. This helps us prioritize follow up. Here’s what we do when we exhibit:

Any requested e-literature fulfillment documents are sent right from our lead capture app.
Sales reps get the Sales Qualified Lead with any notes from the show for calls and immediate personalized follow-up.
Newsletter additions get a thank you for visiting our booth (sent via our newsletter platform) with a key message recap and a photo of our booth and team.
Product information leads get an email from Marketing with any product information. These leads are nurtured until they go to sales.

4. Ask for a work email and direct phone number

Your trade show lead follow-up is going to be stalled when you don’t have the appropriate work email or the direct phone number of the lead you are trying to call. Be sure to ask for a direct phone number for follow up. If you can, do not let the leads enter generic email addresses or free email addresses from providers such as Yahoo! or Gmail.

5. Map your data capture fields to your CRM / email system follow-up fields

This might sound obvious, but make sure whatever digital data you are capturing in your booth maps to the fields in your CRM or email system for easier follow up. And DO IT BEFORE THE SHOW. This will save you time when you upload the data into your CRM after the show.

6. Get your leads into your CRM or email follow-up system right after the show

Time is money. Be sure to assign someone to upload the trade show lead data into your CRM. Even if they are tired from a long show … make sure they do it right away! This is a top priority, because those valuable leads will get cold fast.

7. Follow-up leads while still in your booth

Look, we all know that leads won’t read your email while they are at the show. However, you can cross a task off of your list if you can send them the lead while right there at the show.

PRO TIP: Be sure to copy the lead into your CRM
PRO TIP: If you use links to documents, make sure you have a tracking ID on them so you can see if the lead opened the email and clicked on the link

8. Let SocialPoint help you with a complete lead capture and fulfillment system

Using our interactive trade show games, you can capture leads that are in your booth. Then, you can use our Lead Capture App to add supplemental information to the lead and send e-literature right in the booth. Our Project Managers will help you stay on task and get the results that you want.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and capture leads with our fun interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate a serious increase in excitement, crowds, and leads.

Posted on 4 Jun 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, trade show, Trade Show Lead Capture

Interactive Meeting Ideas: 5 Ways to Use a Virtual Prize Wheel in Your Event

Note: This is the latest post in our series of audience engagement posts.

Most corporate events end up with a stupifying sense of sameness, filled with a series of speeches, presentations, panel discussions, and uninspired trade show booths.

This can have the same hypnotic effect on attendees as the white lines on a highway, putting them into an unintended catatonic state.

So why not shake things up a little and create some fun, energetic activity with a Virtual Prize Wheel? Here are 5 ways to use a Virtual Prize Wheel in your event or trade show:

1. Team Up A Real Golden Ticket – And A Virtual Prize Wheel In Your Event

Remember the exciting anticipation of seeing who would win the Golden Tickets in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? You can do the same thing in your event. Either hide one or a few Golden Tickets around your event, or tape them under the seats at a special session. Ask people to check to see if they have the Golden Ticket, and the crowd will go wild. Then the winner or winners are brought onstage to spin the Virtual Prize Wheel for a chance to win a few select prizes.

2. Pick a Prize after Achieving a Milestone

You have employees or members you need to recognize for having reached an important organizational milestone (years as an employee or member, sales achieved, certification, achieving a career goal a monumental number of times). Rather than give them all the same prize, you can have them come on stage and spin the Virtual Prize Wheel in your event to win their prize. (You can make them all worthwhile prizes, with one exceptional prize – more about picking prizes here.) This adds more drama and excitement to a required yet sometimes less interesting part of your event.

3. Pick a Player to Come on Stage To Answer Questions

We also have seen companies use the Virtual Prize Wheel at their all-employee meeting to choose which attendees will be put on stage to answer questions. So instead of putting prizes on the prize wheel, they put employees’ names on it. As another attendee spins the wheel, the crowd excitedly watches to see whose name pops up – is it their name, or one of their friends? Who is going to have to answer the questions in front of the crowd? Companies use the Virtual Prize Wheel in this way to get event attendees more excited and engaged.

4. Spin to Win with Big Button to Drive Booth Traffic

Trade show booths are too often a dull affair. Bring more excitement – and booth traffic – with a “Spin To Win” prize drawing. Our Virtual Prize Wheel can be activated by attendees smashing a big button – a satisfying motion that will have attendees lining up to play. Once this greater number of attendees are in your booth, your staffers can talk with them to discover their challenges and propose potential ways your company can solve them.

5. Lead Capture Solution with Lead Capture and Survey Forms

You can also a Virtual Prize Wheel to do more than offer a prize, but to also capture lead data. The chance to win a prize will encourage attendees to self-enter their contact data, plus answer a few survey questions that help you determine their potential lead value. You can have more than one Virtual Prize Wheel in your event or booth set up to simultaneously capture lead data from hundreds of people over the course of your event or show.

If you’d like to see how you can create more engaging and interactive content using the wide variety of choices within our SocialPoint Audience Engagement System, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate greater attendee engagement at your events and trade shows.

Posted on 28 May 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In Event Technology Solutions, games, Interactive Meetings, prize wheel, Trade Show Lead Capture

Capture Lost Overflow Trade Show Leads With Our Digital Fishbowl

Let me tell you a story about how our Digital Fishbowl saved us from losing potentially lost trade show leads during the busiest times in our own trade show booth. And why you should therefore consider adding one or more Digital Fishbowls to your own booths at your busiest shows, too.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: Day 1 at EXHIBITORLIVE 2018.

Within less than an hour of the start of the EXHIBITORLIVE 2018 show, we had 13 visitors at the same time in our 10 x 20 booth! Hooray! Just one problem — we only had 4 staffers to talk to them all!

It was awesome to have so many interested visitors, but agonizing to see interested prospects ready to walk away. Especially when you know (thanks to Exhibit Surveys) that the average cost per trade show lead is $283 each!

This was the peak traffic moment, but not the only time all our staffers were already fully engaged while show attendees were continuing to stop at our booth. Every day we had sustained busy periods.

Fortunately, we had a secret weapon: The Digital Fishbowl

The Digital Fishbowl is a modern take on the old-school glass bowl fishbowl, with a few great twists:

Whereas visitors dump their business cards into a glass fishbowl to enter a prize drawing, the Digital Fishbowl improves that by having visitors self-enter their own contact data, so that data goes into the cloud and is immediately accessible by you and your marketing team.
Visitors can get an immediate lead response and digital download of your product literature.
The Digital Fishbowl lets you also ask visitors to answer one or more qualifying questions, so you can prioritize lead follow up post-show.
The Digital Fishbowl presents a more modern image and can be designed to match your company’s brand look and messaging.

We introduced the Digital Fishbowl at the EXHIBITORLIVE 2018 Show, and it won the Buyers Choice Award for best new product. Judges liked most of all how it helped solve lead management issues with regional trade shows.

But this benefit of saving otherwise lost trade show leads during peak traffic time? We didn’t even realize that until after the show, when we looked at the analytics reports that come with our games:

We saw how high the Digital Fishbowl lead counts peaked. The activity in the green box was during the times we were beyond staffer capacity. The purple box is the time we could handle the traffic and were demonstrating the Digital Fishbowl to attendees ourselves. (Green and purple boxes added for emphasis.)

Our booth staffers were engaged in the back of our inline booth, in conversations with visitors and demonstrating our other interactive trade show games. We simply couldn’t get to some of the people standing in the aisles wanting to talk.

But our Digital Fishbowl did – it was on the booth corner, atop an iPad kiosk with a “PLAY TO WIN” graphic. Attendees could self-enter to win Bose Noise-Cancelling Headphones. And so they did, again and again. It wasn’t until we saw the analytics that we realized the Digital Fishbowl was quietly gathering lead after lead after lead!

Imagine not losing overflow trade show leads during busy times!

Has this story struck a chord with you? Do you have shows where your booth staff is right-sized for most of the show, but unable to handle the traffic flow during peak trade show hours? Have you watched potentially valuable trade show leads walk away?

Then consider adding one or more Digital Fishbowls in your booth. The cost for an annual plan (unlimited shows for one year with the same game configuration) is $3,000 – that’s just $250 a month. And whether you have one or three or ten or however many iPads, it still costs the same for our software. Imagine that – the monthly cost for the Digital Fishbowl ($250) is less than the cost for the average trade show lead ($283)!

Two Digital Fishbowls In A 10 X 20 Trade Show Booth

Here’s how adding two Digital Fishbowls could look in a 10 x 20 trade show booth, with one on each corner. The kiosks pictured have our SocialPoint graphics; you source your own kiosks and customize them with your own brand colors, logos, and messages. We will load up game graphics used on the iPads to match.

Four Digital Fishbowls In A Small Island Trade Show Booth

Here’s how adding four Digital Fishbowls could look on the corners of a 20 x 20 island trade show exhibit. Those 4 Digital Fishbowls can scoop up trade show leads whenever your staff is too busy, or your attendees are too shy to engage with a staffer directly:

Multiple Digital Fishbowls In A Large Island Trade Show Booth

Here’s how adding even more Digital Fishbowls could look in a larger island show booth, with one on each corner and even fishbowls in the middle of one or more sides:

Trade shows are a great marketing medium because they allow you to meet prospects face to face. But there will often be times that they number of interested visitors far outnumbers the number of your booth staffers. For those times, have one or more Digital Fishbowls at the ready, to capture and qualify trade show leads that would have otherwise been lost.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and capture leads with our fun interactive trade show games (such as the Digital Fishbowl), feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate a serious increase in excitement, crowds, and leads.

Posted on 20 May 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, trade show, Trade Show Lead Capture

7 Reasons To Choose Your First Show To Try Our Interactive Trade Show Booth Games

Are you ready to rumble? Because not everyone is, at least not right away.

Most potential clients that contact us for the first time already have a specific show they want to use our interactive trade show booth games at. But a good number also are just doing research on promotional activities to boost their trade show results. They like our games, but now need to choose their first show to use them.

If you’ve reached the conclusion that our games will help your better achieve your trade show goals, but have yet to pick a show to try them out, here are 7 reasons that have motivated our other clients:

A big show: At your bigger shows you not only need the booth traffic to make them a success, but your larger show budget can more easily absorb the cost of the interactive trade show booth games. Big industry shows are very often the place we get used first – but they’re not the only place.
A very competitive show: Our games can help you stand out when the competition is stronger. You know the shows – where exhibitors can’t get by just waiting for attendees to wander in, or because the show attendees are so valuable that exhibitors up their game to get their attention.
New brand or marketing message: In makes it easier to integrate a new interactive like our game when you’ve already got your team focused on making a change to your trade shows. You have your new brand or marketing message going into exhibit graphics, so they’ll match the game. And, when you’ve got a new brand or marketing message, it’s more motivation to use a flashy game to call more attention to it.
Non-mission critical show: This is more for the cautious type. Some of our clients want to try our games, but don’t want to risk implementing a new activity when the stakes are high. If this is you, pick one of the least important shows on your schedule, which will still let you can see how well our games boost results. Perhaps your next regional trade show?
Summer show: When you have dozens of trade shows to execute, adding a promotion in the middle of the busy season is even more difficult. So instead, try out our interactive trade show booth games in the Summer, when you’re less busy than the Spring or Fall trade show season.
Willing sponsor: Do you have an exec responsible for one or more shows who is more eager to try new marketing ideas? It makes things go easier when you have the person approving the plan – and the budget – on board with innovation.
Your next show: There’s no time like the present! As Nike says, “Just do it.” Because we customize your game with our own configurable software platform, we can implement a game for you in just two weeks.

If one of these choices made you think, “Aha!”, let us know you’ve got a show in mind, and we can start planning how we can bring the crowd-drawing, lead-count boosting power of our games to your booth! Click here to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate excitement, crowds, and leads.

Posted on 15 May 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, trade show

Win The Game of Phones: Now Your Meeting Attendees Can Play Trivia On Their Smart Phones!

Now that our SocialPoint Challenge Bar Trivia Game is available in our Audience Response App, you can win the battle for attendee’s attention, by giving them a fun experience on their smart phones!

How does adding Trivia to the Audience Response App work?

Now you can add trivia to your event flow and push the game to attendees’ phones in the same way that you push polls, word clouds, discussion topics and much more. Attendees play our “three-strikes” game answering as many questions correctly as they can.

Their scores will appear on the leaderboard that is shown on the big screen in the room or in hallways around the venue. The major visibility of the leaderboard drives huge competitiveness – and attendee participation.

And because our Trivia game is built into our Audience Response App, it works on smart phones and iPads, on Android or Apple IOS. It’s a solution for the “Bring Your Own Device” era. So now there’s no need to rent and set up rows of iPads to give your attendees the fun and learning of trivia.

How does adding Trivia makes your meeting or event even better?

Gamification increases engagement learning. For example, according to HR Dive, “84% of trainers surveyed agreed that gamification in training helps improve knowledge retention and employee performance.”

Our trivia game is addictively fun – people who complete the game usually hit the “Play Again” button to try and increase their score. When attendees play our trivia, they are learning about whatever you want them to learn about, because you write the questions. So, while they are having loads of fun, you are getting tons of engagement and learning. And it’s measurable.

That’s because we can group the questions into learning topics, so you can measure post-event which topics attendees know well, and which topics require additional training. You can even view how individual attendees replied and scored on the trivia game, all in the same platform as their other Audience Response App interactions.

What kind of results are our clients getting with trivia?

Already, our clients have hosted five events with between 300 – 500 attendees that used trivia within our Audience Response App in their events. Each event is averaging 2,000 game plays and 14,000 questions answered by attendees. The attendee engagement is amazing! In addition, we have used trivia in hybrid events – where we had over 1,000 people playing and over 40,000 questions answered. So – we are pretty confident in trivia’s ability to scale to large audiences!

It’s been a common complaint for meeting planners that they have to fight with smart phones for attendees’ attention. Now, with our Trivia game built into your event’s Audience Response App, you’ll not only win that fight, you’ll win the Game of Phones!

If you’d like to see how you can create more engaging and interactive content using the wide variety of choices within our SocialPoint Audience Engagement System, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate greater attendee engagement at your events.

Posted on 19 Apr 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In Audience Response, Event Technology Solutions, Interactive Meetings, News

4 Times When You Should Buy Your SocialPoint Trade Show Game On An Annual Plan

Recently SocialPoint added annual pricing to our interactive trade show games. We realized that there are 4 common situations where an annual plan makes better sense, because it lowers costs and eases workloads.

You might want to consider buying or upgrading to an annual plan on your SocialPoint trade show game if one or more of these 4 situations apply to you:

1. You want to lower the per-show cost on your SocialPoint trade show game

Because getting a SocialPoint trade show game customized for your first event is the most labor-intensive, your first event costs the most. Upgrading from the First Event price to an Annual Plan (with the same configuration) costs an additional $2,000.

So, you get an even better value if you expect to use the same game configuration at 4 or more events. Every show beyond that is free. You can lower your cost per show substantially as you keep using the game at more events.

2. You do many shows with a similar audience

Exhibitor Magazine says the average exhibitor does 44 shows a year, while Skyline Exhibits says 18. Either way, that’s a lot of shows, just for the average. And what if you are above average? At ExhibitorLive 2018, we talked to dozens of exhibitors who said they do 50, 100, and even a few who do over 200 shows a year. With such a large show schedule, there will certainly be subsets of shows in your schedule large enough to use the same game configuration 5 times or more a year.

3. You’ve tried a SocialPoint trade show game and like it

You bought our interactive game for your show, enjoying the smooth experience of customizing and training to use the game. At the trade show you experienced the substantial increase in booth traffic, fun engagement, and leads at your show. You saw the export of so many leads and shared with your team the graphic and data analytics that documented your success. These are good things worth repeating! And since you’ve already paid for your first event, you only have to pay an additional $2,000 to upgrade to the annual plan.

4. You lack the time to invent new promotions for every trade show

There’s no need to reinvent the (Prize) wheel! Most likely, you lack enough time to devise, research, price, buy, set-up, train, and execute a new promotion for every show. It makes it a lot easier to have a known quantity as part of your trade show routine. Not only does it make life easier for you, but every time you use our game again, you get even better at maximizing your impact and engagement.

Getting more booth traffic, leads, and contact data is excellent. Getting all of that at a lower cost per show and with less effort on your part, even better! If you find these situations apply to you, contact us about getting an annual plan on a new or already implemented SocialPoint trade show game.

Posted on 12 Apr 2018
By Samuel J. Smith
In games, trade show