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14 Trade Show Booth Activity Ideas

survey attendees digitally as an activity in your trade show display

Trade shows are a powerful marketing medium for lead generation, brand awareness, and relationship building.  But they can also be mind-numbingly dull, for both attendees and booth staffers.

What makes a booth boring?  Nothing does.  And by nothing, I mean standing around in your booth doing nothing.

With no activities in your trade show booth, attendees focus their attention instead where there is movement.  With no activities to host, your booth staffers retreat inside themselves or their smartphones.

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Give Your Trade Show Passport Game an Extreme Makeover with Event Gamification

trade show passport game extreme makeover

Many meeting planners have the trade show passport game in their toolbox of tricks to drive attendees to their trade show floor.  While some criticize the game as boring or out-of-date, the truth is that it seems to work.  

Perhaps it’s time to give the trade show passport game an extreme makeover?

What is the Trade Show Passport Game?

For those reading that don’t know this trade show game, the trade show passport game is a simple game designed to get attendees to visit multiple exhibitor booths in exchange for a chance to win a prize. Attendees are given paper passports that they can get stamped at exhibitor booths. Once your card has been filled up, you can go enter the drawing.

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Convincing Your Boss To Try Interactive Trade Show Games

interactive trade show games convincing your boss to try them

The good news: You’ve discovered how interactive trade show games can boost exhibiting results with significantly more booth traffic and leads, and you’re eager to try games in an upcoming event.

The bad news: Your boss doesn’t share your enthusiasm.  At least, not yet.

As you would expect, we want to help you be persuasive about this.  Therefore, here are 5 points you can share with your boss, written from your perspective:

1. We Need An Activity To Maximize Trade Show ROI

We won’t get enough booth traffic without an activity. Just standing in the booth doing nothing will not bring in the visitors. Attendees have become too reluctant and time-starved to walk into every booth. We need a compelling activity to grab their valuable attention and pull them in. A popular activity will multiply our overall results far greater than their additional marginal cost.

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13 Audience Participation Games for Corporate Events

audience participation games for corporate events and meetings

When it comes to audience participation games, these are some of the questions that our potential clients bring to us in our first meetings. Ultimately, they are searching for the best game for their needs:

  • What are some simple and fun, games for audience participation?
  • How can you create audience participation games that are relevant to your content?
  • How can you create audience participation games that keep attendees engaged over multiple days of your corporate event?
  • If you are a speaker (or facilitator) trying to spice up your session, how can you implement these games yourself?
  • How can I use the data collected to make better business decisions?
  • What should I keep in mind when creating a game?
    • Create a simple game title or theme
    • Game rewards

    To help you with your brainstorming, we pulled together a list of audience participation games and provided a short explanation of how they could work inside your event. Use this list as one input for your own sales meetings, customer events, and conferences. We grouped the games into three different game families:

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Event Gamification: 4 Common Mistakes To Avoid

Event Gamification - 4 common mistakes to avoid

Have you ever created an Event Gamification element for your event that didn’t work? Perhaps you felt like you followed the advice on other blogs or what was intuitive to you — but the game was still a bust.

Perhaps you are here because you are creating your first game and you want to learn from the experiences of others and not make a mistake.

With thousands of games under our belt, we have seen a lot of game patterns that work and several that do not work. Here are 4 common mistakes that we have seen (and heard about from others) regarding Event Gamification.

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Best Trade Show Games – A 10-Point Checklist For Success

Best trade show games - a checklist for success

You or someone on your team has proposed that you host a game in your trade show booth. That’s great, because games can make your booth come alive. But what really makes a trade show game successful?

The best trade show games succeed for many reasons, which are given below in a 10-point checklist. Use it to compare ideas you’re considering.

But at the highest level, the best trade show games do two things: They appeal to attendees AND provide marketing benefits to exhibitors. Let’s look at both areas of value.

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Choosing The Best Interactive Game When You Exhibit At Different Vertical Market Trade Shows

Choosing Best Interactive Game When You Exhibit At Different Vertical Market Trade Shows

Savvy exhibitors know that exhibiting at vertical market shows can be the best strategy for improving trade show results.

These smart exhibitors understand which industries their most valuable customers come from – and then exhibit at shows were those valuable customers attend.

For example, if you sell a software product for professional services firms, you may exhibit at a big software trade show.  But once you know that ad agencies and engineering firms buy three times more than your average client, you can instead exhibit at shows where ad agency employees or engineers attend.

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Comparing Interactive Games To Other Trade Show Promotional Activities

comparing SocialPoint interactive trade show games to other trade show promotional activities

While your ultimate goal in hosting a trade show promotional activity is to drive more booth traffic, that’s not the only thing exhibitors consider when making a buying decision.

While you can choose from a myriad of ways to pull people into your exhibit, only interactive games also meet several key purchasing criteria of many exhibitors. It might be like comparing apples to oranges. Let’s see how.

key purchasing criteria for trade show promotional activities

What Factors Matter To Exhibitors When Choosing Trade Show Promotional Activities?

Exhibitors consider many criteria when evaluating potential trade show promotional activities. These are several common features and benefits exhibitors value highly:

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What Is A Trade Show Interactive?

Trade show interactive ideas

Adding a trade show interactive has become one of exhibitors’ favorite tools to getting today’s more reluctant show attendees to cross from the aisle and into and their booth space.

Why are trade show interactives more necessary than ever?  Let me count the ways:

  1. Attendees today have more control of the buying process, because they can easily get product info from the web. So, exhibitors must offer a more compelling experience attendees can’t get online to get them into their booth.
  2. Attendees love technology, and spend much of their personal time playing with their phones and tablet computers consuming digital content. So, tech-driven interactives meet their expectations – especially with Millennials, which are now the largest generation in the workforce.
  3. Attendees are overwhelmed with too much work and not enough time. So, when they return to work after the show, they all too quickly forget much of what they learned, except for the most compelling experiences.
  4. Time-starved attendees need a more personalized experience that gives them just the information they need, in a faster and more memorable fashion.
  5. The high potential sales value from trade show visitors justifies investing more to create greater impact and results from each face-to-face interaction.

For all these reasons, trade show interactives are more popular than ever.

Trade Show Interactive Definition

What actually is a trade show interactive? It can have many elements about experience, senses, journey, and more.  Here is our definition:

A trade show interactive takes attendees beyond just looking at displays or conversing with booth staffers. With a trade show interactive, attendees interact in a staged, planned, personalized, multi-sensory way with objects, technology, games, and people to more memorably experience the exhibitor’s marketing message or story. A trade show interactive can be as small as a trade show game on an iPad or as large as an entire island booth.

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4 Reasons Why You Aren’t Getting Enough Trade Show Booth Traffic

4 reasons for not getting enough trade show booth traffic

After all the planning, investment and hard work, imagine standing in an empty trade show booth while attendees simply walk on by.

If you’ve been in that situation, chances are you were frustrated, while your bored booth staffers wished they were somewhere else.

Trade shows are too expensive to do without having a consistent flow of traffic in your booth.  Here are 4 reasons your booth traffic is too small – reasons you can fix to turn that trickle of booth traffic into a flood.

1. You’re Not Hosting Engaging Trade Show Activities

Trade show attendees have changed in two major ways, that make it harder to get them out of the aisle and into your booth. And both of those causes are from technology.

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