Trade show trivia games pull more visitors into your booth, encourage them to stay longer, and teach them about your company and products.
But you can get even better results when you train booth staffers to fully leverage your trivia game in their visitor interactions.
Your training depends on what kind of trivia game you offer in your booth. We have 5 different versions of trivia, so I will walk you through how to adapt your training for each style of our trivia games. If you use another kind of trivia game, you can use these ideas as inspiration.
If you want to know what experiential marketing is, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve gathered 15 experts’ definitions to help you to better grasp this growing marketing strategy.
And why does it matter what is experiential marketing? Because it works. Experiential marketing has actually been a growing strategy for years. It keeps growing because it gets companies better engaged with consumers increasingly hidden by adblockers, ad-free streaming services, and their own consumer cynicism.
When you use our interactive trade show games to drive more booth traffic, you will likely also need prizes for your game winners. But what prizes are exhibitors offering now?
To find out, we looked at what booth prizes exhibitors recently promoted via their Twitter account. We found 100 tweets with a trade show prize offering from late 2018 until July 2019, and then categorized the prizes into 7 groups.
We share this survey as an idea-generator for you as you consider what prizes to offer in your own booth.
Here are a few of the 100 tweets with trade show prizes for games and contests that we found:
Here are the 7 most common trade show game prize categories, and how they ranked:
Consumer electronics: 41%
Exhibitor’s own products: 16%
Gift card or cash: 11%
Prize / swag pack: 7%
Object / education needed for attendees’ job: 6%
Shirt: 4%
Stuffed Toy: 3%
Let’s look at each separately, to get even more ideas for your upcoming shows.
1. Consumer electronics: 41%
Consumer electronics are by far the most popular kind of trade show game prize. Exhibitors entice attendees with offers for fun, expensive gifts attendees may have not yet bought for themselves. Video game consoles were the biggest sub-group, with 10 exhibitors offering a Nintendo, PlayStation, or Xbox.
Here are the consumer electronics offered as trade show game prizes:
1 TB External hard drive
25,000 mAh power bank
32 GB Thumb drive
3D Printer
55 inch TV
Amazon Echo Dot (2 exhibitors)
Amazon Echo Show
Apple AirPods (4 exhibitors)
Apple Watch Series IV
Bose product
Drone (2 exhibitors)
Fujifilm Instax Mini 9 Instant Camera
Google Home Mini (2 exhibitors)
GoPro Camera
Headphones
iPad Air
Ledger Nano S
Mi fitness bands
Nanoleaf Light Panels
Nintendo Entertainment System Classic
Nintendo Switch (5 exhibitors)
Oculus Go virtual reality headset
PlayStation 4 Pro (3 exhibitors)
Samsung monitor
Sony noise-cancelling headphones
Star Wars Sphero BB-9E droid
VR headsets
Wireless charger
Xbox One Console
Within this category there are naturally shifts over the years. While no one offered the formerly ever-present Apple iPad in this recent group, 4 exhibitors offered instead Apple Airpods. Drones also look like they are coming to the end of their peak prize offering time, as there were only 2 in this survey, both in the end of 2018.
2. Exhibitor’s own products: 16%
The second most common category of prizes were exhibitors’ own products. Which is a great idea: You give away a prize that only attracts qualified prospects for your products. And their perceived value is higher than your actual costs.
Sometimes exhibitors offered the product by name, sometimes they offered a discount, sometimes they offered a specified amount of their product. Even companies that offered a service used this strategy.
Here are the prizes these exhibitors offered as trade show game or prize wheel prize:
Win a trip to a future trade show
$300 in product
$500 credit at exhibitor’s store
$500 of store merchandise
1 year subscription to product
25% off pre-packaged solution
Exhibitor’s own products
Exhibitor’s own products, valued at $189 to $349
Free 5-hour consultation
Free consultation and product package
Free e-book
Go Direct Force and Acceleration Sensor!
Second Step kit
Trip for two to Cabo and hotel (from travel agent)
$200 in company’s own books
Free user conference registration
3. Gift card or cash: 11%
Gift cards were the choice of 8 exhibitors, and 3 went right to cold, hard cash – with the largest single prize being $10,000! Gift cards and cash take little effort to procure and little space in your booth. The most common gift cards were from Amazon. Here’s what exhibitors offered:
$100 cash prize
$5,000 cash prize
$10,000 cash prize
$100 gift card (2 exhibitors)
$100 of books
$150 Amazon Gift Card
$500 Best Buy gift card
100 British Pounds of Amazon vouchers
Amazon gift cards
Starbucks gift card
4. Prize / swag pack: 7%
A surprising number of exhibitors took the same path to making their prize sound bigger, by offering anonymous prizes collected together in a “prize pack”, “swag pack”, or similar. This is a good strategy if you have to promote your booth before you’ve actually decided on your prize giveaways! You can also lump together multiple items that all have your logo imprinted on them.
Exhibitors used this language in their promotional tweets:
Prize pack (3 exhibitors)
Swag bag (2 exhibitors)
Swag pack
Prize bundle
5. Object / education needed for attendees’ job: 6%
The digital spinning wheel part is easy to explain: you get a fun, crowd-gathering game that plays on iPads or a flatscreen TV, that you can use for awarding prizes or choosing names.
But the custom part – what exactly does that include?
With the SocialPoint Virtual Prize Wheel, you can customize how the digital wheel looks, how it awards prizes, and how it gathers data. Your 11 custom choices include:
I don’t know about you, but personally, I have a hard time sitting in a general session listening to speakers go on and on and on. If I am not sitting near the front the whole thing turns into blah, blah, blah. And, my mind starts to wander. In virtual meetings, it’s even worse.
However, if there is a way for me to participate in the session, I am much more likely to stay connected to the content and the message.
That’s where event gamification can help tremendously. Event gamification creates a fun way to gamify virtual meetings and let attendees participate in the session.
Many meeting planners have the trade show passport gamein 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.
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.
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?
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:
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.
