“I want 100% of the attendees to participate in this activity!”
It’s a phrase that I hear from meeting planners all the time. They are convinced that the attendee engagement experiences won’t work if only 60% of the people do it.
When you are in a 10 x 10 foot booth space, you have to work even harder to stand out from the crowd. That’s because there are so many other 10 x 10 foot exhibitors, plus all the other exhibitors are in larger, presumably more attention-getting spaces.
That’s why adding an interactive trade show game to even your smallest booths makes a lot of sense.
Even in a 10 x 10 booth space, your game needs to reflect your brand, engage your target market, and advance your marketing goals. However, there are specific issues to including an interactive trade show game to your 10 x 10 booth. Here are those issues, and how to ensure your interactive game is a success:
Why should you follow up on your trade show leads fast? Because if you don’t, your chances of winning the sale plummet drastically. According to InsideSales.com, 35–50% of sales go to the vendor that responds to leads first!
That means if you contact your leads second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth or later, you are fighting over 50 to 65% of the pie with all the other potential vendors – except for the first responder!
So, what can you do to ensure you have fast trade show lead follow up?
The greatest advantage of event apps and audience response apps is to give your attendees a voice.
Instead of passing around microphones in a large audience of 1,000 attendees, an event app or audience response app can be used to capture hundreds of questions instantly from curious attendees.
Equally important – activities such as brainstorming can be scaled up to hundreds and thousands of participants with the same rich participation that you get from groups of 8 to 10 people. While these technologies are loaded with capabilities – it’s very likely that most of these technologies will be new to your speakers. This post provides a guide to help you prepare your presenters to use these tools in their presentations and workshops.
We’ve had very similar discussions recently with several exhibitors who have big trade show programs with big booths, but also lots of smaller shows with 10 x 10 booths that they, as the trade show manager, never get to. Those small shows are staffed by field sales people or channel partners who have no face-to-face contact with the trade show manager.
And while it doesn’t happen every time, far too often the sales people staffing the booth don’t send the leads back to the home office.
Trade show games are a proven, yet dramatically underused activity to get more potential customers into your booth. After hundreds of client game implementations, we know trade show games attract a crowd and get attendees engaged with your booth staffers.
But, if using games in your booth is a new idea for you, you understandably need more info. So, in this article, I will share with you several kinds of games and game aspects to consider in your decision.
The first factor is that your game must be fun! You want people to be magnetically drawn into your booth because you are hosting a game that looks like fun, that their friends have told them is fun, and that they can see people already enjoying to play. And, not just any people, but your target customers. Be mindful that what you think would be fun as a 25-year old man may not be fun to your target audience of 45-year old women – or vice versa. Make it fun for your customers, not you.
Four years ago, CompTIA contacted Interactive Meeting Technology/SocialPoint to help them deliver their first online event. The goal was to deliver an online, educational event to at least 100 attendees and have them remain online for at least two sessions.
CompTIA had nearly 1,000 registrants and over 300 attendees that first year. Four years later, their attendee numbers have skyrocketed to well over 4,000.
This is how we did it, through a strong collaboration between us, the vendor, and an engaged and motivated client team.
Using event technology to poll attendees is only the beginning of what you can do to create more attendee engagement.
Event technology, event apps and audience response apps offer several new and improved ways to create conversations with your audience.
Here are some of the things you can do: poll, play, create, capture, share, vote, survey, comment and smile. Yes, smile, because you can share photos too.
With all of these capabilities at your disposal, here are 20 ways you can use event technology to create attendee engagement experiences
When Midwest Energy Association (MEA), a consortium of energy delivery industry organizations, decided in 2017 to completely change their go-to-market strategy, they decided to retain SocialPoint games – but with a different SocialPoint game to fit their new goals.
“We had success in 2015 and 2016 using SocialPoint’s Challenge Bar Trivia game,” said Lindsay Robertson, MEA Marketing and Communications Director. “The Trivia game worked well to attract and retain attendees, when our goal was to present everything we offer. But, in 2017, we made a strategic shift at trade shows, so we needed a different approach.”
