“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.
How to Prepare Speakers to Use Audience Response Apps for Greater Attendee Engagement
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:
Many of our clients don’t bat an eye at our trade show game prices when they intend to use them in an island exhibit, because they compare our prices to other activities or custom-programmed interactives and see what a bargain we are. Yet, because you won’t get as many leads from a show with a 10-foot space, and because you likely do so many more shows in 10-foot spaces, there’s a reluctance to invest in a digital game. If this is the case, ask your potential vendor if they have a pricing structure that rewards you with lower prices when you reuse the game.
Consider that the game is still only a small portion of your overall costs for that event, but can double your results. Most of all, consider ROI – what is the value of each extra trade show lead you get? An interactive game may be a fantastic additional investment if your average sale from a trade show lead is high enough.
Your 10 x 10 booth space is likely already cramped. So how do you add a game into the design? Our most successful clients design their exhibit layout and graphics to include both the game’s technology and messaging right from the start. That means they integrate any flat screen monitors into the backwall or on a kiosk, table, or stand. Plus, they include bar-height counters for game iPads, and they include graphics messaging such as “Play To Win” or other messages about the game in their exhibit graphics.
And while your space is small, there is another dimension to consider: Some of our clients also divide the front and back of their booth space, and have the game played on a kiosk or table on the aisle.
In your island exhibits you most likely have a diverse team of booth staffers, drawn from multiple areas of your company, such as sales, marketing, management, engineering, and customer service. Yet in your 10-foot booth shows, while you may have similar kinds of staffers, more likely you will rely on your field sales reps to booth staff. These staffers are likely less willing to set up a more sophisticated game like our Challenge Bar Trivia. To ensure success when dependent on field sales reps, easier game implementations like our Digital Fishbowl work best. These simple games also ensure you get lead data recorded from booth interactions, when the leads might not make it home to your otherwise.
Interactive trade show games can be a huge part of your 10 x 10 foot booth success, because they attract more traffic, boost engagement, and done right, facilitate better and faster lead follow up. They are a worthy part of your budget, provided you properly integrate them into your display design and choose them well to match the strengths of your booth staff team.
If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and get more qualified leads with our 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 excitement, crowds, and leads.
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.
To give their event session audiences a voice, more event producers are asking their speakers, facilitators and panel moderators to use interactive technology, such as audience response systems. But are speakers prepared to use them?
Most speakers gravitate to the PowerPoint lecture-style presentation, because that’s the content delivery format that they know. If they are in a large corporation they are probably used to creating PowerPoint documents that double as informational documents that are shared via email as well as in presentations to small groups.
But in today’s world, event speakers need to do more than just lecture to keep people engaged and connected to their content and ideas.
Research shows that attendees stop paying attention after 10 minutes in the average conference session. And, it’s worse online! Online attendees are 1 click away from doing anything else on the Internet…like watching cat videos. How can you compete with cat videos?
When attendees spend 4-6 hours per day in conference sessions sitting and listening, most attendees are going to be lucky to remember three key messages from a speaker. So all of those detailed slides with secondary messages and supporting arguments will easily be forgotten.
Interactive meeting technologies such as audience response apps and event apps help with retention because they engage your attendees in a conversation. When you ask them a poll question or open-ended question they become participants in a conversation. The more that you can get attendees to participate the more likely they will be to retain the speakers key messages.
Related – What is Audience Engagement?
Most speakers plan for a 50 minute presentation and 10 minutes of Q&A. Inevitably they go over time and leave only 2-3 minutes for Q&A. That’s bad.
We recommend that your speakers plan for 20 minutes of interactive time for every 40 minutes of lecture time.
Above I mentioned that your speakers are most likely not familiar with all of the tools available to them or how they work. I recommend that you provide them with a list of the audience response system (ARS) capabilities in your event app or audience response app.
Here is a list of the most common conversation tools that you should expect in your audience response app:
Regardless of your vendor you should have access to most of these conversation tools. Each one will work a little differently and all of them can be used to help your speaker’s achieve their conversation goals.
You may want to share examples of each with your speakers. So they can see how they work.
Related – 10 Ways to Visualize User Generated Content
Related – Part 2: 10 Ways to Increase Event Attendee Engagement with Interactive Technology
Step 4: Recommend conversation templates that give speakers a roadmap for planning their attendee engagement activities
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.
These shows may be so small the show producer does not provide a badge scanner or lead retrieval app. And the reality is, even if they did, the booth staffers may not use it, preferring to tuck business cards into their pocket.
So, the marketing department pays for the show, the trade show manager manages the show, and they get nothing to show for it.
Don’t get me wrong, there may have been valuable leads collected at that show, including leads that turned into sales. It’s just the marketing department has no way to track the leads to sales. If they have a program with a dozen small shows like this, they have no way to determine which shows are worth keeping, and which to drop, so they can then experiment with other potentially viable shows.
So, to recap – are you in this same situation:
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.
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.”
MEA narrowed their marketing strategy to focus on their leadership training offerings, as there is such a huge demand to train new leaders because of the massive retiring of the Baby Boomers.
“Our goal this year was to more quickly profile and qualify our booth visitors, to enable discussions with the most qualified visitors, and to facilitate reaching out post-show with new leads from the show,” said Robertson. “We asked SocialPoint for a game that would achieve those goals, and they delivered.”
SocialPoint offered an “Instant Win” version of their Virtual Prize Wheel game where, rather than spin a virtual wheel to reveal their prize, instead their prize award pops up on the screen. MEA’s game was called “Try Your Luck To Unlock The Truck.”
To promote the game, MEA displayed two iPad kiosks, plus “a large graphic of the tailgate view of a truck, the common place our clients have ‘tailgate meetings’ in the field,” said Robertson. The graphic attracted booth traffic, and signaled to attendees that MEA understood how they worked.
“The game has been very successful at doing exactly what we wanted from it,” said Mark Bechtel, MEA Training & Tradeshow Coordinator. “We get attendees into our booth, get all their info at the show, and then we can easily reach out later via email to contact leads after the show.”
Added Robertson, “Our booth staffers really like how simple the Instant Win game is, because they don’t need to babysit someone to show them how to use it – attendees just walk up and start playing. Attendees were happy to win our prizes, and some came back to play again.
“Best of all, while the game boosts MEA awareness and gathers lead data from all booth visitors, our booth staffers are freed up to have longer conversations with more qualified leads who already shown interest in our new leadership training offerings.”
Bechtel is pleased with the control the SocialPoint game platform gives him. “I have enjoyed working with SocialPoint’s game platform. It lets us handle logistics with minor changes easily without any issues. I find it easy for me to make quick changes to the on-screen verbiage and the ratio of winning players. The app is great to play around with and to have that control myself.
“We have used the ‘Try Your Luck’ game at 6 events so far, and will likely use it for 3 more,” said Bechtel. “The game has been great to use in different events – we use it at any time, at any purpose event, wherever we are. We can try it out with any type of audience or booth. And since this game costs less than the Challenge Bar Trivia game, we can afford to use it, even at events with only a couple hundred people.”
“Plus, the game allows me to easily be prepared for post-show success. I can export a spreadsheet of all my trade show leads so far. And, I can easily add on another unexpected trade show, with some simple changes on the app, so post-show I can separate out those new attendees. It’s really easy.”
Added Bechtel, “Due to our long sales cycle, it’s still too early to calculate our ROI, but with the improved leads and engagement using this game, we are confident we did well.”
A new marketing strategy didn’t mean MEA had to get a completely new digital interactive vendor. “It was a blessing to work with SocialPoint,” concludes Robertson. “We came to them with some out-there ideas, yet still needing an affordable solution. They helped us find a great, customized solution in a very short amount of time.”
If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic and get more qualified leads with our 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 excitement, crowds, and leads.
