For many B2B corporate events, team building is Job #1.
Your management wants their meeting attendees to transform from a group of strangers and acquaintances into a unified team aligned with your company culture and strategy.
Because after the meeting’s over, they’ll be much more willing to help their new friends than their unknown coworkers. Plus they’ll be less likely to leave, reducing turnover and increasing productivity, sales, and profits.
To help you achieve your team building event objective, we’ve assembled 60 team building activity ideas you can build into a digital game your attendees can play on their smartphones throughout your event.
Many of these ideas have been used by actual SocialPoint customers in the games we created for their corporate events, while others are further ideas tailored to key use case games we can design for your attendees with our game platform.
Hosting a sales kickoff meeting (SKO) costs a pretty penny.
Sending even one salesperson to a sales kickoff in Chicago ranges from $500 to $2,000 for airfare, meals, hotel accommodations, and ground transportation. That doesn’t even include event production costs (and inflation isn’t doing anyone any favors).
Now, think of how many events you have attended that left you bored and zoning out. What a waste, right? That's not what you want for your 200-500 person sales team in Chicago.
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.
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:
SocialPoint recently introduced 3-dimensional layered graphics to our popular Virtual Prize Wheel game.
We thought this would be a great time to share that product enhancement, plus share many other recent Virtual Prize Wheel examples. Our goal is to inspire you as you consider how to graphically portray your brand with our interactive games.
Our Virtual Prize Wheel is fully customizable to your brand. There are three main areas for customization:
The prize wheel slices, which can have up to 5 colors and your choice of fonts
The center circle where clients often put their logo
The background image
Most of the examples we will show you here focuses on the background image, as that is where you have the most opportunity for creativity and design. First, let’s start with the new 3-D looks:
A glass fishbowl is an icon of old-school trade show exhibiting. But it’s time to retire it — for something better.
Most likely you’ve seen an exhibitor put a glass fishbowl on their booth counter for visitors to toss in their business cards in the hope of winning a prize. Exhibitors draw a card for the winner, and keep all the cards as potential leads.
But, like rotary phones and carbon copies, using glass fishbowls to gather trade show leads leaves you at a severe disadvantage compared to what’s possible with today’s technology.
Many of our exhibiting clients tell us they crave trade show ideas on how to attract more visitors to their booth. They want an attraction that makes their booth irresistible for attendees walking down the aisle.
