Trade Show Game Prizes 2019: Top 7 Ideas From 100 Exhibitor Tweets
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%
While somewhat similar to giving away your own product, these exhibitors gave away other people’s products, but chose items that would matter only to people with the job responsibilities of their buyers. That way, only people qualified to buy their products would visit their booth, and those qualified buyers would be grateful to them. (Our interactive trivia game is also good for attendees who like to learn.)
These gifts are very specific to narrow vertical markets. So use the ideas for inspiration, if not the actual prizes!
$300 in antibodies
$4000 of Microsoft Azure
Google curriculum kit for teachers
Job-specific medical book
SCUTA software 1 year license
Win a trip to a future industry trade show
6. Shirt: 4%
Shirts can be a great giveaway, because when attendees wear them, they become walking billboards for your brand. However, your shirt has to be nice enough to avoid getting buried in a drawer.
Chances are, more than 4% of exhibitors are offering a shirt as a prize giveaway, but don’t bother to tweet about it. However, these exhibitors who did tended to offer something more than the average t-shirt, to get attention and stand out:
Performance T
Super soft t-shirt
T-Shirt
T-shirt from recycled bottles
7. Stuffed Toy: 3%
Stuffed toys were once very popular as giveaways. The idea was, guilty parents away from home would stand in line for stuffed toys to give to their kids when they returned from the show. Exhibitors offering them would then get a chance to talk to attendees. That idea may still work, especially at certain vertical market shows.
However, a drawback is that the prize is for the attendees’ kids, not the attendee. You want your booth visitors to see your branded prizes, not their little children, who, shall we say, lack buying authority.
All three of the stuffed toys we saw in exhibitors’ tweets were for stuffed toys that fit the exhibitors’ brands.
