While trade show booths can be expensive to plan for and set up, they present the opportunity to showcase your brand and garner onsite sales conversions through customer engagement.
More engagement or visitors to your booth opens the door to higher conversion rates. To reach those higher rates, your booth’s offerings should entice attendees.
Focus on crafting a fantastic trade show booth to provide the best customer experiences using these strategies for interactive elements.
1. Reach Out Before the Trade Show
Pre-show outreach is valuable for brand awareness before your trade show appearance, and it all begins with plans to increase rate of investment. Think of it as mobilizing your customer base while reaching attendees who didn’t initially know your company would have a booth. To reach consumers before the trade show:
Lean into digital marketing
Three months from the trade show, begin posting on your social media channels teasing activities, and products that customers would get excited about. In doing so, attendees are more likely to add your booth to their list of companies to visit. This is because you’re giving insight into what you will be offering, which helps attendees look forward to your trade show appearance.
However, don’t post a simple list of booth offerings; accompany it with short-form content. Tease attendees with content about print materials, potential interactive games, giveaways, products, and speakers. Whether conveyed with pictures or video, create an atmosphere of mystery around your booth’s offerings to intrigue customers online. This intrigue will compel curious customers to engage with your brand.
Support email marketing
As a business, you most likely have an email list of customers for promotions or a newsletter already in use. That list is a prime opportunity to inform the customer base about your trade show appearance and build anticipation.
A month before the trade show, send one email a week to stay at the top of your contacts’ minds and give insights into what will be at your booth. Include links to products that attendees will be able to interact with at the show. An uptick in visits to specific products will show what products should be promoted the most at your booth.
This strategy works very similarly to digital marketing but in a different format and for a different audience. The weekly email should be directed toward your pre-existing customer base, while the digital marketing strategy opens the potential for engaging new audience members. Still, relying on your current audience is invaluable to increase customer engagement.
Invite key guests
If your booth plans include spokespeople or speakers, send invites to key individuals that customers would be most interested in seeing, hearing from, and interacting with. This allows the invited individuals to advertise their appearance and market through their own network, which helps bring a potential new audience to your booth.
Key guests bring in a potential new audience and offer another method of engaging attendees for extended periods. The longer an attendee is at your booth, the greater the likelihood of sales conversion.
2. Design an Interactive Booth
At the trade show, your booth’s appearance directly correlates to how attendees perceive your brand. Before a person even approaches a spokesperson, an impression is made based on how you decide to present yourself. To entice more attendees to visit your booth and boost customer engagement:
Create engaging displays
Incorporate several screens into your booth design. Using these screens, you can present videos with virtual product demonstrations, product use cases, and other fun promotions to engage attendees. Likewise, having touch screens to present a catalog of products and services encourages attendees to learn about your brand. Both displays use screens in a fun way that enables customers to interact with your brand.
Demonstrate products
One of the staples of trade shows, product demonstrations are a tried-and-true method of engaging attendees and leading to potential sales conversions. These demonstrations present the opportunity to show attendees how your product is used and its other use cases. Be sure to highlight the benefits that would motivate a consumer to purchase.
Integrate new technology
With the advent of virtual and augmented reality, create an experience for your customers that aligns with your brand. Immerse attendees in specific use cases or allow fun games that happen to be on-brand for your business. Intrigue from general trade show attendees is sure to bring more customers to your booth and boost engagement. Having VR or augmented reality gear available for attendees to use is an excellent way to garner interest since people love to interact with or witness new technology.
3. Create Print Materials with Added Value
Many business cards or brochures end up in the trash. To avoid this, design your printed materials with innovative elements that provide value and reusability. Adding value to your business cards will help boost brand awareness and memorability.
Incorporate social media icons properly
Allot space within your print materials to prominently display social media icons without ruining organization in the overall design. You don’t want the icons to be perceived as an afterthought in the design process.
Once a comfortable spot is found, add a call to action along with the social media icons to motivate customers to act, follow, or check out your social media platforms. Doing so will help customers engage with your brand post-trade show, potentially creating long-term consumers.
Beyond your booth, trade shows are a great chance to increase brand exposure by capitalizing on social media icons in print design. An attendee may walk past your booth and not have time for a full visit, so they pick up one of your print materials, like a brochure. With social media icons, the brochure allows attendees to connect with your brand without spending time at your booth.
Take advantage of QR codes
Whether handing out business cards, brochures, or posters, include a QR code that links attendees to:
- Special offers or discounts exclusive to trade show attendees. Knowing specials are available, visitors will be more interested in your booth’s offerings.
- Virtual product demonstrations.
- A survey or questionnaire to get specific feedback. This will help you measure the success of the various parts of your booth.
4. Entertain Attendees with Interactive Games and Giveaways
Entertaining customers is a great way to keep them engaged, but it isn’t the singular goal. Focus on brand awareness, selling products, and increasing sales as well.
Offer Interactive Games
There are several kinds of games played at trade shows. To focus on increasing customer engagement, offer games that require conversation and active attention. For example, trivia can be a fun, informational experience where a spokesperson from your booth talks with customers about each question after the answer is revealed. You can go even further and tie a product to trivia for an informational walkthrough.
Digitally, your booth can offer a game that uses a specific social media hashtag to encourage trade show attendees to take pictures of their experience at your booth. Turn it into a contest with a prize for the person with the most likes or reposts. This is also a good way to interact with users who missed the trade show.
Host Specialized Giveaways
Personalized giveaways will help engage customers by offering prizes they would enjoy, showing that you’ve done your care and researched them. Giveaway branded products tailored to your customer base to increase brand awareness.
5. Provide Time for Networking or Informational Sessions
Host a more relaxed networking activity that encourages one-on-one conversations with customers. This can help you follow up on interested customers in a less high-stakes environment. You are more likely to convert on sales in a more inter-personal situation.
Informational Sessions
Alongside a networking activity, you can also conduct an informational session. This will help attendees understand your brand, who you are, your voice, and what products you have to offer. In this session, ask questions to get a sense of how attendees approach your brand. Doing so will help engage attendees and have them spend time at your booth.
6. Measure Engagement Post-Trade Show
After the show, you’ll likely be tallying sales, adding new emails to your email list, and calculating ROI. However, there are other measurements to pay attention to, and a whole host of new marketing opportunities.
Post-Show Marketing
Marketing for the trade show doesn’t end on the last day. You should have new content to post and talk about online. Promoting the result of your trade show booth can be very beneficial toward boosting online customer engagement and booth engagement for future appearances.
Post short-form content on social media highlighting activities and significant moments from your booth. This will help drive conversation and encourage attendees to comment on their experience. Then, build upon the highlights by posting content that elevates products and customer experiences showcased at your booth. This will engage users who attended but are learning new information and those who missed the trade show. Overall, online engagement increases.
Measure Overall Engagement
Along with tallying sales, new emails for the email list, and ROI, there are a few other measurements to consider. To efficiently measure engagement at trade shows, assess booth traffic. Don’t count everyone who visits your booth, but keep a rough estimate.
Similarly, monitor the likes, follows, and comments on social media during the trade show’s advertising period. The growth made on social media at the time will indicate the initial reach of your marketing efforts. Social media posts will likely still affect your analytics months after the trade show.
Finally, to gauge brand awareness post-show, conduct an exit survey. The survey will help you get a sense of customers’ intent after visiting your booth. Understanding your visitors’ thought processes will tell you what needs to be tweaked for future trade shows.