By Samuel Smith
Trade shows are a powerful marketing medium for lead generation, brand awareness, and relationship building. But they can also be mind-numbing dull, for both attendees and booth staffers.
What makes a booth boring? Nothing does. And by nothing, I mean standing around in your booth doing nothing. With no activities in your trade show booth, attendees focus their attention instead where there is movement. With no activities to host, your booth staffers retreat inside themselves or their smartphones.
It doesn’t have to be that way. You can make your booth a mecca of face-to-face engagement. You can be the fun booth. You can pull people in and get conversations started. Conversations that become leads and sales.
Here are 14 trade show booth activity ideas to help generate more booth traffic and engagement:
1. Demonstrate your products
Buyers come to trade shows to see in person the (mostly B2B) products they don’t feel comfortable buying online. So have your booth staffers demonstrate your products all through the show. You can also let the attendees get their hands on your product and try it out themselves. The best demos have movement, noise, and clearly prove your major advantages that matter to buyers. Got a small product? Consider amplifying the demo with a live video feed on large monitors.
2. Photo op
Even though almost everyone has a camera included with the smart phones in their pocket, they will still stop to get their photos taken at events. Entice attendees into your booth with fun wearable props: props they can hold, cool things or people they can pose with, or something that exemplifies the event location. Get your brand into the act with backdrop screens displaying your logo and hashtags, or oversized social media post frames. Or just use the photo op as a way to stop attendees and start a conversation.
3. Augmented and virtual reality
These technologies add a high-tech cool factor to exhibitors’ booths. Done well, they let attendees experience products in new, more memorable ways. Virtual reality puts your booth visitors in virtual places in locations and at a scale they can’t in real life. Augmented reality overlays more visual information over the product or visual prompt they see before them. Both AR and VR can help you tell stories and make benefits more explicit.
4. Trade show games
Trade show attendees like to win prizes. By offering trade show games, booth visitors learn about your products as they compete for prizes or top-dog status. Games can be old-school analog or digital interactive activities. As people get excited playing, their enthusiasm will attract even more attendees. Just be sure that attendees can figure out how to play your games quickly and your prizes don’t break any industry gift-receiving rules.
5. Time trials
Hosting a contest of skill where attendees compete against the clock or each other is a sure draw. This works especially well if your product users are motivated by ease and speed of use. Display a leaderboard with the names of the fastest competitors. Give the setting a bit of game show pizzazz. You may even have an emcee who cheers on competitors, which will attract even more people.
6. Subject matter expert talks
Attendees come to trade shows to learn. That’s why most trade shows offer many educational sessions in addition to the exhibit floor. Get in on some of that action by having your own subject matter experts or company executives host presentations. Talk about the latest trends, most wanted how-to topics, and biggest challenges your customers face. Just be sure your subject matter experts are also good presenters—if not, get a professional presenter to learn the content or to interview the expert.
7. Attendee survey
Ask attendees to share their opinions to key questions facing your typical buyers. They can share their feedback by writing on white boards, Post-It notes, texting, data-entry kiosks, touch screens, or any way you can capture and display their votes. Some attendees will be willing to share their opinions, while others will only want to see what others have said. Either way, you have attendees engaged rather than just walking by. Bonus: Their opinions are a natural starting point for a meaningful dialog.