Get more fun, revenue, and savings from your tradeshow presence. 

Now that the holidays have passed, it can only mean Tradeshow Season is coming. Another quarter filled with glad-handing, networking breakfasts, motivational speakers, and of course, the feeling that this year will be no different from last. But we’ve found a few ways to breathe new life into your tradeshow presence that drive more foot traffic and improve your conversion rates. All you have to do is break a few of the long-standing tradeshow rules you never thought you could.

Broken Rule #1: Fun is restricted to promotional products
Add up all the logo’d mugs, pens, stress-balls, and tradeshow ephemera. What do you get? A huge pile of clutter. The kids might play with it for a little bit, but these are all corporate promotional panaceas that wind up in the circular file because they fail at creating a memorable connection between the business and the audience.

On the other hand, what if you offered a touch-screen game kiosk? First of all, games are fun and different. That alone will bring new attention to your presence. Touch screens are now relatively affordable (even rentable), combining with Flash to create a fun, engaging experience. And because so few companies dare to have fun at tradeshows, we’ve seen companies who offer games to have far higher—even record-breaking—traffic. We recently built a game for a client who enjoyed a record number of leads for their entire tradeshow season. A huge hit.

What’s more, the game is custom to your company—so while attendees enjoy the fact that someone has actually gone to the trouble to give them some fun, what they get in return is your sales pitch and branding—without you having to go through that whole speech all over again. Quiz games and matching games are great ways to entertain and educate simultaneously.

Maybe the nicest feature to this popular promotion is that it has a “long shelf life.” In other words, you can make minimum changes (to the game play, the products doing the educating, etc.) without starting again from scratch. This makes your investment work harder with every subsequent show. Our client used the game we built for the entire year, making only minimal changes for each of the 4 shows they attended.

Broken Rule #2: The only scanner you can use is the one they rent you
We all endure this yearly headache: “The Scanner Company.” This is the company who has a license in your exhibit hall and charges you a ridiculous amount to rent their hardware—let alone the costs of using their expensive (yet somehow barely helpful) database software.

Now is the time to stop the insanity. You can simply buy a scanner, and then use it without ever paying another rental fee. While certainly not the cheapest piece of hardware your business will buy, you know from your rental rates that it will pay for itself over time – and you’ll never have to use another dirty, half-broken expensive rental again.

The next question is, ”What does the scanner connect to?”

Broken Rule #3: It takes time to integrate tradeshow leads with marketing efforts
For our game client, we integrated the scanner right into the game, so that once a badge was scanned, gameplay initiated. This all fed into a central leads database.

Our client didn’t have to wait for the spreadsheet from the scans, they could start using the data immediately.

You can personalize the game with a person’s name and anything else in the badge about them. You can ask questions during gameplay about the products they’re interested in, and then tie those responses to their record.

Now you have a warm lead with product-specific information.

Next, you can automatically add that person to your own database via the Internet, and take action. Have an inside salesperson follow-up during the tradeshow, when they have time to talk. Or automatically add them to a predefined email list, and start sending them an email campaign with the information they requested—before they get back to their office.

The bottom line is that buying your own hardware and database tools—and integrating them—does more than save you money in the long-term. It streamlines your sales and marketing efforts, and brings prospects into your discourse while the iron is hot, and the memory of having fun at your tradeshow booth is still fresh.

Interested in making your tradeshow presence a high-powered sales and marketing machine? Our staff excels at integrating technology to break tradeshow records. Contact our Vice President of Client Relations, Tim Reeder, at treeder@emergedgtl.com or 610.325.5960 to learn more.

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