I’m a serious believer in the old saying, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
So, I think it only follows that if you can somehow make your work fun, the more “lovable” it becomes!
You may already know that I started my career as a magician, and how I was able to turn the fun of that into helping others become more engaging. If you’ve ever wanted to look behind the curtain and figure out the tricks, you’ve come to the right place. The magic of engagement is easy and fun to do — let me take you on a tour of my top three engagement tools — they are so cool, you’ll want to try them yourself!
#1 – The Engagement Deck
So, imagine a deck of playing cards! Ah, but these are no ordinary playing cards!
The Engagement Deck is a deck of 52 cards, just like you’d expect, except each card has a trade show booth exhibiting tip for staff. These tips range from “how to engage passersby” to “booth etiquette”.
Use the Engagement Deck to do fun training games with your staff until they are familiar with a full line-up of engagement techniques to draw upon as needed.
#2 – Crowd Metrics
Now, anyone serious about a trade show will obviously be concerned about the results they are generating. How busy is the booth this year? How many people walked by our booth compared to the leads we’ve scanned?
Crowd Metrics is our facial recognition analytics offering. We supply the camera, the rigging and send you daily reports. We’ll position a camera behind a sign or presentation monitor. Once the show opens, we’ll track the attendees who passed by your booth.
Some of the outputs in Crowd Metrics’ report include:
- Number of visitors
- Average visit time
- Media attention span
- Demographic info such as age range and gender split
- Sentiment – based on the general facial expression
Clients of ours who have a strong marketing focus love this kind of information. It’s also very useful to be able to support your live marketing investment decisions based on empirical data. Many trade show staff make anecdotal assessments such as “it felt slower than last year,” but it’s difficult to give a show a fair assessment based on feelings alone. By using Crowd Metrics every year you’ll have comparable KPIs to help assess your success.
#3 – Spin To Win
And finally, everyone’s favourite — get attention and have fun with Spin To Win. You don’t have to be a Wheel Of Fortune fan to love this game. There’s just something timeless and almost hypnotic about this kind of game of chance! The game serves a dual purpose: first, it’s what we call a passive opportunity to generate leads in your booth; secondly, the excitement of a potential prize will draw people to your booth like bees to honey.
You can run the Spin to Win game in a variety of ways. Purely online on a webpage, in your booth on a tablet, or have leads scan a QR code and they can play on their very own phone.
Here’s how the Spin To Win game works:
- You give us pictures of the prizes you’d like to use and tell us what percentage of the time you want each prize to be won. We’ll set up the rest.
From a QR Code:
- The user will scan the QR code to bring up the game on their phone.
- The user clicks spin and spins the wheel – everyone loves a good dopamine rush!
- The spinner lands on the winning prize and the use will hit the Redeem button
- To redeem, the user fills out a form filling in their name and email address
- The prizes can be mailed or emailed to the user, or they can be given instructions to swing by your booth.
On a Tablet in your booth:
- The booth visitor steps up to the tablet and clicks the spin button.
- The spinner lands on the winning prize
- Then you can either scan their badge as you would normally, or if you want to make these tablets self-serve, a lead form can be displayed, and they can fill out their information to receive their prize in the booth.
Best of all, everyone who plays is a winner! What? Yes! Every spot on the virtual wheel earns each user a prize of some kind. Sweet, huh? There is always a winner; the spinner just decides which prize they will win.
Getting back to the part where the winner fills out a form, notice how, in that last step, you’re capturing their email and name for future remarketing! This is a perfect tool for capturing leads. It can be run from a centre stage presentation on a large scale, or within individual trade show booths.
Best of all, Spin To Win is always custom branded to your company so it will always look professional.
Also, you can control the prize inventory. You establish how many prizes you intend to give away, what percentage of spins result in what type of prize. And you can remove the prizes from inventory when you hit your cap.
I know you’re already thinking of what kind of prizes you could offer — let me guess, you have a closet of logo’d swag ready to go? We’ve discovered in doing this over and over that it’s a good idea to include a variety of smaller swag (eg: a pdf download, a charging cable) along with more exclusive products or services to make the whole presentation more appealing. Some really effective gifts include free training, a free trial, or perhaps a universal cool prize such as an iPad. And, with a limited amount available!
So, the spinner wins, and so do you! Right there, you’ve generated a dopamine spike for the booth visitor and for yourself! Don’t we all love the rush of a win?!
Want a Pro?
These engagement tools take time and practice to perfect. Sometimes, you might not have time to do the preliminary work yourself. After all, there are some things you’re happy to do yourself, and some things that are best left to the professionals. Only you know how your skills and resources measure up against your sales targets.
If you want to improve your odds of winning your next spin at the trade show game, we’re here for you. As experts in engagement science, understanding how the brain works and what people will respond to, we’re excited by new opportunities to connect companies with clients.
Now it’s your chance! Ask us how we can help you today.