One of the most popular questions our clients ask is, “What is the best way to structure how we pick winners for prize giveaways in our game?” Our clients want to feel confident they are doing the right thing to make their trade show booth games or event gamification a success.
Since we build so many different types of games for many different kinds of events, we have seen a lot of good ideas and bad ideas on picking prize winners. Below I will share only the good ones!
Rewards, Recognition, or Both?
Usually, clients want to create a fair process and make players feel like they still have a chance at success. A common fear is that the prize will appear out of reach after the first day.
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 exhibitors were strongly positive about the advantages and benefits of using a trade show giveaway, they still had problems with them. Here’s how exhibitors ranked 5 problems experienced when offering a trade show giveaway:
What stood out to us right away is that of the top 2 problems exhibitors have experienced with giveaways, our Virtual Prize Wheel game can help exhibitors solve them both!
Because exhibitors use our Virtual Prize Wheel to manage awarding their trade show giveaways, in the summer of 2018 we surveyed exhibitors to find out:
What trade show giveaways are working best now?
What do exhibitors seek when selecting giveaways?
What value do giveaways bring exhibitors?
Whether you call them premiums, swag, tchotchkes, or simply gifts, giveaways are as ubiquitous at trade shows as aisle carpet, banner stands, and lanyards.
But just because trade show giveaways are everywhere doesn’t mean they are being used to their full potential. Use our survey insights to get more from your trade show giveaways.
Best Trade Show Giveaways STRATEGIES: Offer Multiple, High, and Low Values
Exhibitors were given in the survey the choice of 7 strategic uses of trade show giveaways.
Chances are you’ve used trade show giveaways to drive more booth traffic. It’s a time-honored tactic that gets attention and lets attendees go home with a souvenir to remember you by.
But your giveaways can do even more to help increase your trade show results. You can boost their marketing impact in 4 powerful ways, by combining your giveaways with our Virtual Prize Wheel.
Here’s how our Virtual Prize Wheel adds impact to your trade show giveaways:
1. Make your trade show giveaways more exciting to attract more visitors
When you show a colorful prize wheel on a big flat screen monitor, complete with photos of your big prize, it clearly signals to attendees that there’s a fun and beneficial reason to visit your booth. Attendees get more excited to try to win a prize – even if it’s the same giveaways you would have given them anyhow! And attendees love to smash the big button that drives the prize wheel on the screen. As people spin to win, their enthusiasm and squeals attract attention from other attendees. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd!
One of the biggest decisions for our clients who use our Virtual Prize Wheel game in their trade show booths is: What kinds of prizes should they give away? After seeing some clients struggle with this choice, I want to share with you some advice, so you can have a smoother experience and get more people into your booth.
