How to Drive Trade Show Booth Traffic with Interactive Technology

Booth traffic. Over and over, clients tell us they want to drive booth traffic. They are constantly looking for interactive technology ideas that will help them get more people into their trade show booth.

And we’ve heard it for a long time. We’ve been working with interactive, digital, and social-media driven attendee engagement in events for more than 10 years. Some of our over 1,000 activations have worked very well. Some have not. So let’s give you the best of those 10 years.

Here are 5 lessons we’ve learned about attendee engagement that should help you as you plan your next trade show booth experience:

1. Think About Breaking the Ice
When visitors are tired after a long day of exhibiting, the last thing they want is for you to launch into your 10-minute canned spiel, then poke them with your lead scanner. What you really need is a way to break the ice. When our clients think like this, they usually open their mind to fun, new ideas that can help them capture leads and learn about their booth visitors. (Read: Using Digital Trade Show Games as An Ice Breaker with attendees)

2. Keep It Simple
Attendees are walking the trade show to find answers to their business problems, so they have plenty on their mind already. Giving them a complicated game to play, with lots of rules and steps, will only annoy them and turn your potentially good experience into a bad one. So design your digital interaction to be as smooth and seamless as possible.

3. Make It Big and Bold
Your screens are a unique opportunity to draw people in from the aisles – but only if they can see what’s going on! We always recommend that our clients make sure that content is BIG and bold. Stop putting your website or a PowerPoint presentation on the screens. Striking visuals – such as our leaderboard graphics – can pull traffic into your booth from the aisles. Also, resist the urge to put anything that you can’t read from 10 feet away. People in the aisles can’t see all of that small copy. (Read: 8 Content Ideas for Your Screens)

4. Give Visitors Love
Attendees love to see their name in lights and their picture on the big screen! The bigger the screen the happier they are! So, why not give them what they want? Social media walls, leaderboards, idea boards help you show attendee-generated content from the event and draw people into your booth.

5. Draw A Crowd With A Crowd
People have a fear of missing out – if you can leverage this to create a crowd environment in your booth, you can expect others to follow. One of the great benefits of our Challenge Bar Trivia game is that people often huddle around the gaming stations to play the game and watch their friends. Without a doubt, whenever there is a crowd around the stations others will naturally wander into the booth to see what’s happening. You can do this too. Try it – it works!

Bottom Line
After over 1,000 events, we’ve seen our clients who succeed follow these ideas. It’s not complicated, it’s just what works. Follow these lessons and you’ll have more traffic in your trade show booth, and ultimately more leads and sales, too.

If you’d like to see more about how you can drive more booth traffic with our interactive trade show games, feel free to contact us with questions or to discuss your event with one of SocialPoint’s Digital Strategists. We’ll help you generate more booth traffic.