The number of visitors who attend, enquiries taken, and email addresses collected are all often key performance metrics for events professionals. Every visitor to your stand is a potential customer, so it’s important to maximise your traffic as well as providing a quality experience for every visitor.
In addition to getting a stand in the right location and commissioning an attractive design, there are numerous ways to attract more people to your stand and encourage them to interact with you.
Intelligent use of social media
Social media is a fantastic way to encourage visitors to visit your stand by letting them know where you are and what’s happening at your stand. You can let people know your stand number in advance when using the event hashtag, live-tweet keynote speeches and events, and tell then what they can look forward to when they visit you. One update isn’t enough – you need an ongoing pre-and post event campaign to promote your attendance and keep your company at the forefront of visitors’ minds.
Quality giveaways & prizes
Giveaways and competition prizes are very heavily used by exhibitors, to the point where you need to put time and effort into your prizes to stand out. Cheap, disposable giveaways (such as pens and stress balls) rarely make an impact – it’s better to give away fewer items and focus on quality. Your giveaways are a direct representation of your brand, so bland, poor quality items can reflect worse than having no giveaways at all. One of the cheapest ways to provide quality giveaways is to offer free coffee, snacks, or cookies – if you can smell the fresh coffee or cookies, even better! However, be careful that clients don’t settle down and you may not have enough stand staff to tend to other clients you really want to talk to. Likewise, a contest is a great way to pad out your email marketing lists but it’s important to offer a good prize to encourage people to part with their details. It’s best to choose a prize that is personally useful, rather than something that is professionally useful (such as a free trial of a B2B product).
Start with your target audience and think what they could be interested in, maybe even outside of a business context. If the initial costs are too high, maybe you can identify a business partner with a mutual interest in your clients to team up? Identify a clear measurement, what success looks like, which should give you a good idea what the cost per lead/ conversion comes down to.
Technology
Talk to the exhibition organiser and see whether they offer any other technology to their stand exhibitors, apart from lead capture scanners. There is a whole world out there that covers exhibition technology, however some organisers like to keep it simple.
Staff stand training
Knowing everything about your products is essential when talking to clients but how do you attract them off the aisle onto your stand? Prepare your Killer Questions in advance and make sure these are open ended and something people can relate to.
