Four in-booth tactics to boost your exhibition stand design
When it comes to designing great exhibition stands, knowing how to grab and keep visitor attention is a must. Here are some fun ideas to help you engage and involve attendees at your next show.
1. Competitions
With a rise in affordable, interactive devices, gamification is a hot topic in the world of events. With online leaderboards and digital challenges now widely adopted, adding a degree of visitor participation is taking the collaborative event experience to a whole new level.
But you don’t need fancy tech to encourage a bit of competition at your exhibition stand. For example, we helped our client Cabana boost its exhibition presence by offering a chance to win tickets to the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games. As part of this campaign, printed invites came complete with an individual code which gave stand visitors a chance to try their digits on a padlock showcase holding a giant ticket. If successful, they were invited to come back later when the winner would be revealed. This meant Cabana benefited from a second visit from most of their prospects, boosting brand engagement and opportunities for networking. While this particular campaign took place 15 years ago, and the prize was a very good one, similar tactics could be easily adopted by businesses of all sizes who want to drive more footfall at their next event.
In addition, just last week, Apex client Inform showed how a bit of rivalry can help boost engagement when it attended the IRRV Annual Conference!
2. Photo opportunities
Photo stations are becoming increasingly popular at all kinds of events. As well as delivering that much sought-after fun factor, they also act as a conversation starter for attendees who don’t know each another. And, they give your staff a great way to kick-off discussions with visitors. Furthermore, today it isn’t difficult to email photographs to those featured in them; so you can capture that all-important data. You can also use these photos to boost your brand awareness by creating sharable event content that can be posted across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Take a look at how Apex client Elior used photography to make an impact during its 2016 roadshow!
3. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)
AR and VR are changing the world of events. Only last week, Facebook confirmed the launch of Oculus Venues, a new app to enjoy concerts, movies and events via VR. But, while the virtual tradeshow won’t replace real-world events anytime soon, VR and AR give brands an ingenious way to engage with potential customers. And to promote those larger products it just isn’t feasible to transport to tradeshows.
4. Product demos
It doesn’t matter how good your exhibition stand looks if you don’t attract and engage with the right people. So, even as we continue to look for new and exciting ways to increase footfall, product demos are still of crucial importance at tradeshows.
Giving relevant visitors the opportunity to “kick-the-tyres” of your product, demos let you show off your key benefits and talk proudly about how you can help your customers.
Showing how it is done, Apex designed and built an exhibition stand for Advanced Dynamics, which ensured maximum space for demonstration.
In today’s competitive business world, just sticking the company logo on the biggest stand you can find just won’t cut it. And, as not all visitors are worth the same to your business, you need to figure out WHO you want to attract, and WHAT will help you to do that.
Adding imagination and ingenuity like never before, at Apex we devise on-stand attractions and exciting features that will bring your target customers onto your stand, and keep them coming back.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you integrate in-booth features into your next exhibition stand, contact us today for a no-obligation chat.