If you are investing your time and money in a trade show exhibit, you want to make sure you are not just catching people’s eye for a split second. You want to create an immersive experience that will stick with your audience long after they have left your booth.
You know all of the reasons that your brand, product, or service has the power to impact people’s lives positively. Let’s make sure you are relaying that in the best way possible to positively impact your planning, execution, and return on investment.
Personally Connect With Your Audience
The best way to connect with your audience is through an interactive experience that makes them feel personally connected to what you have to offer. Investing in the time to have one-on-one conversations with your audience members can significantly enhance their experience with your product or service.
Forbes explains how a one-on-one conversation with each of your audience members helps to strategically relay the benefits of your product or service because: “It also allows you to pick up on nonverbal cues and body language, making it easier to see what is resonating best with everyone and what isn’t.”
When you tailor your approach to each individual and identify their unique needs, you demonstrate how your product or service can address them personally. You can easily convert your listener into a satisfied customer by pinpointing a personal problem and offering a solution from your product or service.
Additionally, a personalized one-on-one conversation emphasizes how your customer and company objectives are aligned. Forbes explains, “When representing your company or business at a trade show, you are supercharging your company’s brand with your own behavior, competence and integrity. It allows customers and partners to gain a broader understanding of the solutions you offer for their current and future business success.”
Experiential Influences Interaction
People have varying preferences when it comes to learning styles, and there are several factors that affect these preferences. One learning style is experiential learning, which involves gaining knowledge through practical experience.
Experiential learning plays a significant role in trade show interactions as this learning style has the ability to shape how attendees absorb and apply the information presented.
By incorporating a learning experience into your presentation, you can effectively engage your audience and enhance their understanding of your product or service. VeryWellMind explains experiential learning “emphasizes how experiences, including cognition, environmental factors, and emotions, influence the learning process.” A memorable experience can lead to a stronger connection between your audience and your brand.
However, learning does not always have to be boring.
Invite Your Audience to Play a Game
Another way to keep attendees interested and engaged throughout the trade show event is to invite your audience to participate in a gamified learning experience.
Enspire explains that “Gamification is one of the hottest trending topics in the learning and development community…” and that “organizations are seeking gamification of learning activities to boost learner motivation, engagement, and enjoyment in training experiences.”
When your audience members are learning through a gamified experience, they are likely to be fully engaged as well as enjoying the experience. A positive learning experience equals a memorable association with your brand, product, or service.
A Quick Segway Into TradeShow Planning…
As a person who is designated “in charge” of an upcoming event, planning ahead is crucial. In order to make the most out of your experience at the trade show, give yourself plenty of time to figure out the most critical points you can hit to engage your audience. This could even mean a lead time of 1 year to 6 months ahead of the show.
If you are an experienced trade show veteran, you are probably familiar with choosing booth space, etc, at the close of the previous year’s event. When you get back home from the show, this is a great time to take inventory of what worked and what didn’t while you were there. With everything fresh in your mind, write out an achievable timeline of the things you want to accomplish in order to blow next year’s show out of the water. Things like:
- Setting due dates and deadlines in a calendar so that you aren’t caught off guard
- Writing down goals your company wants to reach that are realistic and achievable based on your performance at this year’s show
- Things you’d like to do differently
- Things you saw on the trade show floor you’d like to see in your own exhibit (or things you saw and want to avoid at all cost)
- How to incorporate the things above into your trade show plan to make next year’s event that much more lucrative and memorable
Attending a trade show can be an excellent opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals. There is no reason you cannot make your audience’s trade show experience fun, especially now that you know it makes your exhibit more memorable. Creating a personalized, fun, and unique experience for your audience members will help you plan, execute, and ensure a return on investment.
