Justin Kozuch

I recently attended a conference and I was surprised at the number of booths I saw that failed to grab my attention, engage me or didn’t provide the tools I would have needed to sign up for a service, product or even a mailing list.

In the age of instant subscription - yes, I’m coining a new buzzword - and the existence of technology that allows you to engage users and find new fans, I often wonder why organizations don’t take advantage of the plethora of free tools that offer these benefits.

As I walked around from booth to booth, I started to think about what I would do if I was an exhibitor at a conference. Of course, this is by no means a complete list. I’m sure if I spent an hour thinking about it, I could come up 10 more ideas. Here are 3 different tactics I came up with that you can employ to rock your next tradeshow appearance:

User Signup

If your company measures success in terms of the number of users (daily active or otherwise), provide visitors to your booth with the ability to sign up for your service. Hopefully, that service already exists on your site, so put it to good use. I’d put good money on getting a decent visitor to new user conversion rate.

Bonus Tip: If email marketing is part of your communications strategy (and it should be), offer booth visitors the ability to sign up for your mailing list. I’m a big fan of Mailchimp and have been a loyal user for a number of years. As it turns out, they have an iPad app that I can use to sign up subscribers to the Pixel to Product mailing list. It’s free, customizable and is a low-tech way to putting your content on the screens of your customers. In turn, they can share this content with friends, colleagues, and their social networks. Put your content to work for you.

Social Media and You

Is your content already being spread through social media? (If not, ask yourself why.) Are people talking about your product or interacting with you through these channels? (Chances are it’s already happening.) Listen to what they say and look at the sentiment. If it’s bad, why? Do you have a strategy in place for prioritizing and engaging with those making these remarks? (You should. If not, here’s a few suggestions for dealing with negative feedback.) If it’s good, thank them and build relationships with them. Keep in mind the path people take to talking about your product: Interest -> Action -> User -> Fan -> Advocate. If there’s mass adoption of your product, even in a small market, highlight the adoption and make it visible to your visitors. As a rule, visual content draws people in. Display the content you (and others) are creating and don’t be show it off!

Bonus Tip: If your brands hashtag is particularly active, use a free tool like VisibleTweets to show others what the conversation online looks like in real-time. You can also use the Twitter search syntax to display mentions of your company, your product and other social objects using one search query.

Foursquare

Create a venue for your booth on Foursquare and encourage people to check in at your booth to win a prize. Add a tip to the venue where your booth is located with a description of your company and bit.ly the link to your company’s website so that you can track how many people clicked on it.

Bonus Tip: If you have the financial means, create a badge that people can unlock when they check into your booth. As a Foursquare user myself, I love unlocking badges and incentives (10% off my next purchase, preferred seating for the mayor, etc). Use the platform to your advantage. Foursquare has a decent venue analytics platform, and allows you to view data such as total checkins, new and unique visitors and social reach (shares to Twitter and Facebook), as well as age breakdown and who your visitors were (and how to get in touch with them).

Over To You

What about you? If you had a booth at a tradeshow, how would you rock it? What would you do? Let me know by way of a comment below.