Increasing the visitor footprint at your booth is currently on the rise. It is one of the ways to achieve greater visibility for the products on display, as well as reach a large audience with a clear message. One strategy is gamification, and there are different ways to execute it. Like everything else, it always depends on the type of product you sell, the target audience you want to reach, and the characteristics of your booth. Gamification, like our booths, can also be customized and adapted.
The Concept
Gamification defines the application of game elements and techniques in non-recreational contexts to motivate and increase participation, in this case at a booth. In marketing, gamification has a clear objective: the loyalty of existing customers and the acquisition of new leads.
What types of gamification can I apply to my booth?
When you request an open booth with a high flow of visitors, we suggest activating a gamification action. This way, we get visitors to come to the booth to participate in the activity and have fun. This directly contributes to increasing the visitor footprint.
Gamification can have several objectives; in this article, we explain three of the main ones:
- Brand positioning
Do you want to increase engagement and interaction? Game elements such as points, badges, levels, and leader boards motivate users to interact more with the brand. This turns passive interactions into active and engaging experiences, which increases brand visibility and recall. It is also a good method to stand out and differentiate yourself from the competition. Brands that implement gamified strategies demonstrate innovation and an understanding of what motivates their audience, creating a distinctive value proposition. Furthermore, they also educate consumers about a brand’s products, services, or values, making the information more digestible and memorable.
- Generating high traffic and movement on social media
Do you want people who visit your booth to, somehow, forget they are in a business environment, enjoying themselves and laughing while you execute your gamification proposal? If you want to generate a lot of traffic and movement on social media because your target audience is there, then be sure to run a strong hashtag campaign and add visual, eye-catching, and engaging content to your booth so that event attendees find it interesting enough to share it on their social networks. This will generate online exposure for your company and help your branding and products gain a stronger foothold among existing customers and create an impact and interest among new ones.
- Obtain contacts or leads, that is, data and information about visitors
Do you want every person who visits your booth to leave a real and tangible mark? If you are looking to gather information from visitors, whether through surveys or contact details, you need a powerful gamification action that requires pre-registration of participants to begin. This will generate a database for your company, which you can use to contact potential customers later.
Other advantages of gamification
Gamification can be used for all these purposes and even with the same activity in each case. Although this is true, some of them are more controllable and quantifiable than the others. In the second case, the choice to share is solely and exclusively up to the visitor, so there may be a lot of foot traffic at the stand, but little interaction on social media. In the third case, the visitor is required to fill out a registration form, and therefore, there will be much more reliable KPIs (in terms of quantity, not quality).
All the mentioned purposes present deviations, since not all visitors who share content on their social media will reach where you intended, nor will all visitors who leave their details be your target audience. The data you collect from gamified interactions will be valuable for understanding user behaviour, preferences, and habits. This information is crucial for better understanding your audience and personalizing future marketing strategies.
Other factors to consider
To begin with, since gamification is one of the most important parts of the process for executing and maximizing its optimization, you need to have a clear strategy: What are you trying to achieve? How? What will you do with the information obtained? Are KPIs important? How can the results be measured? Does the activity need to be targeted for a specific audience? Which is the allocated budget (investment)? What economic benefit is expected? What percentage of space should it occupy at the booth?
These are some of the questions you should ask yourself at the very beginning and, above all, have clear answers to them. They will guide you and help you decide on the right gamification to get the most out of it.
However, to understand it better… What examples of gamification can we find at trade shows?
At trade shows, we find activities such as photo calls, physical games (basketball, bowling, precision games), digital games (virtual reality, multiplayer competitions on different computers or game consoles with leader boards), escape rooms, surprise ball dispensers, contests, analogue cartoon drawing, AI photo booths, interactive robots, custom keychain creation, prize wheels, raffles, etc.
At Smart Room Barcelona, we would be happy to help you adapt your strategy to the most appropriate gamification action for your specific needs and objectives. This tool is increasingly common in designer stands and even in modular ones, as it is a quick way to grab visitors’ attention and generate a large flow of interactions and people at the same stand. Contact us, and we will design a stand that optimally integrates gamification to maximize your impact at the trade show and help you achieve your goals.
