If you have a conference booth, you may expect increased foot traffic this year as the event industry grows rapidly. All this is due to the emergence of new hybrid and virtual attendance formats that eliminate financial barriers such as travel costs.
According to the Annual ICE Report, event spending is expected to rise by 83% in 2023. To enhance your ROI, consider offering additional attractions at your conference booth.
There’s also a pronounced trend toward integrating technical solutions for first—and third-party events to include additional virtual audiences. Gartner projects that by 2024, 30% of companies with more than $100 million in revenue will take a virtual-first approach to events. This figure has increased from their pre-pandemic prediction of below 5%.
Clearly, attendees will begin to expect the ease and convenience of integrated technological solutions from exhibitors. And as your booth attracts the most conference attendees, let’s make them the best they can be!
Top Reasons Why Conference Booth Tours Are Worth It
Many companies have chosen to forego guided booth tours. This is generally because conducting them in the chaotic atmosphere of a large trade show can prove difficult. But you shouldn’t just throw them out wholesale; they can be your secret weapon to stand out!
When executed correctly, booth tours can draw in attendees, get them to engage with your brand, and convert prospects into customers. So how can conference booth tours elevate your game?
Attract Better Leads
B2B products are often designed for industry-specific functions and can be challenging to understand at a glance. You probably have a few key product attributes that require a demonstration or explanation to showcase properly.
Taking leads on tour increases the engagement of your booth visitors and allows you to narrow down their interests to speak directly to their needs.
Have your roaming guides conduct a tour every half hour from 9-5. While the trade show floor remains open, you should have back-to-back product demos, continuously pushing your value to attendees. These attractions are more than just a draw to prospects. They’re also a more effective way to educate attendees on your selling points.
Personalize Your Brand Storytelling
Your conference booth is geared toward mass attendee consumption—but that doesn’t mean you can’t provide a personalized experience.
Knowledgeable staff members can address leads directly, answer their unique questions, and describe your product’s value in a way that aligns with the prospect’s needs. Additionally, they can highlight products to create a cohesive narrative about your company’s history and mission.
Try altering your booth design to encourage engagement. Provide refreshments or souvenirs to draw in customers. Also, gather lead contact information, and encourage interaction by playing games and offering prizes to winners. You’ll find that prospects spend more time at your booth.
Convert Attendees Into Qualified Leads
Your conference booth is one of the best places to find qualified leads. You should use two methods to assess sale potential and determine whom to follow up with.
Incorporate digital surveys at the booth to generate data on individual product interests, company demographics, and job titles. But also rely on your trained booth staff to appraise prospects’ interest levels in different products and gather professional demographics.
Collecting prospects’ information is relatively easy if you integrate a scheduling app into your approach. Qualified prospects can also request a meeting with your executives or subject matter experts on the trade show floor.
Three Key Steps in Streamlining Conference Booth Tours
As mentioned, the trade show floor can get crowded and disorderly. Therefore, offering a streamlined tour experience is in your visitors’ best interest.
Transparent processes are always appreciated in a hectic environment—so use this to improve attendees’ perception of their interaction with your brand. Having a clear purpose for every aspect of your booth is the best way to increase your ROI.
1. Maximize Conference Booth Tour Sign-Ups
Attendees should be able to quickly and easily—with no lines and no waiting—sign up for guided booth tours both during and prior to the conference.
Embed links in your event marketing, social media, industry publications, and your website through a dedicated meeting scheduler. Also, you can encourage sign-ups at the conference by placing QR codes near your booth that lead to your sign-up page.
Asking leads to sign up for your tours has various benefits, such as streamlining the tour process, collecting potential clients’ details for further follow-up, and allowing guides to customize tours according to the provided industry information.
Encouraging leads to sign up can make the tour experience more efficient and gather essential data to develop a more personalized relationship with potential customers.
2. Create an Engaging and Memorable Booth Tour Experience
Better lead engagement results in a positive correlation with your brand. While you want your booth to be educational, you also want it to be fun.
Flashy offerings like contests and virtual reality displays can attract more attendees to your booth, ultimately increasing your ROI in terms of sales and brand awareness. Plus, you can incorporate brand messaging into elements like interactive displays.
3. Book Meetings With Interested Attendees
Your conference booth tour is the first step in lead generation—but re-engaging with prospects later is what generates returns. Allowing leads to schedule meetings, calls, or sessions that are geared toward their specific product interests moves them down the sales pipeline.
A scheduling app is the most efficient way to do this. It allows your booth staff to prioritize meetings with key leads and automatically manages room bookings to prevent errors.
Your scheduling app will also track which subject matter experts or executives are meeting the lead and when. And on top of all the other benefits, the app documents the lead’s information to provide context for the meeting.
Make Your Conference Booth Tour Sign-Ups Seamless
Your conference booth can be the start of your sales pipeline so long as you’re effectively generating substantive leads and following up. Guided tours are a great introduction to your products and brand, as they offer a more personalized and engaging way to explore your booth.
Of course, these tours aim to pique prospects’ interest and move them further down your sales funnel. But to do so, you need to integrate a scheduling app that can capture lead information and automatically process meeting requests.
The most sophisticated apps can integrate with your CMS, simplifying your event data and making it easy for your sales team to submit their outbound meeting requests.
Look for an app that will also help you navigate inbound meeting requests. Features like a customizable inbound request form can help you determine which meetings have value with pertinent information on the lead.
You can generate incredible returns from your conference booth by combining the right tech and integrations with effective trade show strategies.
