Trade Show Contest Ideas

If your goal is to attract visitors to your booth so you can let attendees know about your services and increase your product sales, our trade show contest ideas will help you do just that during trade show or exhibition events.

About  the industry

Trade shows, trade fairs, and exhibitions are organised so that companies in a specific industry can showcase their experience and competence. As a way to manage the trade show industry, permanent trade show grounds or convention centers were established as venues that featured all the necessary equipment. Nowadays the trade show industry continues to grow modestly, and fun trade show giveaway contest ideas have become especially helpful.

Reasons for running contests

Trade show contests and games can drive more traffic to your company. Exhibiting at a trade show is an excellent way to find new customers to help your business grow. Moreover, 91% of attendees say that seeing a company at a trade show impacts their choices. It is also a good strategic marketing tool to empower your sales and increase ROI.

Determining your target audience

If your company is a B2B sector organization, the people you need to attract are businesspeople, exhibitors, vendors, and top managers. The interest of these people can be attracted by the benefits, status, exclusivity, personalisation, convenience, additional individual services, customer support, and compliance of your product or service.

Challenges of the industry

When you do not have a huge budget, you cannot afford to simply “buy” visitors’ attention by giving away iPhones or gift cards, sponsoring the fireworks show, and the like. You need to take a creative approach to the design of the table or booth and use the best trade show booth contest ideas to stand out.

Running a contest for a trade show: the process and good practices

There are some surefire methods that can be used for running a contest at a trade show that will gain the maximum interest from attendees and will result in your company’s success. Here are some of them:

• Set out an interactive whiteboard (or tablets to put on a table next to a sofa where visitors can sit).
• Show a slogan or an eye-catching inscription for people interested in sales.
• Use your site or social media, where a visitor can find answers to their questions right away.
• Shoot and show a video clip.
• Invest in your stand design.
• Collect contacts (various formats to choose from).
• Use live streaming.
• Combine live and online trade show and event staff training.

GEVME’s experts in exhibitor and sales training deliver practical and highly interactive trade show sales training for large-scale events with positive results.

Contest requirements

Trade shows contest and games will help you generate event buzz. But first, they should be clear to the audience. Promotional trade show giveaways, lucky draws, or online contests all should have clear requirements set according to the tradeshow objectives and should also have clear rules to follow.

Rules

If you organise contests on the basis of a social media platform, keep in mind that each social platform has different rules regarding contests. If you pick an event platform or integrate it with social media, you may develop your own rules and invite your own jury.

Choose fair juries for your contest and determine fair judging criteria.

Judging

You should create a landing page with a convenient and user-friendly signup form, such as the Judgify platform. This should make it clear how you will choose a winner.

How to pick a winner

The winner is determined by public voting or judging criteria. It should be clear and easy to enter as well as easy to understand why a particular winner was chosen, on what grounds, etc.

When your contest is completed, return to the contest platform section and click on advanced scoring to easily measure the results. 

Types of contests

There are some cheap trade show contest ideas and contest types to apply in tradeshow organisation:

• Photo contest
• Instagram hashtag contest
• Essay contest
• Blog contest

• Video contest

You can also discover more useful information about contest types, giveaway contest rules, trophies, international contests, and how to promote them from our blog. 

The best contest and giveaway ideas and why they work

There are so many ways to organize giveaways and attract visitors at trade shows: free snacks and drinks, free drawings, candies/cookies with fortunes, children’s books with bright illustrations and funny texts with your info on the side, panamas and caps with your logo, soda water sweet glass (very popular right now), sets for soap bubbles, and so much more! Big discounts on the first order to the lottery winners and ticket sales will work as well.

Prize wheels

Prize wheels are always a fun way to draw people to your booth.  Make it fun with a variety of prize wheels and accessories that are perfect for your next company event. A big, colourful prize wheel will attract attention at a bustling trade show and can help create a game show atmosphere. Be creative when offering various wheel sizes, from lighted wheels to magnetic wheels or massive jumbo wheels. 

Prize drawings

At trade shows, sweepstakes are prize giveaways where the winners are chosen by the luck of the draw and are so much fun. Prizes can be almost anything you can think of, from your company knick-knacks to large sums of cash, trips, certificates, and tickets for the next event.

Counting contest

Put your name, phone number, and guess in a contest box. Each day, at the end of the tradeshow night, a winner will be selected. The daily prize is $50 or another fun item! 

Photo contest

Free photo contests may be added daily at trade shows with photo booths or via mobile phones and social media accounts. You may offer $4,000 of prizes at each show and get your work reviewed by expert judges.

Guess the amount of something in a container

If it’s a standard container, it may even have the number already stamped on it. The objects put inside should be completely unseen to encourage the player’s enthusiasm. For example, they can count the number of items around the outside of the bottom of the container to determine the winner.

Searching for clues and solving a riddle

Offer your visitors clues to solve challenging puzzles. These free tradeshow riddle games will give them plenty of challenges to solve and win something. They’ll have to look for clues in the source code, file names, URLs, and wherever your imagination allows.

Prize ideas

What’s new and hot for 2019 trade show giveaways? The choice of a prize for a contest requires good expertise in terms of your target audience and the tradeshow objectives. There are so many simple, affordable, yet great prizes to offer regardless of the industry you’re in. In fact, using tradeshow giveaways as prizes for larger promotions is recommended at trade shows for the maximum engagement. 

Identifying your contest idea

Sometimes it takes just one idea to set your trade show off and offer the perfect prize. Since a contest is a form of competition that requires skill to win, the most engaging, motivating, and interesting idea will be the most successful.

Spend money on a good themed background for a photo, and run a photo contest on Instagram with a profile hashtag. Think about what bonuses you can give to the winners (and how to determine them).

Tips for planning

When you are dealing with a trade show, you should show initiative and be creative to prepare well. Here are some tips and helpful recommendations:

• The stand’s attendants should not forget to smile, hand out business cards, and quickly respond to interest. A glass of water offered to the guests at the stand would also be great for reinforcing a positive impression to those who are already involved in the dialogue. 
• They should have matching branded shirts or other means of identifying themselves on site. 
• Move on to mutually beneficial and pleasant communication and networking with the guests. Stay polite.
• In the middle of the stand, you can also place a beautiful artificial tree that you can rent (which you can often see in large shopping centers). People like these, and they will constantly take pictures around them. 
• You can attach your business cards or other informational materials to the flowers and fruit on the brand tree. 
• It is best not to overload the booth with anything else. Success in promotion and successful presentation depend on the quality of your services rather than on your creative abilities.

Such exhibitions usually do not provide places for recreation, so a very pleasant surprise would be to arrange something like puff seating for people to relax where you offer them their services. This will not only attract people but also make people more relaxed. A relaxed and happy customer will be sure to listen to you.

Call to action

Develop an actionable contest plan on how to pick the right idea and run a successful competition for trade show audiences with Judgify. Start right away! Use trade show contest examples for ultimate success.

Contest management

How do you get your booth to stand out at a trade show? We offer you the help of our intelligence platform to run better events, including trade show contests. Be strategic in your approach. Create an info hunt contest with the potential for large-scale engagement, use social media, integrate it with our platform, and generate new leads for your company. Your contest should reengage current subscribers and build buzz around a new product or line to attract new ones. Do not skip professional contest management assistance. 

Conclusion

Running a social media contest at a trade show is an easy way to keep audiences engaged and acquire new business customers at a really low cost via voting software. It’s a no-brainer—people like free stuff, so organize giveaways on a regular basis for them to increase their engagement and prepare for your next trade show’s success. Good luck!

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