Use Social Media Contests to Attract Clients to your Trade Show Booth
Before social media, all you could do was advertise your trade show 
booth appearance and hope for the best. Advertising is a bit like testing whether spaghetti noodles are fully cooked. It’s a lot of tossing ideas against the wall until something sticks. Social media allows you to tailor advertising for your trade show booth, and get an almost instant response on how well you’re doing. Contests on social media generate even more interest and excitement for your trade show, giving you an excellent way to judge your efforts immediately.
1. Set Goals for Your Social Media Contest
It’s not enough to offer a contest and hope people respond. You need to outline exactly what you expect to accomplish by holding a contest via social media.
- Are you trying to get more people to come to the show?
- Are you trying to get more people to visit your trade show booth?
- Are you trying to increase the number of contacts you make at the event?
- Are you trying to boost product sales at the trade show?
- Are you trying to generate interest and excitement for the product or service you’re promoting at the show?
Only when you have a specific goal for the contest can you truly evaluate its effectiveness. For example, if your contest brings 200 extra people to your trade show booth on Saturday, does that help you meet your goal of making 20 percent more sales than during last year’s event? It only does if these visitors become customers.
Define your goals so it’s clear whether they’ve been met. Other worthy goals might be increasing your social media followers, or better targeting the audience most likely to become customers. Whatever it is, state it clearly and keep it in mind while you create the contest.
2. Develop a Strategy for Your Social Media Contest
When you have your goal, you can tailor a contest to help meet that goal. If your goal is to encourage visitors to your trade show booth, develop a contest that encourages people to physically visit you. This includes contests like coming by to guess how many widgets are in the jar or who can post the best photo of your booth. You’ll also need to select which social media platform you’ll use for the contest, though you can use several social media sites. Are your consumers on Facebook? Do they spend their time on Pinterest?
Once you’ve decided whether to host your contest via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest, or come combination of these or other social media sites, thoroughly read their rules before setting up the contest, as each social media site has different rules for what is or isn’t allowed. Check our apps like Wildfire to assure you’re complying with the terms of the platform you use. Finally, develop a contest that’s relatively simple for people to enter. A long, complicated game of treasure hunting or a technically complex task is likely to deter many people from entering.
3. Measure the Success of Your Social Media Contest
As soon as the data on your contest’s success starts coming in, you need a way to track it. Your goal and strategy determines what data you’ll collect and how you’ll measure its success. For example, if your goal was selling products or generating traffic to your trade show booth, you’ll need someone to tally these results during the show. Linking the contest to the social media strategy in some way is important, so you’ll know which visitors came as a direct result of your social media efforts.
If you use more than one social media outlet to promote your trade show appearance, you’ll need to build some way into your strategy to know which visitor came as a result of what social media. You can assign contestants user codes, or have them fill out a form when they arrive to keep track of this information. Just don’t make this process cumbersome, because costing extra time or asking for too much information can deter people from following through.
4. Use These Lessons for Later Marketing Strategies
Once you finish your trade show and contest, don’t fail to use this information for other marketing purposes. Did you figure out your most likely customers are more into Pintrest than Facebook? Perhaps the visitors to your trade show booth likesa chance to showcase their photography talents, or maybe they like games of chance. Also, make note of how many of your contest participants continue to like, share, and follow your messages over time. Which social media sites generate the most long-term users and customers?
It’s just as important to take note of our failures as our successes. If you didn’t get the response you were hoping for, figure out why. Often the answers lie in user comments posted on your social media pages. Was the contest too complicated? Was it so simple no one got interested? Did people lack the skills or tools to compete? A lack of success doesn’t mean failure, unless you don’t learn from it. Make suggested changes in your next promotion or contest so you can capitalize on what you learned.
Some contest formats are more popular than others. Contests where consumers can get involved directly with your business, without things getting too complicated, are the most successful. Frito-Lay is generating excitement and anticipation with their “Do Us a Flavor” Facebook contest, wherein contestants get to choose the company’s next flavor of potato chips. A small travel agency called Travel Sheikh is seeing big success with a photo entry contest. AMC Theaters has continual contest opportunities on their Pintrest page, encouraging people to come back again and again to try their luck.
Social media contests are a great way to generate interest and participation in your trade show booth, but it isn’t a substitute for a well designed, attractive display, friendly, well-trained employees to work the booth, and a solid presentation of your products or service so those who attend know who you are and what you offer.
You want to live up to all the hype your contest and promotions built so that your casual visitors convert easily into paying customers.