The word “engagement” is so ubiquitous now that it’s almost becoming trite—if only the concept wasn’t so essential to satisfying the needs of today's attendees.
Nicole Bowman, vice president, marketing and communications, International Association of Exhibitions and Events, and Scott Craighead, IAEE's vice president of exhibitions and events, offer up ideas that have worked for their events:
Pre-Event
1. Create a personality quiz similar to those you see circulating on Facebook (What kind of dog would you be? What famous person do you resemble in personality?), but link your questions to content specific to your conference, your organization, or your audience. For example, IAEE once did a campaign around a “What promo product are you?” quiz, while a scientific conference once asked attendees to start conversations around this topic: "What kind of microbe would you be, and why?"
2. Provide speaker spotlights: quick messages showcasing a single speaker, with a photo, short bio, what he or she will be talking about, and a link to more information.
3. Hold chapter contests, with a free registration or some other valuable goodie as a prize for each chapter winner.
4. Interview past attendees and post their experiences on your show's blog or website.
5. Offer an opportunity for matchmaking/appointment setting to help attendees connect with each other, with suppliers and vendors, and with whatever other audience segments your show serves.
6. Design a social media campaign that sends messages about all of the above to your social media accounts, and encourage attendees to share with their contacts. An audience member said her organization launched a social media campaign asking attendees how they became a part of their profession, and then brought the campaign on site with a social media wall highlighting their stories.
On Site
7. Use beacon technology. While some planners may worry that attendees won’t want to be tracked on the show floor, Bowman pointed to research from the Center for Exhibition Industry Research that found 50 percent of attendees are comfortable with having beacons tracking their activity, and another 31 percent are neutral about it. IAEE first used beacons at its Expo! Expo! in 2016, and Bowman said they quickly learned how important it was to tell exhibitors what they’ll get out of it—leads—and also to let attendees know that they’ll score peer-to-peer networking capabilities and navigational help if they allow themselves to be tracked. Just be sure to have the Wi-Fi bandwidth to support the beacons.
8. Include collaborative activities. At some of its events, IAEE has put on a wall a large coloring-book-type image outline that attendees can fill in using differently colored markers. At the final luncheon, the collage was brought in and displayed to show the result of attendees' collaborative coloring. The image, of course, should reflect an aspect of your show’s theme or content. An alternative: The organization puts up a timeline with key moments in its history, and meeting participants can put their own key professional moments on the timeline as well.
9. Provide shareable moments. Activities such as whiffle-ball golf on the show floor, giant Jenga games, and walls that participants can color on are social-media catnip for conference-goers who want to share their latest creation or a photo of themselves in action.
10. Provide space for appointments. Make it easy for those who signed up ahead of time using your matchmaking or appointment-setting apps to hold those meetings in dedicated spaces, or ensure that exhibitors are set up to hold appointments in their booths. Also be sure to take advantage of the data your appointment-setting apps provide to show exhibitors some ROI. IAEE’s stats, collected through a networking, matchmaking, and scheduling app, showed that a recent show’s 262 exhibitor profiles and maps were viewed more than 20,000 times, and that attendees exchanged 4,400 messages with exhibitors. Overall, the app generated an average of seven pre-show qualified leads per exhibitor.
11. Display a social-media wall. Attendees love to see their photos and tweets projected on a large screen at the venue. IAEE projected its ever-changing social wall during the general-session walk-in. Make sure to have someone moderate the posts coming in on your hashtag before posting them to the wall, in order to filter out unwanted messages and spam.
12. Use Facebook Live. It’s a great way to provide updates from the show floor, spotlight exhibitors and attendees, and create more buzz around your event for those at the show and those who now wish they were.
13. Arrange meet-ups on the show floor for those who have met virtually, but have not yet connected face-to-face—or for any other smaller subset of attendees who may want to get to know each other in real life.
14. Be sure to integrate your beacons with your mobile app, and include some gamification to get participants’ competitive juices flowing—include a leaderboard with your social wall so everyone can see where they stand.
15. Include corporate social responsibility volunteer activities, such as Build-a-Bike, where attendees collaborate to put together a bicycle, which then is given to a charity.
16. Use polling technology to periodically check in with the audience and spur them to participate in the action.
Post-Event
17. Rethink your surveys. While most organizers do some sort of post-show survey, Bowman and Craighead say to take a hard look at what you’ve been doing—are you asking the questions that will get you the data you need?
18. Content marketing and case studies. Chunk the content into short-info bursts and case studies that you can distribute post-show via your app, social-media channels, website, and email campaigns to remind attendees of what they learned, and to pique the interest of next year’s potential participants.
19. Make podcasts from specific sessions or create short videos as another means of content marketing.
