If your team frequently hosts conferences, trade shows, or other types of sales-focused events, then you know firsthand just how crazy these events can be. Sometimes, these events can feel like a blatant ‘one-upping’ contest with brands constantly trying to outdo each other with bigger booths, brighter colors, and cooler conference swag. It’s easy to lose sight of the real reason many brands attend trade shows in the first place: to connect with customers.
With so many brands, messages, and visual stimulators taking up real estate in an attendee’s mind, the actual logistics of the event can quickly fall by the wayside. A show’s connection with attendees starts as soon as they register or check in to the event, and continues until the last minute the expo hall shuts down. Keeping this in mind, your team can leverage innovation, creativity, and technology to truly deliver an unprecedented level of customer service and experience at your next trade show.
In most cases, trade shows, conferences, and events have a standard registration and/or check-in process. An attendee fills out his or her name, contact information, and basic company details. Because we’re living in a digital age, this data is quickly uploaded into an online platform (if it wasn’t already entered as such). After this brief interaction, the attendee goes off to enjoy the conference, in many cases never engaging or interacting with the host organization again.
Or, that’s how it used to be. Today, innovative organizations are taking this user experience a step further and offering extended use credentials tied to user-specific data. This means that an attendee registering is just the beginning of the engagement. Through any number of possible technologies the host organization can continue to communicate with, engage, and entertain the attendee throughout the entire event. From allowing attendees to make payments directly from a smartphone to sharing contact details in seconds with certain exhibitors to granting access to specific areas of the event through an app, this information acts as a sort of ‘digital passport’ that tracks where attendees have been, where they’ve spent the most time, and even who they have engaged with.
So you have all of this information now, but what can you actually do with these insights? Much like any other data-gathering solutions, digital passport technology for trade shows provides a unique look at how attendees interact with their surroundings at a show or conference. From large-scale user metrics like gradual heat mapping to individual insights like user participation, your team can build a holistic, 360-degree profile of your ideal attendee.
Your team can also leverage insights about where attendees spend the majority of their time to help inform your marketing and branding strategy. Let’s say you review the digital passport information from an event and realize that an overwhelming number of attendees spent a good amount of time at one booth. You can go through your records, see what that particular brand did well (Were there any specific technology or graphics used? What about a certain game or gimmick?), and then use this to help guide your own marketing efforts.
Ready to learn more?
Although trade shows may seem like the ‘last frontier’ of branding with incredible technological advancements being made every year, there is still room for innovation — and Bluewater can get you there. See how your next trade show can amp up the volume with digital passport technology from Bluewater. Schedule your call today or contact us below!
