Trade shows and conferences are excellent opportunities for companies to network and present their products/services to a wide audience. But taking part in these events also represents a major investment. That’s why organisations need to maximise their ROI by taking advantage of this opportunity to generate leads and sales.

In an environment where they are in direct competition with other exhibitors, how can we differentiate ourselves and achieve these objectives? Gamification is emerging as an effective lever for attracting and converting visitors.

In this article, we take a closer look at the links between gamification and trade shows. We also share our tips on how to host a trade show and win new customers.

SUMMARY

• Gamification and trade fairs: the obvious way forward
• The benefits of gamified trade show experiences
• How can gamified marketing be used to host a trade show?

Gamification is the process of turning any activity into a game. It’s a particularly popular tool in digital marketing, but one that companies are increasingly transposing to the physical world. We have already mentioned gamification in shops, but it has long been a central element of trade show experiences.

Exhibitors didn’t wait for gamification to collect business cards to generate leads and win prizes for participants. Physical games have always been incorporated into trade show stands to make them more attractive and encourage visitors to interact with the company.

But playable marketing has come a long way since thenand so are the technologies used on exhibition stands. The arrival of mobile screens and large-format displays (such as interactive kiosks) is opening up new possibilities for businesses. These phygital devices also help to bridge the gap between the digital and physical experience, boosting user engagement on their preferred channels.

Gamify your stand to host a trade show with interactive activities for visitors enables companies to achieve a number of strategic objectives. Here are some of them.

Gain visibility/awareness and engage visitors at a trade show

Trade shows are highly competitive events. Pour animer un salon professionnel, companies have to stand out from hundreds of other exhibitors. Their objective: to capture the attention of a public that no longer knows where to turn.

Gamification is an excellent way to stand out from the crowd. Exhibitors can attract visitors by creating an interactive and entertaining experience that will break the monotony of the other stands.

The public will be more inclined to engage in conversation with a company’s sales staff if they are directly invited to take part in a game. This will be all the more the case if this interactive activity can enable them to win attractive prizes (goodies in the company’s colors, a free trial period, etc.).

Mechanisms such as random drawing or the wheel of fortune are ideal for trade shows. They are clearly identifiable by visitors, who will be naturally drawn to the stand and the chance to win a prize.

Generate leads and collect data through gamification

To ensure that their efforts have an impact beyond the exhibition, companies need to put in place a lead follow-up strategy via personalised content. So one of the biggest challenges of this type of event is lead generation and data collection so that they can be reactivated with relevant information or offers.

Gamification is an excellent way of collecting data on prospects, such as their contact details. But an entry form for a marketing game or even the interactions resulting from the game itself (as with a swiper, for example), can give companies even more valuable information about their audience. This will give them more in-depth knowledge of their target audience’s preferences, buying behaviour and even direct feedback on their products.

At the French Salon International de l’Agriculture, Lidl invited visitors to take part in a one-armed bandit game. Players had to line up 3 identical symbols on the theme of the event in order to win 50 euro vouchers in the chain’s shops. Before launching the interactive game, each participant not only had to fill in a form to provide qualified information. They also had to choose whether or not to receive the company’s newsletter.

Result: Lidl used the game as an effective lever to capture qualified data and generate downloads of its Lidl Plus application. Hosting a trade show enabled Lidl to collect 152K entries and 7K shares on social networks, as well as recruiting 71K optins.

Converting through hosting a trade show

By boosting the visibility of its stand and facilitating lead generation, gamification is already a powerful conversion lever for companies taking part in a trade show. But it can also use its interactive animation to generate more sales, and so maximise its ROI.

In particular, the brand can reward visitor interaction with prizes in the form of purchase incentives. The prizes up for grabs in the Lidl one-armed bandit competition were vouchers to be redeemed directly in Lidl shops.

Similarly, promotional codes shared via an instant win can encourage visitors to complete a sale at the show. Simply adding a validity date (e.g. the duration of the event) can create a sense of urgency and boost the company’s conversion rate.

To maximise the impact of hosting a trade show, companies need to think through their strategy from A to Z. Here are the steps they can take to ensure that they leave no stone unturned in their conversion funnel:

• Define the objectives of your interactive marketing game. What results does the company want to achieve through gamification? For example, it may want to increase the number of visitors to its stand, generate leads or win new customers.
• Choosing the right gamification mechanics depending on its objectives and audience. The phygital device via which the game will be presented is also very important. Depending on its budget, the company may opt for an interactive terminalor tablets. It is also important to ensure that the game reflects the company’s identity and that it is clearly identifiable for participants.
• Defining attractive endowments to boost the participation rate. Depending on the audience’s expectations, the company can offer benefits to all participants (100% winner) or offer physical prizes to the big winners;
• Distribute your marketing game beyond the trade show. Companies can also use gamification to boost their visibility and their online message. The animation can also be made available via social networks or directly on the company website.
• Analyse the results and activate the data collected. Gamifying your exhibition stand can help you generate more leads. But this does not guarantee that they will convert into customers. To do that, it will need to follow up its prospects by sending them personalised content and progressively advance them along the sales funnel. Analysis of the data collected will also enable better segmentation of its customer base.

Conclusion

Trade shows are much more than just an event at which your company presents its products and services. It’s an opportunity to connect with your audience and build a loyal and engaged community. To increase the ROI of your exhibition stand, rely on our playable marketing mechanics!

With the depreciation of data and the end of third-party cookies, companies are constantly looking for new ways to collect customer opinion and feedback. Surveys have always been a very practical way of gathering data about your target audience. But its gamified format, the interactive survey, is proving even more effective.

In fact, 89% of consumers say that when a task is gamified, they are more motivated to complete it because of its competitive and playful nature.

In this article, we present the advantages of interactive surveys to better understand the expectations of your audience. We’ll also look at how to use gamification to boost engagement, obtain relevant responses and optimise your campaigns.

SUMMARY

• What is a survey?
• Why use surveys to improve your marketing campaigns?
• Why opt for interactive surveys?
• How to gamify your interactive surveys

A poll is a survey in which data is collected from a specific group of people. The aim is to acquire more in-depth knowledge about the various questions you ask yourself about your marketing target: what are its consumer habits, its budget, its preferred purchasing channel, and so on.

The different types of survey

Just as there are several reasons to share a survey with your audience, there are also different survey formats :

• Market research surveys These are used upstream of a project to gauge the needs and aspirations of the target audience. It is aimed at companies wishing to launch themselves with a new audience. It can also help them find out how they are positioned in relation to their competitors, or whether there is a demand for a new product.
• Satisfaction surveys (or NPS – for Net Promoter Score). This type of survey is used to assess whether customers are satisfied with the company’s experience or offering. In practical terms, it involves indicating, on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely it is that the consumer will recommend the brand to friends and family.
• Awareness surveys : They involve asking shoppers about their knowledge of the brand. This is a good way of measuring the success of an advertising campaign, for example, or identifying unexpected associations that consumers may make with the company.

The simple act of asking someone for their opinion is already an effective way of capturing their attention and increasing their commitment. However, responding to a survey can also be a tedious task, especially if the format is not adapted to the audience.

As we have already discussed in other articles, the trend is towards interactive marketing. Users are looking for entertaining formats that introduce game mechanisms to make content more engaging.

Gamification will motivate more people to take part in a survey, which is why it’s a good idea to opt for interactive surveys.

Those surveys can serve several purposes:

• Increase the number of participants and the survey completion rate. The main reason why users rarely complete a survey is that when the format is not interactive or is too long, it loses interest. Incorporating a game element makes the survey more engaging and attractive. This will encourage participants to complete it in order to obtain the reward that has been promised.
• Obtain better quality data. The aim is not only to increase the response rate, but also to improve the quality of the data collected. If the survey is entertaining, participants will be more likely to give honest answers. This is particularly important if the survey includes more in-depth questions.
• Increase brand awareness and customer loyalty. By creating fun surveys, participants will associate the brand with this enjoyable experience. They will be more likely to click, comment or even visit the brand’s website afterwards.

Several interactive survey formats are available to make their feedback forms engaging. Companies can :

1. Turning a survey into a battle

2. Replace the yes/no format with a swiper

Rather than sharing a survey with closed ‘Yes or No’ questions, brands can make the experience more interactive by opting for the swiper. This format is reminiscent of dating applications. Participants drag an image to the right if they like or agree, and to the left if they don’t.

3. Transforming an awareness survey into an interactive quiz

Instead of sending out a long form to test your audience’s knowledge, Trivia is an interactive alternative. This survey format makes it possible to engage participants, who can test their knowledge and even compare their results with other players.

4. Motivating participants with a personality test

Personality tests are another very popular format for interactive surveys. It allows companies to learn more about their customers and enrich their CRM. But it’s also a way of encouraging participants to complete the survey, since the reward is learning more about their personality. For Valentine’s Day, the personality test can reveal the user’s profile and make personalised recommendations.

Are you looking for a fun, original and interactive way to strengthen cohesion within your teams or to motivate your employees? Workplace competitions are an effective way of engaging and rewarding your employees while reinforcing their sense of belonging to your organisation.

We’re going to share with you some ideas for competitions or interactive events that can be launched in-house to challenge teams in a fun way.

SUMMARY

• The benefits of interactivity and games to motivate employees
• Our ideas for corporate competitions
• 5 tips for launching workplace competitions

In 2006, Netflix decided to organise an open competition to improve its recommendation algorithm CInematch. The prize is an exceptional 1 million dollars.

Armed with user data, employees of the video-on-demand platform competed to design an algorithm capable of outperforming Cinematch by predicting how users would rate a new film based on their previous preferences.

Three years later, two teams managed to beat Cinematch and ended the competition. This example clearly shows that, used wisely, in-house challenges can be a good way of pushing employees to excel, strengthening collaboration and team cohesion.

On a day-to-day basis, internal competitions can have a number of benefits for your company.

Training your teams the fun way

Rather than organising a traditional training workshop or seminar, a company can opt for an interactive competition. It’s an excellent way of transmiting information in a more entertaining way and boost internal communication.

You can raise awareness of a CSR initiative (such as environmental protection) by organising an interactive quiz around the theme, or a competition such as the Fresque du Climat. In this way, employees are kept informed of the company’s long-term strategy and are regularly involved in its implementation.

Reinforcing a sense of belonging to the company’s values

Internal competitions and surveys, for example, are a simple and effective way of collecting feedback. They will help to improve the company’s internal culture so that it better reflects the expectations and aspirations of its employees. But other team-building challenges are just as relevant for strengthening employee support and improving the company’s image internally (and externally).

Like Netflix, you can challenge your teams by involving them in certain choices (logo change, new product design). The fun, interactive format will bind employees together around a common challenge and help new ideas to emerge.

Boosting team cohesion and stimulating performance

Internal competitions also contribute to employee motivation and productivity. After all, it’s when you’re having fun that you’re most effective, simply because you don’t feel like you’re working.

This gamified format is also an excellent way of rewarding the most motivated employees without creating tension within your teams. Everyone can take part and has a chance of winning a prize (tickets for a show, a trip offered by the company, etc.).

The whole point of workplace competitions is that they can take any form you like, depending on the specifics of your organisation and the objectives you want to achieve. If you’re looking for ideas for workplace competitions, here are some suggestions that you can adapt to your teams.

1. The photo contest

Photo competitions are a great way to unleash employees’ creativity and encourage them to share their personal experiences at work. Phillips, for example, has used this approach to strengthen its employer brand and facilitate future recruitment. Philips employees were invited to share photos of themselves at work on social networks via the hashtag #LifeAtPhilips.

2. The in-house culture quiz

Quizzes such as Trivia (a quiz with several choices of answers) are also a fun mechanism that is particularly well-suited to the corporate world. It’s an excellent way of testing employees’ knowledge of the organisation’s history and values, and strengthen cohesion and a sense of belonging within its teams.

3. The performance challenge

When organised fairly and inclusively, performance competitions are an excellent way of boosting employee motivation. One of the most popular forms of performance competition is based on key performance indicators (KPIs), particularly within sales teams. This internal competition rewards employees who have exceeded their sales target.

4. The treasure hunt

A treasure hunt in the company’s physical offices (or in a virtual recreation for remote teams) is also an excellent way of engaging employees. The company can hide surprise prizes on its premises or within a gamified application.

5. The winning calendar

The game is therefore an original and effective way of engaging employees and strengthening team cohesion within the company. Be careful, however, to ensure that everyone can take part and that it does not create unhealthy competition between its employees.

Adictiz recommends that you :

• Think about the objectives you want to achieve with your in-house game and choose the right format accordingly;
• Choose an easy-to-use gamification tool to organise your digital competition and enable all your employees (even those working remotely) to take part.
• Get your employees involved to come up with new ideas for in-house competitions;
• Choose the right rewards and prizes to motivate your employees;
• Ask for feedback once the internal marketing campaign is over to assess its impact and improve future initiatives.

Commitment has become a very important aspect of online marketing in recent years. With the rise of social networks, brands can no longer simply broadcast advertisements or post a publication and wait for it to generate sales. They now need to interact with their audience and find new ways to increase audience engagement.

In this article, we share with you 10 formidable techniques for creating engaging marketing campaigns.

Engagement has become the key metric for marketers. For many, it replaces so-called vanity KPIs (such as the number of subscribers, for example) and provides a much better assessment of a brand’s reputation and appeal on social networks.

However, engagement also translates into very concrete KPIs, such as the number of comments, likes and shares of a publication. Some formulas also include the number of impressions or views, etc.

These community interactions with the content shared by a brand are good indicators of its relevance. But they don’t say much about the intention behind these actions… and even less about how they enable the company to achieve more concrete objectives, such as increasing sales, building customer loyalty, etc.

So before we look at the best levers for creating engaging marketing campaigns, it’s important to think about the objectives that the brand wants to achieve. In other words, what the engagement of its audience can bring to the brand in terms of commercial results.

The different objectives

The objectives of an engaging marketing campaign can be multiple. Interactive content can enable companies to :

• Capture the attention of your prospects and expand your target audience to generate new leads.
• Collect data (feedback, opinions, survey responses) to adapt your offer or marketing to the needs of your community.
• Reactivate existing customers to stay ‘top of mind’ when they need to buy a product/service (particularly before a major marketing event such as Christmas or the launch of a new collection).
• Convert your audience from their social network accounts or newsletters to your online shop (or in-store).

Build audience loyalty by creating a more solid relationship that is not just transactional.

Companies wishing to launch marketing campaigns to increase audience engagement can use a number of levers, depending on the objectives they wish to achieve. Here are the most effective.

1. Listen and respond to your subscribers

The first simple thing to do to increase audience engagement and strengthen the user experience is simply to interact with them. Brands that make a point of replying to their subscribers’ comments, reposting their publications (of the UGC type) or simply asking for opinions (in the form of surveys) are those that forge the strongest links with their community.

Beyond the consideration they show their customers and prospects these brands also take advantage of these interactions to better understand their needs and expectations. Comments or responses to a survey are all first-party data that shed light on consumer trends within their audience. The information collected can then be used to better segment customers or adapt communications, offers, etc.

2. Create exciting competitions

Create an engaging marketing competition is also an excellent way of achieving your sales objectives. Interactive animations such as quizzes, photo contests or instant wins are highly effective to :

• Expand your audience (thanks to the buzz around the prizes to be won, for example).
• Raise community awareness of the launch of a new product or service.
• Reactivate customers by offering them rewards.

3. Launch a viral campaign with a content creator

Partnerships with influencers are also an excellent way of generating more engagement with your community. Content creators have a closeness with their community that can benefit brands, whose communication will appear more authentic.

But account takeovers, for example, can bring a bit of freshness and novelty to the content shared by companies, and so engage their audiences.

4. Capitalise on interactive advertising content

Interactive marketing is, in essence, a powerful generator of engagement. In fact, its purpose is to Invite a community to interact with the content, for example by integrating gamification mechanisms (in the case of competitions or Playable Ads).

5. Encourage the creation of UGCs

UGC campaigns (whether in the form of a competition or a simple branded hashtag) are particularly effective in increasing audience engagement. They enable brands to encourage their customers to share content about their products or services.

UGC will be an excellent way of boosting their visibility, reinforcing their sense of belonging to the brand’s community and converting new customers more effectively than photos from a professional shoot.

6. Organising events

Events (whether virtual or physical) are an integral part of brand community strategies. They allow brands to create much stronger links with its customers and therefore build loyalty. But they are also good conversion drivers (when they are organised to launch a new collection, for example) and engagement drivers (by inviting participants to share content around the event).

7. Doing live shopping

Live shopping is a highly effective form of interactive content for generating engagement and boosting conversion rates. Brands will present their products in a more immersive wayand answer their customers’ questions live. Customers benefit from a personalised shopping experience without having to visit the shop.

It is also possible to integrate interactive experiences such as surveys or games into live shopping. These gamified formats will boost community engagement even further.

8. Use co-creation to engage your audiences

Co-creation is another ultra-powerful form of interactive marketing. It allows customers to participate in the development of a new product or service, usually by taking part in a survey and then voting (to select the best idea).

Not only does this strategy generate engagement. But it’s also an excellent way of activating the data collected from its community to create products for which companies are sure to have demand.

9. Share relevant content

By sharing content with high added value (such as free guides, webinars, tutorials, etc.), companies can respond effectively to the expectations and needs of their audience. It also generates engagement by encouraging their prospects to delve deeper into the subject, ask questions, etc.

10. Share behind the scenes of your brand

Consumers are generally curious to discover what goes on behind the scenes at their favourite brands. Social networks are excellent platforms to share his backstage, give a voice to its employees, etc. Many brands, particularly in the fashion industry, take advantage of these channels to reveal the secrets of their workshops or catwalk shows. An ideal technique for increasing audience engagement while highlighting the company’s expertise.

Create a more engaging marketing campaign using gamification. Adictiz offers you a a wide choice of formats for interacting with your audience, depending on the objectives you want to achieve!