Struggling with Trade Show Lead Loss? Know How a Custom Trivia Can Help

When Bethany, an executive with an automobile company in New York, was tasked with planning the company’s upcoming B2B exhibit, she was determined to give it her best. She meticulously planned all the aspects, including trade show marketing, booth design, staff training, lead collection, giveaways, and everything else she could think of to get the expected results.

Her hard work paid off, and the booth was successful in attracting a lot of people. In fact, they had to hire two additional staffers on the 2day of the event for crowd management. But while almost everything worked out as she had planned, and the company generated plenty of leads, the post-event conversion data was far below expectations.

The Culprit? Trade Show Lead Generation Strategy

Trade show lead loss is an ever-present dilemma most company executives and event managers struggle with. Often, the culprit is the overused and impersonal lead generation strategies, like collecting business cards and using badge scanners.

[Read: Trade Show Games VS Badge Scanners: Which is Better for Lead Generation]

While the number of leads you collect is important, it is about quality over quantity when it comes to trade show lead generation. For example, collecting contact details of 10 booth visitors who know your brand and are interested in your product/service is far better than 50 randomly collected leads.

Unfortunately, most traditional methods don’t help with brand awareness, nor do they provide you with a mechanism to differentiate a potential customer from maybe a freeloader or a window shopper.

[READ: 4 Types of Trade Show Attendees]

The Solution? Custom Trade Show Trivia Can Help

If you're looking for lead generation ideas to support your lead collection and conversion goals, custom trade show trivia can be a solution. Here are some of the ways a custom quiz can prevent lead loss and help you execute successful events-

Collect Engaged Leads

One of the most common mistakes I’ve seen most exhibitors commit is not understanding the difference between leads and engaged leads. You collect engaged leads when the booth visitors engage with your brand in some way. They know about your company, products/services, what you do, and how you’re better than your competitors.

[READ: 7 Trade Show Lead Capture Mistakes]

Come to think of it, how many sales calls and emails do you receive from random companies, and how many of them do you actually do business with? Most probably none. It’s the same with trade shows too. So, when your sales team starts following up with the leads, they should already know about you, and this awareness makes the job of the sales personnel easier.

With a custom expo quiz, you can create questions to help people learn more about your company. So, in a way, it helps you collect engaged leads with higher conversion potential.

Lead Retrieval Digitized and Automated

We live in a digital world where many everyday tasks are performed online. In such a scenario, methods like physical lead collection forms don't sit very well with how you want people to perceive your brand. You'd want people to think you're a modern, digitally-advanced company. But most traditional lead collection methods don't support this perception.

Moreover, losing lead data in transit from the trade show to the marketing team or when incomplete lead data is uploaded to CRM is a common problem with such offline trade show lead generation methods.

Custom trade show trivia digitizes the lead collection process by requiring booth visitors to fill out a short online lead form before playing the quiz. The trivia is connected to an online lead collection platform to prevent data loss.  

Accelerated Lead Follow-Up

The time spent between trade show lead capture and your sales team contacting the leads is also important. You don't want to delay following up with the leads after the event. Unfortunately, methods like business card collection or offline lead forms are bound to delay the process.

With most such methods, you must manually upload the lead data to the CRM. In the process, you lose precious time that your competitors who participated in the same event can easily take advantage of.

After the event, the custom quiz provider will share a spreadsheet with all the leads you’ve collected during the event. You can also log in to the online portal of the game provider and access the lead data as required.

Trade Show Lead Qualification

When exhibiting at a trade show, you don't just want leads but leads with the highest purchase potential. You can nurture other leads further to increase their probability of purchasing from you. For this, you'll need dedicated marketing strategies for hot, warm, and cold leads.

[READ: Trade Show Lead Management Planning]

But with the older trade show lead retrieval methods, there is no way to differentiate one lead from the other. Without this differentiation, how will you build a customized marketing and follow-up strategy?

When you deploy a custom expo quiz at your booth, you can use the questions to qualify the leads. While your booth staff also has a critical role in lead qualification, the trivia can be customized to assist them in their efforts.

Refine Trade Show Plan with Trivia Analytics

If we take Bethany’s example, her company collected leads, but the conversions were not up to the mark. And now, it is challenging for her to identify what went wrong and how she could improve the company's performance at future events.

An increasing number of exhibitors now use advanced technologies to analyze and optimize their performance. If your booth lacks similar tools and technologies, you should consider using them to identify the gaps and create an improved trade show plan.

[READ: Trade Show Planning Guide]

Leading trade show trivia providers also offer post-event attendee data and engagement analysis to help exhibitors further improve their trade show performance.

Prevent Lead Loss and Succeed at Trade Shows with Custom Trivia

While custom trade show quizzes are fun, they can also solve serious trade show challenges like lead loss. So if you're struggling with lead generation, qualification, and conversions, a custom expo quiz can help.

Check out how our custom trade show trivia can take you closer to your lead collection objectives.  

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