4 Ways to Boost Customer Engagement at Corporate Events

When you are planning an event that has been in the works for months, there is nothing more satisfying than to see its success. After spending countless hours planning and booking vendors, special guests, entertainment, and keynote speakers, don’t forget about your attendees who could also be your potential customers! So, how do you actually engage your audience’s attention and keep it? Check out these 4 creative ways to boost your customer engagement at your next corporate event.

Photo booth

Photo booths are a new ‘must-have’ for any special occasion such as weddings, birthday parties, dances, and even your next corporate event! Photo booths that print pictures on the spot are great souvenirs for guests to take home. Some booths come with fun props, signs, and costumes for great memories to laugh at later with your colleagues. If a customer loves their picture, chances are they will probably want it printed, giving you the opportunity to send home a happy memory and your company name and brand in their pocket. Some photo booths even have options to email photos right away. This presents a great opportunity for customers and attendees to post to social media with your event hashtag or mention your company name for the social networking world to see. Photo booths make guests smile, laugh, and create memories. Who doesn’t want that at their event?

Live Social Feed Wall

Social media is an essential part of any conference, wedding, festival or marketing campaign and has become just as important at a live event as the event itself. By promoting the event’s username and custom hashtags from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and more – live social walls inform guests of where the conversation is happening and how they can participate.
Live social feed walls provide guests with the instant gratification of seeing their posts appear on the screen in real-time, and can persuade even the most casual social media user to share their experience. It acts as a live social hub for your event, promoting and molding your online presence through your hashtag campaigns and showcasing the live stream of posts. Live social feeds help increase awareness and reach both inside the venue where attendees can visit your booth and see your wall, as well as outside the venue where attendee’s followers are exposed to your social presence and your brand. The best part? Live social walls are inexpensive and extremely easy to use. There’s no work required during the actual event, meaning the feeds essentially work for themselves.

Games

Sometimes it’s helpful to have a gimmick at your booth to help increase your booth’s traffic and customer engagement. For example, you could set up a roulette wheel where visitors are able to give the wheel a spin and then answer a question about the company in order to win a prize. Trade show games offer entertainment to the drained event attendee who may have already made their way through several rows of booths, or attended multiple panels. While visitors still wants to seek out the information found at the show, they may be feeling physical fatigue and information overload before ever crossing paths with your booth.
Games have the potential to offer something different that will both educate and energize attendees as they make their way through the venue. Capturing your attendees’ attention with swag is often enough to make them want to stop by. Giving them a way to interact through a game adds an element of excitement as the customer tests their chances at winning your prize. After you have their attention, you then have the opportunity to engage them with more information about your brand, product, and services. If your game is engaging, has the right execution, and offers tempting prizes, your company has the opportunity to be the talk of the show.

Mobile apps

Creating custom mobile apps for events are a hot trend that can help attendees make the most of their experience. When you plan a large conference, one of your main goals before the show is to drive attendance. Attendance is a key to a successful event, but do you engage your attendees once they get there? Mobile apps have opened up a new realm of attendee and customer engagement and offer increased value at your event. They help your audience connect with you and build a social presence throughout their event experience.
Having an app that integrates their social accounts in the app means that they don’t have to navigate away from your event or app to share their experience and reactions on social platforms. Encourage your guests to post what they’ve learned in sessions and share any photos or quotes they take away.
Having a mobile app for your event is also a great way for attendees to build an agenda to keep track of sessions, panels, and any other activities they don’t want to miss. To most attendees, the agenda builder this is probably the most important part of an event app. Within an agenda builder, an attendee is able to see the entire schedule and bookmark specific sessions, allowing them to easily manage their plans. A mobile app can include an activity feed that centralizes everything going on at your event and highlights different session and activities that your audience may not have stumbled upon. While a mobile app may take a little more work, it is a great way to keep your boost your customer engagement.

There are, of course, tons of other ways to boost customer engagement at corporate events. If you have any other suggestions, we’d love to hear about them!