8 Gamification Ideas to Break The Ice In Your Booth

On a trade show floor, attendees wander for hours while every booth fights for attention.

If you can only offer branding and demos, you’ll blend into the background. You’ll lose the fight.  

You need an edge—something that stops people, pulls them into your space, and encourages them to interact with you.

That’s where gamification comes in.

With engaging and strategic gamification:

• Your booth will draw attendees like moths to a flame.
• You’ll teach people about your brand in the most fascinating ways.
• Your business will be impossible to forget.

Making someone feel entertained is the first step towards initiating meaningful conversations that generate ‘game-changing’ results for your business’s bottom line. Every marketing KPI you have is achievable through gamification.

In this article, we share the eight gamification ideas that will elevate your offering to the next level.

1. Customized educational games

One of the most effective ways to immerse your ideal customers in your product or service is to create a digital game that illustrates the benefits it provides and the problems it solves.

You’re no doubt familiar with the game Simon Says. You can create something like this, whereby attendees follow pop-up commands related to your core offering and learn about it in real time.

This is just one example of how you can fuse brand education with a layer of fun.

You can also integrate a data capture system whereby people have to enter a small amount of information up-front in order to participate. (We’ll come back to this point numerous times throughout the article, as it’s so important to remember.)

It could be simple information like first name, last name, and email address. Or you could go deeper and ask one or two multiple-choice questions like, ‘What factors matter to you when considering solutions like ours,’ or ‘What's your purchasing horizon?’.

This system will feel unobtrusive to attendees and gives you clean, actionable data.

This data can be exported directly into your CRM system in real time. You’re effectively ticking the lead-gen and engagement boxes in one fell swoop.

There’s usually a social sharing component to this idea, too. You might send the person a score and some kind of award, and with one click, they can share their experience on social media. This will only further grow your online presence and get more people talking about your brand.

Furthermore, every user participation, prize giveaway, and social engagement can be tracked so that your ROI is being reported in real time.

If you decide this idea is worth pursuing, we recommend opting for double-sided touchscreen kiosks. This way, you’ll maximize foot traffic and engagement within your booth.

2. Photo and video engagements

Most people love visual content, and most people love being able to create their own content.

Having photo and video engagements in your booth allows attendees to do both.

From branded photo and video contests to AI-powered photo and video booths, there are an array of gamification options you can use to break the ice.

Here’s an example of how you can use AI for a photo engagement at your next trade show:

• You have a kiosk in your booth, which contains an integrated lead capture form.
• Once the user enters their data, they can choose from a variety of photo styles. You can even turn them into a bobblehead—we’ve seen firsthand instances of companies giving attendees this option!
• The user snaps their headshot photo.
• Through a trained model, they will receive a photo that is AI-generated and contains the company branding.

This form of gamification is a huge hit because, as we said above, people love photos—but they also love reimagining themselves in almost any type of scenario, which AI allows them to do.

If you can give them a photo experience that they can't create on their own, it becomes incredibly impactful.

And, again, by integrating this form of gamification, you’re doing much more than just encouraging greater levels of interaction in your booth. You’re also giving attendees a socially shareable piece of content that’s tied to your brand.

3. Prize walls

A simple, high-impact gamification concept at trade shows is a hybrid digital ‘prize wall’.

It never ceases to amaze us how many people are drawn to free stuff, or the chance to win something cool.

That’s why a prize wall works so well.

In simple terms, this might be a physical fabrication with a digital experience built into it—an all-in-one piece, essentially.

You could have a large LED display or feature wall, which attendees can see from across the hall.

This display could feature a grid of on-screen lockers, or cubbies, with a different prize inside each locker. (For example, an autographed item, tickets to an event, or a jacuzzi if you’re feeling generous.)

As attendees filter into your booth, they:

• Are greeted by one of your booth staff.
• Enter their information on a tablet.
• Hit a button on the tablet, which triggers an animation on the screen. (You can also have a touchscreen but let’s assume you have a tablet for this example.)

At this point, a light bounces from box to box with sound effects and rising suspense.

The animation stops on one box, revealing the prize.

As we stated at the beginning, this is a relatively simple gamification concept to introduce to your booth, but it’s very eye-catching, engaging, and effective.

There are many variations of this concept (such as spin-to-win wheels, digital scratch-offs, mystery boxes, and memory games) that deliver the same blend of spectacle, participation, and measurable outcomes.

4. Buttons and levers

Imagine you’re in a casino.

You sit down at a slot machine. You grab the lever and pull it down.

There's something about pulling that lever down that gets people excited, right?

If you want to give your booth attendees this same adrenaline rush, you can incorporate physical pieces of equipment like buttons and levers to trigger engagements and make people feel physically immersed in your game.

Here’s how this could work:

• Attendees walk up to a large screen.
• There could be a console or a little podium with a couple buttons on there.
• As attendees are clicking those buttons or pulling the levers, they’re playing a game.

This concept is known as ‘phygital’. It’s marrying a physical engagement with a digital engagement.

It enhances the attendee experience by adding a physical element to the experience of watching something on a digital screen.

5. Mobile on-device gamification

You don’t just need big touchscreens or LED displays if you want gamification in your booth.

You can also create on-device gamification concepts that are tied to your brand’s footprint.

For example, you can drive people to a mobile microsite where they can play a branded game (or series of branded games).

You’ll know as well as us that:

1. There’s tons of downtime at trade shows.
2. People like to play hypercasual games like Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, and Sudoku.

You can use both of these universal truths to your advantage by building on-device, interactive games that are fun, educational, and branded.

Here’s an example of what you could do:

• You build a mobile-optimized microsite.
• You have branded QR codes that attendees scan to join a scavenger hunt and scatter these codes around the show venue.
• The attendee is taken to the microsite, scans the code, and completes a short registration (again, lead capture is fundamental to any form of gamification in your booth).
• They’re given a series of daily ‘missions’ via the microsite, i.e., ‘Take a selfie with the event mascot’, or questions relating to your product or service. These tasks refresh each day to encourage repeat participation.
• Once they’ve completed all tasks, they go to the prize area where a brand ambassador visually verifies that all tasks are accurate and complete.
• Once this is confirmed, the attendee wins a prize and is also entered into a sweepstakes.
  

This is a totally different form of gamification from the others we’ve listed in this article.

Instead of just having these engagements take place within the confines of your booth, you're allowing people to engage with your brand outside of your footprint while they're playing this game.

Crucially, you’re then giving them a reason to come back to your footprint to finish the engagement.

With this option, you have the best of both worlds.

6. A mini-arcade

Let’s face it. Some industries are naturally more exciting to the general public than others.

If your company is in the ‘not very sexy or exciting at first glance’ camp, don’t worry—you can bring it to life via a mini-arcade.

Think of a mini-arcade as a gamified presentation, and put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers.

Would you rather learn about a company through an interactive mini-arcade game or a ten-point presentation?

Exactly.

Here’s how a mini-arcade could work in your booth:

• You create touchscreen engagements that make the user feel like they’re in an arcade and present them with different games that they can play.
• They enter their data on the touchscreen.
• They play all of the arcade games, which can be branded and tailored to your product or service.
• Their points are added up to give them a final, cumulative score.
• They appear on a live leaderboard, which is hosted on a separate display and showcases the top scores to spark competition.
• Players can replay to improve their rank; optional prizes or daily resets keep momentum high.

This idea brings out the competitive nature of human beings.

They love to compete against each other, and they want to win.

In this scenario, they want to be at the top of the leaderboard. They'll come and play over and over until they can beat their score and get as high up on the leaderboard as possible.

Having a leaderboard will also attract a constant influx of intrigued onlookers. If even a small cohort of these onlookers become potential customers or warm leads, this mini-arcade has served its purpose.

Given how ‘outside of the box’ this idea is—not just in the context of trade shows but gamification in general—it’ll help you stand out for all the right reasons.

And if you can tie it back into your product or service, i.e., using mini-arcade games to explain what it does and how it’ll help people, even better.

7. Gameshow-style experiences

Who doesn’t love a good gameshow?

You can make your attendees feel like they’re on their favorite gameshow in a number of ways, such as via multiplayer trivia.

Picture this.

You've got three contestant podiums, just like in the quiz show Jeopardy!.

You’ve got an acting MC on a microphone saying, ‘We need three contestants!’.

Every few minutes, three attendees step up to compete against each other, which draws attention from onlookers, who stop and watch.

And guess what?

The trivia questions are educating everyone on your products and services.

If, for example, you’re in the cybersecurity space, the questions could be on cybersecurity best practices, and there would be a prize at the end of the day for the highest overall score.

You can also sprinkle in the odd question about pop culture or sports to prevent your gameshow from being too one-dimensional.

But the overarching point here is that you’re driving traffic to your footprint. The people who are flocking to your booth are having fun while subconsciously learning about your brand the whole time.

This is one of the best gamification ideas for a trade show because it ticks literally every box:

• Contestants walk up to a tablet on your podium and enter their information: LEAD GEN, CHECK
• They’re learning about the brand through fun trivia questions: EDUCATIONAL, CHECK
• People are competing directly with others for a prize, which keeps them coming back: GAMIFICATION, CHECK
• The questions are specific enough to interest and attract people who are looking for that particular product or service: QUALIFIED LEADS, CHECK
• Passersby stop and interact with your brand for more than just a few seconds: BRAND AWARENESS, CHECK

A gameshow checks all of these boxes, and it does so in a fun, unobtrusive way.

8. Video-led trivia

Video-led trivia is another gameshow-style concept which you can use to good effect.

Contestants could watch a short video about your product and its key attributes, features, and benefits.

Once the video has finished playing, a related question pops up and the contestants are competing with each other to see who gets the most right answers.

This format works on two levels. It keeps the energy of a game show while delivering product education that sticks.

Players feel like they’re just answering a trivia question, but they’re actually retaining the key information that could compel them to buy from you further down the road.

Bring these ideas to your booth with The Trade Group

Have these ideas whetted your appetite?

Good.

We’ve got even better news.

We can help you integrate these concepts in your trade show booth (not all at the same time, but you get the point).

Since 1986, we’ve helped businesses like yours create storytelling assets that inspire rather than underwhelm.

‍To find out how we can do this for you, send us a note here or give us a call at 800-343-2005 to get the ball rolling.