5 Audience Engagement Tools for Hybrid Trade Shows

The hybrid trade shows have been a crucial marketing and sales tool for businesses. These give the opportunity to showcase the business offerings, spread awareness about new concepts, and discuss the latest industry trends. Now, these trade shows are popular to organize in a hybrid environment. Yes, you have read it right. Trade shows are virtual now!

Hybrid trade shows became more popular after the hit of the pandemic. When people have realized that they could not meet in person, the trade show organizers have changed the ways of organizing trade shows. Hybrid trade shows combine the virtual component of trade shows and live face-to-face interaction. It allows the organizers to bring live attendees and online viewers together. So, hybrid trade shows happen in both virtual and physical settings at a time.

It seems interesting to follow the trend of organizing hybrid trade shows. But do you know the difficult part of these shows? It is to keep the audience engaged. Some tools can ease keeping the audience engaged. Want to get more information about it? Keep reading then!

5 Tools To Engage Audience In Hybrid Trade Shows

1. Polling

It is the best way to have responses from the audience in a hybrid trade show. You can create a poll and engage the face-to-face and virtual attendees. These polls can be either text fields that are the open-ended questions or close-ended ones that are MCQs. With this tool, the presents at hybrid trade shows can have the results in real-time.

Polling can help you to get information from the attendees. Also, to keep them engaged in the event. With polls, you can ask them how familiar they are with the trade show. Or you can ask for feedback in the break or maybe in the end.

You can use polling to provoke questions during speaker presentations to keep the audience engaged. You can also use polls to break the ice and make the attendees comfortable with the hybrid trade show.

2. Social Wall

You can aggregate content from different social media platforms and create a free social wall. It helps to keep your virtual and live audience connected and engaged in the hybrid trade show. You can display the Social Wall before, during, and even after the trade show.

Before the hybrid show begins, you can display the social wall on your registration pages to attract the audience. During the event, you can display the wall on the digital screen. After the event, you can use this wall on the brand websites.

To create your social wall, you can use platforms like Taggbox, Juicer, Hootsuite, The Wallrus, Everwall, and many more.

3. Q&A

It is tough to keep the online audience engaged compared to those who attend live face-to-face. Q&A is a great tool to keep the attendees connected, especially the online attendees.

Question and answer sessions you can do in two ways. One is the free-flow Q&A session which goes on throughout the show. Other is a planned Q&A session. You can keep it multiple times in between the event.

You can do free-flowing Q&A with chat or with audio. In the chat option of Q&A, you can allow the audience to talk with each other. The audience can unmute and answer the questions if you go with the audio option. Planned Q&A sessions, these you can keep after every speaker presents. It makes the audience pay more attention while speakers present their idea.

4. Gamification

Organizing games is a powerful tool to keep the hybrid trade show lively and attendees engaged. You need to ensure that the games you organize must be according to the audience size of the Hybrid trade show.

For the large audience of 150+ attendees (including live and virtual), you can organize games like multiple choice trivia, this vs. that, icebreakers like the world cloud game, etc. In the case of a small to the medium size audience, you can divide the attendees into small groups. You can ask them to share things in common or organize a game of fact guessing.

5. Networking

Establishing a network among those who attend the trade show live is easy. The difficulty comes with creating and maintaining the connection in virtual attendees. You have to use networking tools and pre-plan the whole thing.

You can use a networking lounge in the hybrid trade show where the virtual attendees can share the topics of their interests. You can give them options to choose from and share their interests.

You can also allow the attendees to create and maintain a network with video chat or texts. Discussion helps them to get engaged more in the trade show.

Let’s Wrap Up!

Hybrid trade shows are becoming more popular by the time. It can give your audience a memorable experience if you can keep them engaged. You have the list of tools now. You can use these to keep the attendees connected with the show.

Choose the tool you want to go with, and see the differences in your upcoming hybrid trade shows!