Trade Shows are an integral part of the events industry. Do you know why?
Tradeshows help organizers reach out to a highly targeted and focused audience base, and enable exhibitors to expand their brand presence and generate qualified leads.
Market reports bear witness to the immense business potential of trade shows. The global trade show market captured the largest revenue share of 30% in 2020 and is growing rapidly over the forecast period of 2021- 2028.
Hybrid trade shows extend the reach of traditional in-person tradeshows and help organizers target a larger audience. A larger audience base also means more chances of getting leads and finding new prospects globally.
Let’s deep dive into the benefits of hybrid trade shows and how organizers can make the most out of them.
What is a Hybrid Trade Show?
First thing first, hybrid events combine the in-person and virtual events into one unified experience. With both on-site and virtual components present, in hybrid trade shows, remote attendees can visit virtual exhibit halls, booths, meeting rooms, networking spaces etc in an immersive virtual environment.
So, the remote attendees get the exact facilities that they would get in on-site events. Not just that, exhibitors too, get to target both on-site and virtual attendees. It drives online sales on a multi-functional platform by connecting exhibitors and buyers from all over the world.
5 Benefits of Virtual Trade Shows
Here are five reasons why you should host your next trade show in a hybrid format.
1. Enhanced Brand Visibility
88% of the exhibitors participate in trade shows to increase the brand awareness.
Hybrid exhibitor booths empower sponsors and exhibitors to personalize their booths to match their brand guidelines. They can also share downloadable resources, product demos with the visitors to acquaint them with their brand.
A hybrid events platform also provides you the scope to run ads for your sponsors. Additionally, clickable banners allow you drive more traffic to your sponsors’ booths. Moreover, if you have sponsored sessions on your agenda, you can place banners in the auditorium to showcase the sponsor involvement.
Read More:8 Proven Ways to Improve Engagement in Virtual Trade Shows
2. Access to a Diversified Range of Audience
Hybrid events let you target a focused audience beyond the immediate geographical border. What’s the upside? With a larger audience base, exhibitors can find new markets to expand their business, find prospects worldwide and become truly global brands.
Another upside of a broadened audience base is if a brand’s services didn’t have much demand in its own geographical region, they might find a niche audience in some other parts of the world.
3. Lead Generation
For exhibitors, lead generation is one of the top priorities. In fact, 72% of exhibitors participate in trade shows to generate qualified leads.
With hybrid trade shows, exhibitors have an ideal platform for generating leads.
Hybrid booths with multiple touch points, such as product gallery, e-resource center, meeting scheduler, help them position their brand effectively, increase booth footfalls, showcase products and generate quality leads.
Furthermore, as an organizer, you can keep the hybrid event platform live for a longer duration than your physical event. What does this indicate? It simply means that attendees can revisit the booths, check out products and finalize deals with exhibitors even after the actual event is over..
In a nutshell, your event becomes a long-term source for lead generation for your sponsors and exhibitors.
What more can you do as an organizer?
Leveraging a comprehensive hybrid event platform will let you track the registration data and gather attendee demographics before the event.
Share the demographics with your sponsors and exhibitors. This helps them form a better understanding of the attendee demographics and communicate in a more personalized way.
Pro Tip: Allow early registrants to book meetings with exhibitors and sponsors before the event started. This helps exhibitors identify potential leads beforehand and improves the chances of lead conversion.
4. Enables Real-time Interactions
Tradeshows provide brands with the unique opportunity to engage with their audience directly. But, at the same time, during in-person tradeshows, it becomes challenging for booth representatives to engage with each lead personally.
Hybrid events platform offer the flexibility to connect and interact with potential leads later. Any on-site attendee can log in to the hybrid event platform and drop a query or request a meeting with brand representatives.
Remote attendees, too, can visit the virtual booths and chat with booth representatives, and schedule meetings directly.
5. Provides Accurate Data with Measurable Results
According to the survey from Deloitte, 49% of respondents say that data analytics is one of the biggest factors in decision making.
In today’s world data is everything! The analytics dashboard lets the exhibitors track booth performances, identify attendee hotspots, and offers valuable data such as the booth engagement rate, leads generated, demographics of the visitors, product sales and more.
Apart from this, as an organizer, you can also track individual user journeys, of how any attendee navigated through your event, time spent in each spaces and access survey data, chat transcripts etc. Furthermore, you can generate a post-event report for future use.
Read More: Importance of Data Analytics in Hybrid Events
Here’s How You Can Host a Stunning Hybrid Trade Show
Create curiosity amongst the target audience
To ensure a large number of audiences attend your hybrid trade show, create a sense of curiosity and make them interested in the event. You need to market your event effectively by implementing promotional strategies such as posting about your event on various social media platforms, sending email campaigns, etc.
Understand your attendee behavior
With real-time data analytics, you can track the audience behavior in-depth. This will help you in planning and implementing the engagement strategies that best suit your audience requirements.
Choose the right hybrid events platform
Select the robust hybrid event platform that helps in hosting the event seamlessly and best suits your business requirement. Look for a platform that can host a large number of attendees without any hitch and provide a lot of engagement and networking opportunities to your target audience.
The key features to look for while choosing a platform are:
- 3D immersive spaces
- Intuitive UI
- Customisation and branding opportunities
- DIY hybrid booths
- In-built analytics dashboard
- Multiple integration support
Conclusion
With the hybrid events industry booming, exhibitors and organizers should certainly host hybrid trade shows for their business; given the global reach, flexibility, and incredible marketing strategies offered by hybrid trade shows, it should clearly be an industry leader’s first choice.
