There’s no substitute for exhibiting at a tradeshow—nothing beats face-to-face meetings with prospects in your own custom-designed booth, products & services on full display all in one place. Companies spend huge dollars, year-end and year-out, for the opportunity to court conference attendees, over a short few days, to visit their tradeshow box (otherwise known as a booth or exhibit). But, there’s more than a few days in a year. Why limit your investment in the tradeshow experience to just a few days? Think outside the box—outside the tradeshow box—and imagine a world where attendees, or non-attendees, could visit your exhibit beyond the few days of the show.

What if people who didn’t visit your booth (or didn’t go to the show at all) could feel the experience of actually being in your booth, take away your marketing materials, fill out a lead form, get your swag or even order your product right inside the booth? And for those who did visit your booth, what if you had the perfect marketing tool to finally launch an effective post-show follow-up plan? What if you could continue to use your booth to build your brand, generate new leads and cultivate prospects, all the way to next year’s show? That’s thinking WAY outside the box!

We have the solution—a virtual booth.

What is a virtual booth?

See this BoothView 360 tour of the Mannington Booth at “Surfaces 2016”

We’re talking about an immersive, interactive, virtual experience of your actual physical booth. Not an interactive floor plan or a fake virtual booth with poor graphics and avatars—a virtual booth with high resolution, interactive 360° imagery of your actual exhibit. An environment where visitors can move around your booth, interact with displays, download brochures or white papers, watch marketing videos and, yes, even order products and services, right from within your actual booth as if they were at the show.

But, we may be getting ahead of ourselves. We still need to explore the value of a virtual booth and how it would be used.

Why a virtual booth?

Here are some interesting statistics about tradeshows that every marketer should know:

• 83% of brands say that their #1 reason for event participation is increasing sales (Live Marketing)

However…

• 75% of leads are never followed-up with after an exhibition (The Marketing Donut)
• 80% of trade show exhibitors don’t follow up with their show leads (salesforce)

See the disconnect? Most companies attend shows to increase sales—no surprise. But, most companies also do not have an effective post show strategy for following up with the people that visited their booth—much less the ones that didn’t. That’s a problem worth exploring, and fixing.

There’s more …

• 77% of event marketers use social media to promote before and during their event (EventTrack Study)

What about after their event?

• Year-round efforts of combining social media and event marketing boosts click-through rate across social media platforms 236% (Marketing Sherpa)

This demonstrates there is real, untapped potential in post show marketing. One tradeshow industry expert described the time after the show as “the dark side of the moon”. Companies seem to neglect, or underestimate, the potential benefits of investing in post show marketing.

A virtual booth, done well, is a great asset for boosting post show marketing efforts and enhancing results. If companies had some “skin in the game” with post show marketing, i.e., an investment in a compelling virtual booth, would they be more likely to develop and follow through with a comprehensive, post-show marketing plan? Would they be willing to invest in a tool that could produce additional leads, brand awareness and conversions–over and above the few days of the show?

We think so. We know so. And, we have proof.

BoothView360

There’s no better proof to the value of new solution than a satisfied customer. We received some recent press coverage of our newest offering—BoothView360.

http://www.fcnews.net/2016/06/mannington-using-virtual-site-to-recreate-surfaces-space/

And, if you are ready to click right into a booth—here are a few examples:

Mannington Flooring at “Surfaces 2016”

Ford Booth as EAA 2015

Healthgrades Healthshare Symposium

But, What about the Booth Experience at the Show?

We can enhance the booth experience at the show with our Nexus Multi-Media tour platform as well. Virtually Anywhere produces high-end, facility virtual tours for use as website marketing content and interactive sales tools. This same content can enhance the booth experience at trade shows. Several of our customers use their virtual tour to show-off their facility, factory or corporate campus on a large screen in their booth.

So, we can enhance the booth experience at the show, with our Nexus Multi-Media tour platform, as well as extend to life of the booth after the show with BoothView360. We produce marketing assets to help maximize your return on investment in a show exhibit—year around.

That’s what we call… Thinking Outside the Tradeshow Box!