Conference booth marketing

[Artashes]

I know this subject has been recently touched on, but my question has a different angle on it as I found it interesting.

As a web hosting company, if you have ever ran a booth at a conference (or seen another company do it), what message/promo/activities/techniques have worked well?

Everyone is measuring their ROI based on different objectives. Still, because I've personally come in contact with very limited hosting company booths, I am very curious to know what companies are doing to successfully engage event attendees.

 

[bigredseo]

I've been to HostingCon in the past (now defunct), which was a conference geared to hosting companies. So you had all the various software vendors and hardware and datacenters all trying to get resellers and hosting companies to use their product.

The one item that stood out well at a number of booths was the wheel spin, and then gift of merchandise (shirt, pen, mousepads, etc). The wheel has pretty much become a staple at most convention booths.

There were other "competitions" held at booths from Trivia to hardware swap speeds, and one I really liked which was a challenge to takedown a server via shell in as few keystrokes as possible, without using "rm", "mv" etc. Some interesting "hacking" type skills as a result.

When I ran a booth for a backup company, we had the TVs, the candy bowl, the CDs for installation, and the physically destroyed hardware (we burned computers, drove a nail through a harddrive, broke a laptop etc). Not an interactive booth, but effective display pieces.

These days I think if I was to run a hosting booth, I'd be focused on speed metrics displays, how easy or quick it is to install something, ping response times (live chart around the world), and things that move/change. Of course, it depends on the target audience.

I've had an SEO Booth which had a couple notebooks and large TVs where people could do a realtime search for their rankings (business lookup, competition compare, etc). You need the big screen to bring others into the booth, but the tool had to be fast (under 30 seconds), and then the upsell to get the full report, detailed report, or consultation.