The California State Fair is a landmark event of summer in Sacramento. It's a massive affair. It's a contest for ranch animals, it's a farming demonstration, a carnival and a midway, it's a concert, a food court and a sales presentation.
One of the attractions is an air-conditioned tent with dozens of booths selling oddball products and knick-knacks. Depending on your temperament, it is either the best or the worst place in the world. Salespeople for vacuum cleaners, cleaning supplies, pots and pans, whole-house fans and shower build-ins surround you on every side.
But there was a big difference among the booths. Some had pull. Some booths had someTHING that got your attention and got you engaged. It wasn't a sale, but it was defintely the first step to a sale. I was there for about 20 minutes, so I made a list.
How to get convention attendees to visit your booth:
Provide chairs for a presentation, or a bed, pillow, massage chair, airbed, etc. to rest on. I saw massage chairs, memory foam and smart gel cushions being sold this way, but when chairs filled up, the sales booth had a comfortable audience, listening to their pitch.
Have a drawing for a iPad. For some reason the iPad has become the defacto convention giveaway. The convention attendees will be absorbed when they are filling out the form for the raffle, so you probably won't be able to sell to them, but you will have their names and phone numbers for your mailing list. At the state fair, Princess Cruises was giving away a cruise to Alaska, and they had a swarm of people tapping their details into rows of electronic tablets.
This year, the flashing gizmo was a USB-powered fan which spun and revealed a clock face on its blades as it spun. It was very eye-catching, and almost everyone who saw it stopped and tried to decode what they were looking at. These light tricks only last one time. After you've seen the USB-powered fan clock, it won't grab your attention again. Another booth had last-years light show, a scattered green laser pointed at the floor, but mostly everyone was ignoring it.
Engage customers by tossing them a Frisbee or football. This seemed to be working for a mattress saleswoman at the show. She was among the mattresses, far enough away that a good game of catch was possible. She'd just get a guy's attention and toss them the football. Instinct took over and she was immediately and intimately connected to that guy. If she threw the ball a little short, the guy might end up sprawled across one of the mattresses, experiencing it's comfortable firmness.
provide a toy or something to interact with on a short table. Seeing a Lego castle or a 4x4 Rubic's Cube on a table is a pretty good way to rope in a customer. I only saw this technique employed by toy vendors.
Paid "booth babes" are a well-known way to attract people to your presentation, but that's more of a large convention phenomenon. For small venues, attractive salesmen and women are a standard. Larger booths can have magicians, contortionists or aerialsts.
Oh man, people love to watch a taffy-pulling machine. Also, a cotton candy spinner. Candy + motion = an engaged audience.
At the California State Fair, Liberty Safes had a pretty boring product: gun safes. The eye-catching feature of their booth was a video screen with an intreguing, fun video of four guys with sledgehammers trying to bash and claw their way into one of the locked safes. It was great! Showing your product being manhandled probably isn't good for most products, but it worked well for safes.
It takes a strong will to resist the urge to spin the prize wheel. Even if the prizes are valueless, spinning the wheel is a reward onto itself, and people love to do it. The larger the wheel, the more attractive it is to a crowd. A variation is to invite attendees to shoot a Nerf gun at a target. Everyone loves shooting a Nerf gun at a target.
A few jewelry vendors and one small tool vendor enticed the crowd with rows and rows of tiny boxes of products.
The items were small and interesting, so people were naturally drawn in to take a close look. It was a little like a treasure hunt, looking at dozens of different items and trying to find the perfect little payoff.
This doesn't apply to most industries, but two seperate sauce companies had set up a banquet table of their dips. To keep the feeding frenzy under tight control, they handed out single chips to visitors, and let them dip them into whatever interested them. Both vendors were surrounded by interested visitors. I realize this is very close to just handing out food samples, but there was something special about getting to choose your own dip that made it twice as compelling.
