Marketing guru Seth Godin in his book This is Marketing discusses how marketing has changed and encapsulates what consumers expect from suppliers in this phrase “Engagement leads to trust.”
Engagement marketing refers to building meaningful connections and relationships with customers through interactive and personalized experiences. It involves using various marketing tactics and strategies to engage customers and encourage them to actively participate in the brand’s activities, such as social media interactions, events, surveys, and other activities that help create a two-way conversation.
The goal of engagement marketing is to create a sense of loyalty and advocacy among customers, resulting in higher retention rates and increased customer lifetime value. By focusing on building relationships with customers, businesses can foster a strong sense of community and brand loyalty, which can lead to more significant revenue opportunities through repeat purchases, referrals, and positive reviews.
Trust in the tail end of our changing world is what consumers look for over and above the product or service offered. They want to know that you, as the company, will deliver on what you have promised.
What is Engagement Marketing? What Engagement Marketing Actually Means (Beyond the Buzzwords)
Think about the last time you walked through an exhibition hall. Which stands made you stop? Probably not the ones with fancy brochures and pushy salespeople. More likely, it was the booth where something interesting was happening – where you could actually do something, learn something, or experience something memorable.
Engagement marketing flips the traditional sales script. Instead of talking at potential customers, you’re creating opportunities for genuine conversations. It’s about building relationships through shared experiences, whether that’s solving a problem together, learning something new, or simply having a moment of fun.
Here’s what makes it powerful: When someone engages with your brand actively rather than passively, they remember you. Not just your company name, but how you made them feel. That emotional connection becomes the foundation for trust, and trust drives business decisions.
Simply put, engagement marketing is one where the company seeks ways to influence consumer spending beyond the wallet by winning their hearts and minds. It’s about building trust through different user interfaces and by living what the company stands for.
An example of winning hearts and minds is a team at EY, the consulting firm that worked on the Coca-Cola account based in Atlanta, USA. This close-knit and fiercely loyal team was so devoted to the brand Coco-Cola that they would not buy any products or allow the office to purchase any products from PepsiCo, including their peripheral brands Pizza Hut. They were invested and dedicated beyond the norm.
Engagement marketing can be particularly effective in exhibitions because it provides an opportunity for brands to connect with their target audience directly. By engaging with attendees in a personalized and meaningful way, brands can build strong relationships with potential customers, increase brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales.
Why Engagement Marketing is Your Exhibition’s Secret Weapon (And How to Make It Work)
Remember when attending a trade show meant collecting business cards and hoping for the best? Those days are gone. Today’s exhibition visitors arrive with research in their pockets and specific goals in mind. They don’t want to be sold to – they want meaningful connections that solve real problems. This shift has made engagement marketing not just important, but essential for exhibition success.
Different Methods of Engagement Marketing
In his book Marketing: Marketing 4.0, Philip Kotler talks about how to use engagement marketing to build brand loyalty and, in turn, trust. In our new paradigm where more people are working from home, coupled with a marked increase in smartphone usage and level of connectivity since 2017, with a forecast of over 21 million smartphones in circulation by 2025.
More importantly, are the usage rates. In Australia, consumers spend an average of 6.8 hours per day on the internet, with an average of 55% of Australians using their mobile devices to connect and engage.
With this level of interaction, how does a marketer stand out from the crowd to ensure they are building trust and engagement with persistence and by using many channels to reach and reinforce? We will discuss four channels in more depth out of the many that support a tradeshow or exhibition.
Apps
Apps can be used for fun, such as Wordle. Another type of app is used as a self-service channel, such as My BMW Remote App, which allows BMW drivers to unlock or lock their BMW or to flash the car lights and hooter to make the car visible in a busy car park. Apps can also be used to engage services such as banking etc.
Don’t think of apps as digital brochures. Think of them as tools that make the exhibition experience better for everyone involved. Smart exhibitors use apps to connect their physical booth with digital engagement opportunities.
Examples that work:
- QR codes that unlock exclusive content or special offers when scanned at your booth
- Interactive games or challenges that start at your booth but continue online
- Integration with your social media to encourage booth visitors to share their experience
The goal is creating moments worth sharing, which amplifies your exhibition presence beyond the people who physically visit your stand.
Apps provide customers with the autonomy to engage with you and your brand from their pocket. It is more cost-saving and customer-friendly than costly call centres, where most customers walk away frustrated and irritated after listening to a countdown for 30 minutes.
Social CRM
Traditional CRM tracks what you know about customers. Social CRM is different – it’s about participating in ongoing conversations where your customers actually spend their time. This means responding to comments on LinkedIn, joining industry discussions on Facebook, and using Instagram to show behind-the-scenes moments from your latest exhibition build.
The difference matters. Social CRM is customer-driven – they start the conversation. Your job is to respond authentically and helpfully. When someone posts about exhibition challenges on LinkedIn, that’s an opportunity to offer genuine advice, not a sales pitch.
This approach builds relationships over time. When exhibition season arrives, you’re not a stranger trying to start a conversation – you’re a helpful industry voice people already know and trust.
A perfect example of this is the guitar story where United Airlines broke a musician’s guitar. As a result of not being compensated nor experiencing a positive experience, he wrote a song that included the line: “I should have flown with someone else, or gone by car, ’cause United breaks guitars.” The story went viral on Youtube from the time it was posted on July 6, 2009, the same day it received 150,000 views. United Airlines tried to fix the problem by getting in touch with the musician, but it was too late. A mere 3 days later, it had over 500,000 views, and by November 2020, it had received roughly 20 million views.
Tradeshow Environment:
Amend your app to encourage customer and their community engagement. Move beyond the universal business card competition and stand out from the crowd. Think about how to encourage your customers to have conversations with you. Make it easy for your customer to find you on their chosen platform. Not everyone uses Insta as some people still prefer Pinterest, for example.
Think about how you can use your stand as the touchpoint to begin the chain of customer experience. You want to do more than likes and shares. You want to drive the conversation on social media so that you not only get the customers in front of you but also their network.
Channels to keep in mind. Think about how to use Tik Tok, YouTube, and Instagram with your app and stand integration. We all remember images that resonate. Can you use your stand to tell a story?
Current trends that work:
- Augmented Reality (AR) that lets visitors visualize your products in their own environment
- Interactive touchscreens that let people explore your offerings at their own pace
- Live social media walls that show real-time engagement from the exhibition floor
CRM Agents
If you are successful, the volume could be overwhelming. To ensure that responses are genuine and thoughtful, look at your target audience and hire agents who mimic your target audience and who you empower to respond on your behalf. They speak your customers’ language and understand the pain points, but more importantly, it’s not the company directly responding but rather someone else.
Agents must be encouraged to be autonomous with an understanding of the historical context of the interaction and what the goals are.
Gamification
At heart, we’re still children, whatever our age, and relish the opportunity to behave our shoe size. Gamification is using the principles of games in a non-game environment. Use that to your advantage when developing your engagement marketing plan. Think about the success of long-running TV shows such as Survivor and the Amazing Race. They’re successful because they feed into our playful and vicarious human nature.
Are there areas that lend themselves to gamification?
Start small and measure the response.
People don’t always behave in the way we expect them to, so some tweaking will be required as well as persistence, as we don’t always hit the nail on the head the first time around.
Gamification does tap into our emotions of fun, making it easy to move the level of engagement higher without much effort. The trick is testing gamification ideas on target markets. If you have a widespread of generations, make editions that would resonate and be age-appropriate.
Trade shows and exhibitions lend themselves so well to gamification. You can make the starting point of the game the stand and move out from there. Speak to the organiser about other areas that you can use for your game. A TV stands elsewhere in the hall, and hidden products are dotted around the hall, with clues provided along the way through vinyl floor stickers, etc.
Making Engagement Marketing Measurable
Engagement marketing only works if you can measure its impact. The smartest exhibitors track multiple metrics to understand what’s actually driving business results:
During the exhibition:
- Booth dwell time (how long people stay)
- Social media mentions and shares
- App downloads or QR code scans
- Quality of conversations (not just quantity)
Post-exhibition:
- Follow-up meeting bookings
- Social media connection requests
- Website traffic from exhibition-related content
- Actual sales conversion rates over 3-12 months
The key is connecting short-term engagement metrics to long-term business outcomes. A booth that generates lots of social media buzz but no sales conversations needs adjustment.
How effective is Engagement Marketing?
Engagement marketing provides an opportunity for a company to truly engage with your customer beyond the product or service you provide. You find out whether they are invested in your product or service and trust your brand sufficiently to engage with you and share their opinion with their community. It is up to you to provide the touchpoints for them to interact and voice their opinion and the support structure to respond to those interactions.
Looking Forward: Where Engagement Marketing is Heading
The future of exhibition engagement will be even more personalized and data-driven. We’re already seeing exhibitors use AI to customize booth experiences based on visitor behavior, and this trend will accelerate. 5G connectivity is making real-time interactions smoother, while sustainability concerns are pushing toward more reusable, modular engagement experiences.
What this means for you: Start thinking about engagement as an ongoing conversation that includes but extends beyond the exhibition floor. Your booth should be one touchpoint in a comprehensive engagement strategy that includes pre-show marketing, social media interaction, follow-up communications, and long-term relationship building.
Ready to Transform Your Exhibition Presence?
Creating truly engaging exhibition experiences requires more than good intentions – it requires strategic thinking, careful planning, and expert execution. The booth design, technology integration, and staff training all need to work together to create memorable experiences that drive real business results.
That’s where professional exhibition stand builders make the difference. At UCON Exhibitions, we understand that engagement marketing isn’t just about having the latest technology or the flashiest design. It’s about creating spaces where meaningful business conversations can happen naturally.
When you work with experienced exhibition professionals who understand both the technical aspects of booth construction and the strategic aspects of engagement marketing, you get results that go far beyond what’s possible with a standard display approach.
Your next exhibition could be the one that transforms your business relationships. The question is: will you create an experience worth remembering, or just another booth worth forgetting?
