This $0 booth trick beats million-dollar displays 🎪
Why making things harder = 10x more leads
The biggest lie in event marketing is that people visit booths to learn about products.
Truth is, people come for the gifts. 🎁
Most marketers know this. But they make a fatal mistake: They try to make gift collection quick and easy. “Spin the wheel! Win a prize! Next please!”
That’s a mistake.
🔑 The secret sauce
Your #1 goal isn’t getting people in and out fast - it’s actually making them stick around the booth.
It’s super easy to understand why:
When people see others hanging out at your booth → they get curious → FOMO kicks in → they want to know what they’re missing → so they visit themselves ✅
👀 But HOW exactly can we make people stay?
Alright, here’s how we engineered the perfect conference booth.
One word: Challenges.
This is our little secret at Wiz for creating packed booths, again and again.
💡 The marketing idea: Create self-paced challenges (that take time to complete).
🕹️ 4 challenges that actually work
In my experience, there are 4 types of challenges that always make people spend maximum time at conference booths:
1) QR code hunt 📲
Last year at the RSA Conference, something weird happened at our booth:
Dozens of people were crawling around on the floor. Some were climbing on chairs. Others were peeking behind our screens. What were they doing…?
They were hunting for hidden QR codes! 🕵️♂️
And they stayed at our booth for 15+ minutes each.
Meanwhile, our neighbors were still doing the same old “spin the wheel → grab a t-shirt” routine. Their visitors were gone in 20 seconds.
👉 What to do: Hide QR codes all over your booth space. Visitors must find them all and show you 10 open tabs on their phone to win a prize.
You can get creative with hiding spots:
Behind monitor screens
Under furniture
Inside booth decoration
Between marketing materials
Employees shirts
Let’s move on to the more advanced ideas. I’ll be covering:
🧪 3 ideas that attract huge crowds (with step-by-step guides)
🎯 The exact genius challenge that made people stay 900% longer in our booth (yes, literally 9x more time)
💎 The cross-location strategy for generating buzz at events
🔥 Real psychology behind why most booths fail (and how to engineer the opposite effect)