We all know that trade shows can be expensive for all parties, especially exhibitors. Expenses include renting space, creating the booth and paying for show-related services, such as electricity, labor, furnishings and carpet. Other expenses include travel, lodging and meals, staffing, entertainment, exhibit promotion, shipping expenses and the all important customer follow-up.

Given this investment, you would think that all leads should be treated like ‘gold’ but this is far from the truth. According to The Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR) in Chicago, over 80% of all event leads never receive post-sales follow up.

RFID technologies provide tools for collecting data, mining visitor intelligence and deliver actionable data for better managing/converting leads.

If I were an exhibitor, I think I would be happy to add the use of this application into my show-related service expenses if I see improvement in my ability to convert leads into buyers.

However, trade show organizers in this region seems not really interested to implement this technology because of adding extra cost to the production of visitor badges. I can merely see 2D barcode has just been introduced to the organziers.

I don’t think HKCEC and AWE or Venetian Macau will have RFID installation in anytime soon. To have the whole exhibition venue covered by RFID censor, the cost remains very high. Unlike the one using by WalMart, we need special contactless censor and receiver that will be able to support long-range scanning.

So, basically we can say the consideration of tracking the trade show traffic lies in two issues. We need a trackable tag and the censor.

If the organizers or exhibitors want to track traffic or even for lead management purpose, there are some other alternatives with cheaper cost.

There is technology which can convert the mobile phone set into a 2D barcode scanner. In this case, it saves a lot of cost and logistic issues to turn a visitor badge into a trackable tag, etc.

There are also location-based mobile phone technology and WiFi wireless network. With carefully design and integration, trade show organizers can come up with many solutions for offline traffic analytics.

Thanks
Eddie.