Whether you organise trade fairs professionally and want to pair virtual trade fairs with your in-person ones, or you want to run a trade fair of your own, with your products and services finally at the centre of attention and with no competition, all you need is careful design and the answer to one question: what experience do you want to create for the exhibitors and the visitors of your next virtual trade fair?
Technology is no longer a limit, but an endless set of possibilities: to create events genuinely designed around the needs and the goals of organisers and attendees, investors and sponsors; to build experiences that stay in people’s minds and are missed between one edition and the next, or to extend over time like halls whose doors are always open; to keep everything under control thanks to real-time data you can observe and manage before, during and after every activity. And if this is true for events and congresses, it is true for trade fairs too.
Because yes, in case you were still wondering, virtual trade fairs exist, and they are no longer emergency measures to fall back on during pandemics and wars (even if, sadly, those seem to be the circumstances we are mostly called to deal with at the moment).
They are, and increasingly will be, concrete, reliable and strategic working tools that many businesses will rely on in the near future.
How can we say that?
We see it in the companies and organisations already exploring these paths with SharEvent. Driven at first by panic and by the fear of losing market share to lockdowns that made in-person trade fairs impossible, they quickly became able to build virtual trade fairs permanently into their set of sales and marketing tools: on their own, alongside in-person events, or as hybrid experiences that open the exhibition halls to the whole world without asking the world to leave home.
So yes, over the past year and a half we have had a privileged view of a whole range of sectors, from electronics to clothing, from recruiting to education, that first tentatively and then with growing confidence found out how far technology could become a strategic tool in their business.
That has allowed us, after roughly eighteen months, to trace some of the trends that let us predict what virtual trade fairs will look like, at least in autumn-winter 2022-23. And perhaps what yours will look like too. Here they are:
1. Your next virtual trade fair has experiences designed around people
Let us be clear: inside a virtual environment, limits and opening hours are no longer acceptable. We would not accept them as users, so there is no reason to impose them on the visitors of our virtual trade fair, all the more so when we want to do business with them. Especially since this absolutely does not mean we need people physically present 24 hours a day to staff the space on the other side of the screen. Technology can do it for us, while helping us give our visitors satisfying, personalised experiences at every stage of their customer journey. We can leave them the option to approach us and discover products and services how and when it suits them, through journeys and activities they manage entirely on their own. At the same time we can be ready to support them the moment they want to know us better, and even provide contact tools for personalised assistance for those who, now convinced by the offer, want to act. All it takes (and it is not little) is good design and solid technology. And if you want to see what they look like, you can try them out with us: request a live demo.
Every business tool, and a trade fair is one, has to produce results, ideally worth more than the resources it consumes. To keep that balance under control not only at the start and at the end of the fair, which already matters a great deal, but above all while it is running, you need data: accurate, up to date and available in real time, because that is what makes it a real working tool for you, for your colleagues, for exhibitors, backers and sponsors. Well, your next virtual trade fair, whether it is entirely virtual or complements a physical exhibition, cannot fail to produce data.
In fact it produces so much of it that the task becomes turning it into a tool for control, action, marketing and development. Here too, all you really need is good design, so that the important data is collected and made available to be read and analysed effectively, and technology that is solid, reliable and simple enough to make all this not just possible but quick and easy.
An example? Here it is, and we can build it together with your next project.