Bill Myers - January 13, 2012

If you are planning to exhibit at a trade-show, you'll want to read this tip on how to quickly attract a crowd of people willing to fill out contact forms to your booth. It's surprisingly easy once you know the secret

This past week I spent four days at one of the largest trade shows in the US.

No, not the Consumer Las Vegas show in Las Vegas. The show I attended was the Florida RV Super show, held at the Tampa Florida fairgrounds.

Each year this show is attended by more than 100,000 people who roam the 27 acres of exhibits and walk through the more than 1,000 motorhomes on display.

My purpose in attending the show was to view the booths of the small exhibitors, take photos and notes, see what products small sold well, and discover what devices exhibitors used to successfully attract a crowd.

I shot more than 300 photos of different exhibit booths and the crowds in front of them, and in doing so, one thing became readily apparent.

If you want to attract a crowd to your booth, have a roulette wheel visitors can spin to win a prize.

The booths that had roulette wheels (I saw five), had long lines of people waiting for up to ten minutes just for a chance to win what in many cases, was a nearly worthless prize.

It seems the chance to win anything was just too irresistible for a lot of people. So they stood in line to spin the wheel.

But the booth operators didn't just let anyone spin the wheel. Visitors had to first fill out a form with their contact info and then were given a free plastic token, worth one spin of the wheel.

At the roulette wheel the rule was: no token, no spin.

By using the token method, exhibitors captured contact info which they could later use in their marketing efforts.

Using a roulette wheel is actually a pretty smart way to make people happy to give you their contact info.

I saw many other things at the show, including an armadillo powered covered wagon, and I shot photos of everything.

I've posted almost two hundred of these photos in the members area of bmyers.com, and if you're working a trade show in the future, or are just interested in seeing what it looked like at this one, you're invited to come take a look at the photos!