Planning a trade show is a mammoth initiative. Event planning is fraught with simultaneous management of a multitude of tasks that require attention to detail. The entire production and management process can be challenging, leaving planners overwhelmed.
Juggling multiple tasks on tight timelines can be challenging even for the most experienced team. The job involves countless variables, including registrations, booth sales, logistics, accommodation, marketing, and on-site management.
One way to make the job easier is using multiple event management solutions to manage each process - such as event registration software, marketing tools, communication tools, trade show design solutions, and event management tools. But, managing multiple suites and software can be another challenge, giving rise to further complications.
So, what is the ideal way to simplify trade show planning?
The answer is - managing every single process on a single trade show event management software – Map D by Nextech3D.ai.
Map D is a centralized platform that consolidates the entirety of event management into one convenient event planning software - saving you substantial time and effort, increasing efficiency, reducing stress and costs, and ultimately ensuring a successful trade show.
How Can Event Planning Software Simplify and Enhance Trade Show Management?
You may have reservations about adopting new trade show design technology to do tasks you have years of experience skillfully accomplishing. Your hesitation is understandable. The nagging question, “Do I really need any event management solutions?” may be playing at the back of your mind. Let’s address the benefits of a 360° trade show event management software so you can evaluate the advantages yourself.
1. Increased Booth Sales
A trade show event management software can help increase revenue by streamlining the complicated process of booth sales. Map D allows organizers to display interactive floor plans of events on their business app or website, where interested exhibitors can choose from multiple booths and buy the one they want. Once a booth is purchased, it is reserved for that exhibitor during the event and not displayed as sold to everyone else. Map D also empowers you to configure multiple payment gateways, check-out scenarios and sell additional services like booth ad-ons, exhibitor upsells, and more for a seamless checkout process.
Map D allows event planners to produce and sell out hybrid events - with exclusive online features, including virtual booths and sponsorship opportunities. Exhibitors can enhance their virtual booths with customizations, adding downloadable PDFs for customers, linking their websites, adding videos, booking appointments, and conveying important information like offers, updates, and a whole lot more. The platform allows trade show organizers to offer exhibitors a lot more value in individual booths and provides an easy, interactive checkout process.
2. Easy Management
Trade show event management software greatly simplifies the workflow by helping organize and execute tasks in smarter ways, including registration, automating emails, budgeting, site management with interactive floorplans, and communication with exhibitors and attendees. Map D improves collaboration by allowing team access to multiple users to work together on the same platform with an event dashboard for real-time updates and tracking. This saves precious time otherwise wasted in coordination and the need for multiple back-and-forths for updating everyone on tasks like booth sales, speaker scheduling, order invoicing, creating exhibitor profiles, etc. It helps create a smooth workflow for the entire team, making it easy to manage medium to large-scale events.
3. Single Platform
An event has a plethora of moving parts and variables to constantly keep track of, right from planning to execution. Unexpected changes and updates in the event plan are extremely common, and all the members of the management team must be informed about them at all times. This is where a single event management solution becomes vital. Map D is a dedicated event planning software that allows organizers to manage in-person and virtual events without hassle. Organizers can manage registrations, set up agendas and schedules, track attendance, manage exhibitors, vendors, and sponsors, and handle payments on the same platform that easily integrates within their own website or app.
4. Cost Reduction
Effective budget management is one of the greatest challenges in event planning. It is imperative to track all expenses and revenues but also essential to avoid unexpected surges in costs. However, with trade show event management software, one can effortlessly keep track of all event expenses and analyze them against the event budget. Map D offers a simple and user-friendly dashboard and reports that allow users to visualize their costs and ensure maximum ROIs from their events. These reports also help identify areas of overspending to ensure that event budgets are optimized. Map D is a cloud-based platform that virtually stores all your data, allows sponsors and exhibitors to show off their brands and promotional material with online presentations, videos, and graphics, and helps attendees purchase e-tickets, eliminating printing expenses. The integration with ARway.ai also allows planners to create digital maps with augmented reality wayfinding for attendees - further reducing costs for physical navigation kiosks and printed maps.
5. Increased Visitor Engagement
Trade show event management software helps establish direct communication between attendees, exhibitors, and organizers. This significantly helps boost attendee engagement. Tools like live Q&As, polls, and discussion rooms encourage an exchange of ideas, create feedback channels for sponsors, and encourage visitors to share their opinions, thereby increasing engagement. Map D also integrates augmented reality for wayfinding and creating brand experiences for boosting on-site engagement with attendees. More engaged visitors directly translate to an increased event buzz and lasting impressions.
6. Improved Data and Reporting
A full-service event management platform like Map D provides organizers with a convenient and flawless way to easily collect a large amount of data from a trade show and analyze and share it. This facilitates the extraction of insights about the event’s performance.
Managers can collect data regarding attendance rates, attendee demographics, and engagement levels. This data helps design future trade shows to meet the demands of attendees and enhance their overall experience. It also enables you to provide insights to exhibitors to show more value. In the absence of an online tool, collecting visitor and sponsor feedback is extremely tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. Map D helps collect feedback conveniently through online surveys and polls.
7. Higher ROI
With Map D’s 365 Partner Engagement feature, stakeholders of trade show events continue to get returns from an event even after it is over. It does so by allowing attendees to continue engaging with the exhibitors online for a whole year after the event. Furthermore, Map D gives you complete control over sponsorship and advertisements at the event. You can decide the frequency and placement of sponsor ads; for instance, you can run a particular sponsor’s ad at a specific time and show it either on the digital floor plan or on the schedule of the event. You can also empower exhibitors to create AR ads with ARway.ai or create 3D and AR ads for their products using ARitize3D. You can decide how much you want to charge your sponsors and exhibitors for different ad placements, lead capture tools, live streaming, and augmented reality experiences to increase your revenue.
8. Task Automation
Reduce your workload by taking advantage of task automation features like scheduling push notifications for event reminders and sharing email updates. Automating the online registration process for attendees and exhibitors and email confirmations will eliminate the need for manual data entry and paperwork. Automation can be a game-changer that frees up your time so you can concentrate on more important aspects of the event experience. It also eliminates the possibility of human errors in data entry.
9. Enhanced Event Experience
Map D improves the experience of trade show coordinators, exhibitors, and attendees. Offering attendees a pleasant and professional experience is essential to ensure they leave the venue with a good impression. Trade show management software allows attendees to make all payments, and access all event information like floorplan, speaker profiles, schedule, and exhibitor profiles from a single online platform. It also allows them to personalize the experience by bookmarking exhibitor booths and speakers of interest to them. It empowers organizers to customize their online profiles. Exhibitors can easily brand and polish their profiles with professional logos, images, videos, banners, and ads. Organizers can use Map D to send push notifications and address inquiries in real-time, making customers feel cared for and assisted throughout the event.
Trade show event management software not only adds value to the event experience but simplifies the production process. Event planning software that helps increase efficiency is no longer a futuristic concept but a technology seasoned planners actively embrace to produce and sell out trade show events easily.
Map D: The Only Trade Show Design and Event Planning Software You Need
Map D is an easy-to-use trade show event management software with a highly intuitive user interface. It easily integrates with your business app or website, and its interface can be customized with your branding. The platform can be used on both iTunes and Android apps. Map D’s groundbreaking technology has already been used to plan over 6000 events of all sizes - small, medium, and large trade shows worldwide.
Map D provides event planners the edge they need to outperform their competition with innovative technology that provides an exceptional, elevated experience to exhibitors, sponsors, and attendees.
Click here to learn more about Map D. Book a demo to thoroughly understand every feature and how the platform can help you in planning your next event.
