Are you planning a product launch, roadshow or media event? Or perhaps your company is participating in a major show or conference. Apart from providing a memorable brand experience, you’ll want to maximize the marketing returns from all the hard work that you put in—in terms of brand awareness and loyalty.
Many companies are unaware of the marketing potential of event photo booths. They’re more than just entertainment; they can seriously amplify your brand message by driving conversations on social media. And that’s just one of the many marketing goals they can help you achieve.
In this article, we’ll tackle this topic in 2 parts:
- How event photo booths can help with your marketing
- How to guarantee a successful campaign
Let’s get started.
How Event Photo Booths Can Help with Your Marketing
Amplify Social Sharing
If there’s one thing people love doing on social media, it’s sharing about their own lives and experiences. That’s why event photo booths are so great at amplifying social sharing, because they tap into this desire that we all have.
Photo booths provide a nice piece of content that people love to share—whether that content is photos, GIFs or videos. If you provide a great experience, best believe that it’s going straight to Instagram.
Even better, you get to insert your brand into that content. For example, you can have your logo on the GIFs, or customise the backdrop and props with your branding. It’s natural and unobtrusive, which is so important at a time when we’re all bombarded with ads.
Combine this with a hashtag and you instantly have a rich catalog of content that can be easily searched and built upon.
Studies have shown that:
- Consumers are twice as likely to share user-generated content with family and friends.
- 92% of consumers trust peer recommendations over advertising.
At Ubersnap, an average of 40% of our guests will end up sharing and downloading their GIFs. At the Singapore Night Festival, our event photo booth generated 700 GIFs and 500 shares. That’s how you supercharge your marketing.
Don’t underestimate the importance of messaging apps too, like Whatsapp and WeChat. You might not be able to track the results, but you can bet that it’s happening and it’s effective.
Collect Emails
One of the hardest challenges for a marketer is growing an email list. You guessed it, a photo booth can help with that too.
Some photo booths have the capability to collect customer information, such as name, email and contact number. A well designed event photo booth will make the request after you’ve taken your photo (or GIF) and want to send a copy to your email or phone. That’s clever because you’re much more likely to give your customer information for a couple of reasons:
- You’re highly incentivised to type in your information because you want your photo.
- The law of reciprocity states that you’re more likely to do something for me if I’ve already done something for you. Assuming you had a great experience at the photo booth, you’re more likely to give your information in return.
Remember, it’s important to build a permission-based email list—always ask if it’s okay to contact someone in the future! Look for a photo booth that can help you with that. You don’t want your emails to be marked as spam, which will affect your ability to send out more emails in the future.
With Ubersnap, you can customise the information that you wish to collect from your guests. In addition, 90% of guests agree to be contacted in the future.
In a project with Scoot airlines, we ran an activation campaign across 6 cities in Asia. Customers provided their information to participate in a lucky draw, to win a pair of return tickets. We customised the information collection screen according to the Scoot branding, and localised the language to each specific city. This led to a highly successful campaign—we collected a total of 1041 emails from enthusiastic customers.
Grow Your Facebook Page
As marketers, we know the importance of Facebook as a platform. Unfortunately, as more and more advertisers, companies and influencers compete for attention, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find and reach an audience.
At Ubersnap, we developed a solution to help marketers tap into the power of events to grow their Facebook audience—and believe me, events are incredibly powerful marketing opportunities. By linking up our event photo booth to your Facebook page, all of the GIFs will be auto-magically uploaded to Facebook, in real-time. We’re crossing the gap between offline events and online marketing.
When it comes to events, timing is crucial. You want your GIFs to be uploaded immediately. You want to spark conversations about your brand while your event is still happening. Uploading your GIFs manually—hours or days later—doesn’t cut it. By then, the event is over, interest has dwindled and the window of opportunity is closed.
This feature is super effective when you use it in combination with a giveaway. When we worked with Lorenzo (a furniture retailer), we helped to grow their Facebook page by 10,000%.
More on that later.
How to Guarantee a Successful Campaign
Provide a Novel Experience
If you want people to talk—to remark—about the experience they just had, then it has to be remarkable. That’s not to say that ordinary event photo booths—where you take a still photo and get a 4R print—aren’t effective. They still are. But you might want to look beyond the standard fare, and cater something more exotic.
There’s a diverse range of photo booths you can hire these days. If you need a primer, check out our article on how to hire the right photo booth for your event.
At Ubersnap, we introduced the world’s first GIF photo booth with holographic prints. Most of our guests would have never seen a print like ours, so you can imagine the excitement it generates. I can guarantee that they’ll be keeping their prints and sharing them with their family and friends—along with your branding—for a long time.
Organise a Contest or Giveaway
When we worked with Lorenzo (a furniture retailer), we helped to grow their Facebook page by 10,000%. Yes, you read that right.
Here’s how we did it.
First, we linked our event photo booth to their Facebook page, so that all of the GIFs were automatically uploaded there. We then held a contest—the GIF with the most number of likes would win a sofa.
Incidentally, we were using that sofa as a prop in our setup. Guests would sit on the sofa while they took their GIFs. It became much more visceral when we asked them if they would like to take the sofa home, for free. Just share the GIF that had already been uploaded to Facebook!
Soon enough, the likes and shares started rolling in. The GIF that ended up winning had over a hundred likes, and thousands of people were introduced to the brand. Many of them ended up following the page, helping Lorenzo gain thousands of new fans.
Here’s a bonus tip—give away something that is relevant to your brand. Lorenzo was a furniture brand, so they gave away a sofa. When we worked with Browhaus (an eyebrow grooming service), they gave away their eyeliner in exchange for customer information. I’ve seen too many companies give away an iPad or iPhone for no reason. You want to build loyalty to your brand, not Apple.
Attract Attention
Here’s something that sounds obvious, but still needs to be said: location, location, location. The success of your event photo booth depends on your ability to draw people to it. Place it in the right location where there’s a natural flow of foot traffic—say, near the entrance or any place where there’s a bottleneck of people—and you win half the battle.
Humans are extremely visual and even the slightest movement can attract our attention. We’re highly attracted to faces too; that’s why the most effective ads use faces of other people to pull us in.
Let’s use that to our advantage.
That’s where a live gallery comes in. Many photo booths provide this service, where you show the photos or GIFs on a large screen, like a projector. Imagine a constantly updating stream of images (of happy faces). I’ve seen first-hand how people are pulled in like moths to a flame. It’s irresistible.
Throw in some customised props and an attractive backdrop, and you’ll see a steady influx of guests. Now, it’s up to you to decide what you want to do—get social media shares, collect their emails or grow your Facebook page. The world’s your oyster.
In Conclusion
Photo booths bridge the gap between offline events and online marketing. You can improve event engagement by providing a novel experience and organising a contest or giveaway. Don’t let that effort go to waste; translate your success at your event into serious growth online.
Looking to achieve marketing ROI for your event? We’ve been there, done it. Let’s talk.
