Challenge

Zimmer Biomet, a long-time event program client of Hamilton, traditionally relies on face-to-face events to communicate with their audience and showcase their products. For their 2020 AAOS marquee event, Hamilton partnered with Zimmer Biomet to design a completely new 110’x110’ exhibit. Then just two days before the booth was set to ship to the show, AAOS was cancelled. Zimmer Biomet needed a virtual, cutting-edge solution to allow them to take their capabilities to market now and capture prospective interest—and they needed it fast. Enter Hamilton EXTEND®—Hamilton’s virtual event platform.

Approach

Hamilton launched the Zimmer Biomet virtual exhibit in just two weeks so the launch could be a quick follow after the original AAOS show dates. The result was an immersive, interactive, virtual recreation of the actual in-booth experience where visitors can navigate through the exhibit areas of interest, interact with the displays, download marketing materials, watch videos, and request information. Upon landing on the site, the visitor is taken through a virtual tour of the booth which provided a platform for the company president to speak directly to the attendee. The 2020 AAOS exhibit design serves as a foundation for the site navigation. The visitor can navigate to areas of interest based on their specialty. Pulsating “orbs” throughout the experience are queues for additional resources and information. Calls to action are integrated through the experience to both collect registrants and qualified leads via information shared in registration process.

Results

The immersive and intuitive virtual exhibit showcasing Zimmer Biomet’s top performing ecosystem of product solutions for every stage of treatment and desired patient outcome had proven impactful. Most notably were the number of visitors to the site. The virtual exhibit had 440% more unique site visitors than in-person badge scans at AAOS 2019. In addition, the leads that were captured on the site were signaled by the client as “more highly qualified” and “more relevant” than those captured at the in-person event. The virtual exhibit site enabled Zimmer Biomet to reach surgeons and HCPs who otherwise wouldn’t have been at AAOS. Session time was notable at 4:05 minutes per session—outpacing expectations and average website dwell time. For the first few weeks, Zimmer Biomet promoted a weekly medical education webcast series on the site and received approximately 500 registrants.

The site was originally intended for a single use but has evolved into a key communication channel for Zimmer Biomet to extend their brand reach beyond their face-to-face audience and will be leveraged as a complement to future live events.