Events are a great way to add more leads to your valuable email list to further scale up your sales funnel. They provide a window of opportunity to propel and spur your business growth. You can follow up religiously and convert leads into sales.
First, you need to host a great event that will persuade your prospective customers to willingly attend it, as well as permit you to contact them at a later stage.
So what can you do right to ensure that your prospective customers attend your event? And not just attend it, they should like your proposal as well. Moreover, you should be able to acquire their contact details to capture qualified leads.
Here are the 5 steps to maximize lead generation at your next event:
1. Target and attract the right set of people
This is the first step towards compelling an increase in lead generation at your event.
An excellent way to start is to perform a quick marketing exercise called STP (Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning). You should do a thorough segmentation of the market you cater to, according to your business, and segregate the customers you are trying to reach. You can segment your email list based on common firmographic, technographics, and other significant factors.
Finally, identify and develop your target customers from here.
Once this is done correctly, it becomes easier to market, and ultimately sell your product. It helps you connect with the right people based on the value you are providing.
You should try to answer questions like why should your customers attend your event and what is in it for them. If the segmentation and targeting are done successfully, lead generation becomes only a matter of time.
2. Content is the key
“Good content isn’t about good storytelling. It’s about telling a true story well,” as immortalized by the author Ann Handley, is very accurate, especially with respect to organizing events.
A great promotion to attract prospective customers is not enough.
Instead, you must provide them with content that will add value to their business, and provide actionable insights. Content must be of relevance according to the activities, roles, companies, and industries of the attendants to the event.
For this, thorough prior background research is necessary for the people who are attending. Moreover, you should be privy to their interests, so that you can deliver an unadulterated solution to their problems.
Once they see that you have the answers to their problems, they would have no qualms discussing business with you. It also helps you establish yourself as a trustworthy collaborator, which can pave the way for qualified lead generation.
3. Facilitate easy registration
You must empathize with your customers. If you would not prefer waiting for a long time to sign up for a website, the chances are high your customers won’t either. So it is essential to make the registration process very easy and very less time-consuming.
A page that takes too long to load will not have too many customers waiting around, and you will lose prospective customers as a result. The page must load quickly, and should be loadable on multiple devices like mobiles and laptops. It is a good practice not to design pages for precisely one device, as it causes customer erosion, by not catering to a specific set of them.
Another vital consideration is requiring minimal information to fill up a form. A form should be lean and need only necessary details. Asking for redundant information like the number of kids the customer has had, or what mobile device the customer uses will work against you. You’re your aim is only to get the contact details of the prospective customer. A thorough analysis of him or her is a task for a later stage. It is crucial to, therefore, ask for relevant information shortly and succinctly during the sign-up process.
4. Ditch archaic tools for the digital world
An excellent way to maximize your lead generation efforts and ensure you reap more dividends is to adopt modern technology. Simply put, get rid of the archaic methods of information collection in favor of advanced sales productivity tools.
Traditionally, businesses have always collected cards during the registration at the event. It is time to change the trend.
A great way to make the most out of your event marketing is by leveraging the power of business card scanning apps.
Business card scanning apps like ScanBizCards, for instance, provide you with a single platform where you can find all the information from every card pooled together, ready for future reference. The data is stored in cloud storage, usually in the language of your choice, which enables you to access it any time you want and from any device. With these apps, you can even scan and save multiple cards at once, cutting down on time and effort enormously.
They are especially useful in the post-event follow-up process. Instead of rummaging through hundreds of cards physically, you can directly select and open a file on your device, and can even send it to a sales rep in the field, for immediate follow-up. It helps business processes become more streamlined, straightforward, and facilitates more sales.
In this era, a business card scanning app is crucial to make that vital difference between you and your rivals and hand you that competitive advantage.
5. Be well prepared
Events are quite expensive to organize and execute, so you should ensure that there are no shortcomings. Come what may, your preparation levels should leave no stone unturned. You and your team must rigorously and thoroughly go through the nitty-gritty of every aspect of the product that you are trying to sell.
If you do a good job and organize a successful event, the chances are high that the attendants will shoot difficult questions at you to learn about the various details of product offerings.
You and your team must be able to solve every query to satisfy the customer entirely. Here is an excellent opportunity to impress. One thing leads to another, and you can talk about various benefits of your offerings while talking about a different topic.
Now, it’s your turn!
There are many other ways to maximize lead generation from an event. Preparing a great sales pitch, effectively managing your pitching time so that it reaches the attendants, understanding the various roles and capacities of your attendants, discerning the ones with the buying power and following up with prospective customers doggedly and religiously after the event are just some of the things you can do to generate more leads at your next event.