Event marketing is all about successful collaboration with clients and partners, and creating greater awareness about your business among your prospects. Year 2019 saw major developments in innovative event marketing campaigns that used artificial intelligence, voice search engine optimization, and more targeted email blasts in creative new ways to create more digitized and personalized B2B marketing campaigns. 2020 will be no different as more companies are looking to adopt technologies to digitize their reach and event marketing planning. We are living in times when marketing technologies are moving at a faster pace than ever before.
As we look ahead at 2020, let’s look at some of the top trends that drove innovation in the B2B event marketing space and gear up for what lies ahead in 2020 as the martech landscape continues to mature rapidly.
Marketing automation for better outreach
Traditional marketing automation has mainly focused on sending emails blasts to targeted lists. However, with marketers taking a more focused Account-based marketing approaches to prospecting, 2019 saw the growth of multichannel personalized messaging to target specific audience segments. The markets are fast-changing and now AI marketing automation is targeting social media channels to generate more qualified leads for the sales funnels. Not just sales, marketing automation was effective for customer retention programs and increasing brand value and recognition for businesses that leveraged it effectively.
Improved marketing ROI with automated lead capture
Automated lead capture tools to tap website visitors became major game changers. More and more companies are able to track their website visitors and capture leads automatically. On the offline front, tools such as business card scanner apps increasingly replaced the traditional paper form and business card scanner or event badge scanner. Event marketing teams going to trade shows and meeting with new prospects network more effectively and capture more leads thanks to business card scanner apps.
Chatbots and messaging apps
The driving force behind B2B marketing events is conversion and the power of communication. Chatbots have expanded the ability of humans to better interact with prospects and customers and helped in fueling more personalized experiences. Chatbots became widely adopted by businesses across industries as they help event teams to qualify and nurture leads—generating faster responses.
Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality has been effectively employed in 2019—and especially by certain industries such as auto, gaming, retail and consumer tech—to create greater brand awareness and provide a more enriched experience and better visualization. Compared to Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality is more cost-effective and saw much wider adoption due to accessibility, helping companies to demonstrate products and experiences in new, meaningful ways.
2020: what lies ahead?
You can run targeted ABM campaigns, thanks to marketing and sales intelligence platforms that offer you the right technographic and firmographic data. You can go paperless during your event and use a business card scanner to capture your attendees contact information. The top trends in 2019 are set to continue in 2020 and many new innovations are going to change the landscape of event marketing for the B2B industry. Digital business card scanner apps for events combined with AI-powered marketing campaigns will boost your sales and marketing campaigns.