Author: Santosh Ramnani

Marketing technology is changing the way businesses interact with their prospects, clients, and amongst team members within the organization. Take Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, Slack—there are many productivity tools and software apps to help you do more in less time. And so it is essential to always stay updated on the latest innovations so you can apply new ways to bolster your overall productivity.

The fact about trade shows and event marketing technology 

When you’re at a trade show, there’s a lot of things happening all at once, meeting people, showing demos, managing the team and so much more. Often, your sales team can get overwhelmed and lose sight of the main goal—capturing leads!

Participating in trade shows—whether you are exhibiting or attending for networking and marketing—requires thorough planning and management. Your event marketing team is at the center of it all. So it’s important to keep your event marketing team managing your brand in the field updated, and to encourage them to adapt to the latest developments in the event marketing space.

They might be reluctant or uninterested in using new apps or gadgets, but it is crucial for you as a business to provide them with the right tools and training so you can maximize your trade show investment.

In the next sections, we will discuss a few simple things that can encourage your sales representatives to benefit from technology. The more efficient your reps are, the more bang for the buck you’ll get from your trade show investment.

Introduce a user-friendly CRM so you can capture critical data 

A sound customer relationship management tool goes a long way in helping your team stay organized. You should incorporate a user-friendly CRM system that would help your sales team to quickly get used to the process of event lead capture, and provide them with ample opportunities to generate valuable leads that can be accessible for follow-up directly from the CRM. Team up your IT team with your sales reps to train your sales team. Have the system admins provide in-depth knowledge about using the CRM system to their advantage. You will soon witness how fast your leads are being captured, contacted, and how it’s bringing valuable growth for your business.

Use a peer system for faster and better learning 

New inductees on your event sales or marketing team may feel intimidated by new tools or latest technologies. Creating a buddy system will help in creating a better learning curve among colleagues. Team members will be able to ask questions without any inhibitions. This will lead to the sharing of valuable information, spread of digital technology, and better use of resources. You can also pair an experienced rep with new staff and help them to adapt to new gadgets.

Give your event marketing team the right event lead capture tools

It is essential for your sales team to make use of the latest innovations in event lead capture technologies such as business card or event badges scanners during trade shows and events. Coupled with the right lead management and marketing automation solution, such a CRM or email automation software, a good lead capture software can help you to register your attendees, capture important contact information fast and accurately, and speed up follow-ups.

There are business card scanner apps available in the market, like the ScanBizCards business card scanner, which can help you to get higher productivity from your event marketing team. Once your sales team is comfortable with such tools, it will help them to capture leads faster and more accurately, and ultimately fuel your sales funnel.

Use videos for training  your team

No market stack is complete without video tools. Visuals are more engaging than manual transcripts. Try to include video sessions as part of your event marketing training. This would help your team to understand event marketing technology in a better way.

Get into action 

Empower your event marketing teams by giving them tools that help them to focus on the core objective of attending, which is to capture leads, and train them to use these technologies to your business’ advantage. Ultimately, it would save you valuable time and money, and help your team to create more potential clients for your business.

Every successful brand knows the importance of trade shows in their B2B marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most brand marketers still often find themselves unprepared or inadequately equipped during events and can end up losing potential business. The digital marketing space is changing and so is the way businesses interact during B2B events.

In this blog, we will discuss ten key traits that can help B2B marketing teams to create maximum impact at events.

Planning Ahead

Every sales team needs to plan well ahead of their event. If you already have a list of your registered attendees, shortlist their names and invite them to your booth before the event. This will send a positive note to your potential clients and keep them interested and excited about what you have to offer at the event. It’s also a great way to qualify the ‘most interested’ prospects from the ‘tentative’ ones.

Meeting Everybody (Relevant)

It is essential to meet everybody that you feel is qualified by positioning yourself well, and being visible on the event floor. Just sitting at your booth and being lost in the crowd won’t fetch you leads. Keep one of your marketing or sales reps standing near your booth, they’re basically going to act as your prospecting team on your booth. Be receptive to anyone visiting your booth, but focus on the people that are most relevant.

Stacking Up Your Business Cards or Leads

You should keep your business cards with you at all times. Exchange your cards to make sure you have all of your prospect’s contact info. Business cards have been around for years but this old technique of exchanging contact info still remains successful after all these years! Event technology is now bringing in new trends to augment this practice. For example there are business card scanner apps like ScanBizCards to help you to instantly save contacts from business cards on your phone’s address book or directly to a CRM just by snapping a photo. The goal is to collect all the contacts so you can follow up immediately after the event.

Styling Your Booth For Impact

When you’re at a convention, you’re one among thousands of other businesses, and every sales team is trying to sell their brand. Try to be unique and be creative with your booth as that can help you to stand apart from the crowd. Your booth should be easy to spot in the crowd, prominently branded, and brightly lit to attract crowds.

Training Your Staff

Training your staff before the event on verbal and non-verbal communication is always a great practice. Create a list of questions and define the role they would play at the event. Take your best team with you and engage in continuous interaction with your customers using your team’s experience and skills.

Pursuing Your Customers

Persuasion without being too pushy can be a highly effective strategy for trade shows. The goal of setting up booth at an event is two-fold: branding and lead generation. Ultimately, solid branding will also create new streams for lead inflow. Always look to build your brand’s impression in your prospect’s mind. Some salespeople mix persuasion with a hint of sales aggression, that’s just part of sales, but there should be a clear line to draw. Don’t try to smack your products in their face, but be impactful.

Narrating Emotional Stories

An emotional story can go a long way in positioning your brand in the minds of your prospects. Customers relate to real success stories, and exhibitors have a fair chance of demonstrating their narratives and delivering experiencial stories during events. For instance, it can be about how you built your brand from scratch, the struggles you had during that period and how that allows you to use your learnings in helping your clients overcome their challenges.

Organizing Successfully

You can’t do much wrong when you’ve organized everything well. Keep your information booklets, infographic sheets and data cards organized at your booth or desk. Have your lead generation engine set up, position your booth and assets carefully, and be welcoming with a big smile! It’s always easier to focus on the conversations when you have all your assets ready just when you need them, so you can create a sound impression on your prospective clients.

Technical Skills Matter

It’s always good to have sound technical skills during an event. Event technology is improving continuously and there are assets ranging from visualization technology such as AR and VR to state-of-the art display and sound systems to make an impact. You may have to set-up the sound systems, handle your projectors, laptops, displays, iPads, your own products and much more. Technical knowledge will always come in handy, and if your event teams know their way around tech, you’ll have everything working in order at the show.

The Art of Multitasking

As discussed above, you might not always have enough staff at your disposal to handle everything needed at an event. Training your event marketing or sales team to engage in multitasking can go a long way in best utilizing your resources.

Concluding

Every marketing team can easily practice these event marketing skills to maximize their potential event ROI. Events provide the best platform to engage with businesses personally, and so following some of these activities where interpersonal skills are imperative can make your next trade show a grand success.

We update the ScanBizCards app as often as possible to make it faster and more reliable for you.

Here are a couple of enhancements you’ll find with the latest update of our ScanBizCards Lite and Premium apps for Android, version 7.1:

– We’ve added a new OCR engine for better card scan results
– Scanning is 5X faster than the previous version

Love the app? Rate us! Your feedback keeps the ScanBizCards engine running.

Have a question? Tap ‘Help’ under settings on your ScanBizCards app or visit support.scanbizcards.com

Download or update the ScanBizCards Lite or Premium app here:

 

Staying productive is key to success in the current digital age. You need to keep track of your customers or users online, manage your interactions or meetings with clients and internal teams, and measure your progress for continuous improvement.

Luckily, there’s an app for essentially everything out there. There are a variety of business productivity apps available on the Google Play Android store and Apple iTunes iOS store to help you accomplish more. This article will help you to choose your best fit.

1. Google Analytics

You will not find many marketing guys who haven’t used this effectively. Google Analytics is popular, robust and does its job quite well. It is a web analytics app that lets you track the behavior of your website visitor. It provides valuable statistics and presents the report on the dashboard. The app lets you track the bounce rate of your website, the amount of traffic generated, social media statistics and much more.

See Google Analytics for iOS and Android

2. Slack

Slack is a virtual chat room and is built to replace email as the sole and primary mode of communication. You can easily send messages to your team directly and build a group with preferences. This app is extremely popular and is used by over 4 million business professionals daily. You will not lose information as the conversations can be easily tracked.

See Slack for iOS and Android

3. ScanBizCards

This is a superlative card scanner that uses OCR technology to record your contacts from business cards or conference badges and can export contacts directly to your CRM (Salesforce and many others). You can easily create personalized folders for each contact and it also lets you send intro emails to your contacts along with your picture. Available in both free and premium versions, this is one of the best business card scanner apps with over 2 million worldwide users – a great app for marketing and sales people who are always on the move.

See ScanBizCards for iOS and Android

4. Evernote

Evernote is quite a popular app among marketers. It is one of its kind notes taking features which is hard to find among other apps. The best thing is that it’s available on iOS, Android and Windows. This app lets you store images, contacts and eliminates the need to manually record your contacts list. You can easily upload your PDF docs, save audios and videos with Evernote.

See Evernote for iOS and Android

5. CircleBack

CircleBack is an automated address book manager which helps you to sync your contacts. That’s not all though as this app can do a lot more. It uses intelligent automated software to find new business contacts from your Google, Microsoft and exchange inboxes and removes duplicate contacts. This app also has a business card scanner feature that lets you scan your business cards and add instantly to your address book or to your CRM.

See CircleBack for iOS and Android

6. BaseCamp 3

This project management app can help you to collaborate and assign tasks to your salespeople. It can be used by teams of all sizes and is quite simple to use. You can easily add your team members with their details and help you to track your sales team. You can also create to-do lists with this app and set up reminders for upcoming meetings. The app is perfect for managing small and big teams and generates better outcomes.

See BaseCamp 3 for iOS and Android

7. Expensify

Expensify helps you to generate a one-click reports and makes it easy to review them. This is quite a handy tool for everyone because you can get auto reimbursement reports with approval and duplicate detection. You can easily review your sales expenses and view them just by tapping a button.

See Expensify for iOS and Android

These 7 apps can immensely help you to manage your daily sales tasks and reach out to your potential customers faster and more accurately. Make the most of them!

Event Marketing is at the core of any successful B2B strategy. Research has shown that the vast majority of marketers see event marketing as a key source of new leads, and as an excellent platform for promoting their brands. The B2B sales cycle often moves at a slower pace than B2C, and so aggressive and persistent customer acquisition tactics are essential to building a strong brand and client network.

If you analyze all the triumphant event marketing success stories, it all points to one direction — improvement on past performance. And so there must be some yardstick to measure your performance, which would help you to improve from the previous year. So, without further adieu, let’s discuss five of these critical KPIs that you should be measuring to skyrocket your ROI from your B2B event marketing.

Measuring Your Lead Conversions

It is important to measure your lead conversions after your event, which would help you to improve on past performance. It needs to be measured both online and offline. Review your pre-event campaigns and lead nurturing tactics post-event. It would be best if you tracked all the possible channels for lead generation like emails, PPC campaigns, social media, and attendee lists to measure your lead success. Pick the channels and strategies that lead to the highest conversions, you can then fine-tune your strategy for the next event.

Track the Number of Registrations

It is one of the best ways to measure the success of your event and plan for the future. Tracking the registration for events helps you to reorganize the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. You can use lead capture tools such as ScanBizCards business card scanner app for effective gathering, scoring and counting of the attendees and store your leads on your CRM or in the cloud for follow-up. This will help to evaluate your event’s success as you now have real data to measure it.

If it’s an invitation-based event, you can also track registration by the number of tickets or passes sold at the event. This will help you to plan better for your next event.

Net Promoter Score Surveys

This is a crucial tool for measuring the success of your event. You can organize gamified surveys to be distributed among your attendees. It can contain simple questions like how likely are you to recommend the game (representing your brand) to your colleagues. A high score indicates loyalists for your brand. Respondents with a mediocre score indicate neutral attendees who love your event but are unlikely to be willing to promote it. Attendees with a low score can disrepute your brand, if not just be indifferent. The score is achieved by subtracting the loyalists from the detractors. This scorecard helps to design effective strategies to improve your NPS score during the next event.

Media Promotion

It is an essential determinant for measuring your event’s success. If the media have positively covered your event, then it builds trust among your attendees about your brand. So, media coverage helps you to raise awareness about your event and creates better ROI in the future. Measure the performance of your media campaigns across digital and offline channels by defining your key performance indicators (KPIs) for each media steam – e.g, Social, print, journals, PR and so on.

Measure the Lift In Your Revenue After the Event

Of course, an increase in revenues ultimately measures every business’ success. So, you can set up conversion goals by assessing the leads generated during the event. If the attendees of your B2B event became your clients, then you’ve successfully added marketing’s contribution to overall revenues.

Summing It Up

It is important to measure the success of your event for more systematic planning in the future. There are tools to help you to do this successfully — whether it’s productivity tools such as marketing automation platforms and CRMs, lead capture tools such as business card scanner app or performance monitoring tools such as analytics platforms. The key is to track, measure and improve. This will enable you to make better decisions and pan out the right strategies.

Unsurprisingly, lead generation from B2B marketing events remained a top priority and a major source of revenue for businesses in 2019. With more and more martec tools out there now to help companies get higher conversions from events, B2B events will continue to gather steam in 2020.

B2B events are an ideal ground for lead generation where businesses can meet prospective clients, nurture warm leads and improve loyalty with existing clients. Events are an excellent source of data and provide ample opportunity to collect relevant information about prospects and customers.

The year 2020 will bring new marketing challenges, and also new opportunities. For businesses that are prepared to take on competition, it’s important to stay ahead of the game. 

If you’re in the B2B marketplace, it isn’t uncommon for leads to move slowly through the funnel. You need persistence, but more importantly, you need the right technology to nurture your leads. 

How do you do that? We’ll be looking at 7 key tactics to generate more leads in 2020. Read on!

1. Profile Your Prospects

If you’re going to the event as an attendee, you should ideally start prospecting well ahead of the day of the event. Once you’re at the event venue, you should know who you’re going to want to meet. You can browse through the attendees’ list if it’s available, or just follow up with the prospects you’ve already set up meetings with and find a spot to meet by setting up time on the calendar. If you’re hosting or sponsoring, make sure you’ve informed your prospects about your booth. 

Ultimately, narrow down your list to qualified prospects and focus on them. Meeting and greeting everybody will not maximize your leads; focus on the prospects that are most qualified and suitable.

2. You Don’t Need to Impress Everyone – Focus On What and Who Is Important 

As pointed out above, focus is key. Thousands of people attend events and you’re not going after everyone. It’s impossible to meet everybody. Strike conversations with the right people, ask the right questions, get the right info, and have your follow-up plan in place. Don’t sell, but build rapport. Start with general discussions and slowly start building up your pitch without being salesy. 

Of course, everyone is there to do business, but it doesn’t have to be all about selling. Remember, you are not selling your brand; you are building it.

3. Choose the Right Event

Organic channels alone won’t get you the far reaching exposure that paid forms of adverts can bring especially in a short span of time. Events are seasonal affairs and paid ads go a long way in bolstering your promotional campaigns. You can use social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, to generate paid social leads running targeted ads. The simplest way to gather leads is through the one-click forms, and this paid advertisement goes beyond organic posts. Instagram and Twitter let businesses purchase in-stream ads which, along with regular posts, point directly to a signup page.

It’s always best to spread your paid ads budget across streams that best serve the purpose. Do your research and invest accordingly.

4. Establish Relations with Key Influencers

One powerful and extremely useful brand promotion strategy is establishing connections with known faces / key influencers in the industry. Influencers can help you to spread the word and promote your business, gathering valuable leads for your business ahead of the event for you to pursue.

5. Revamp your Email List

Solidify your email marketing strategy and revamp the existing system if that’s what it takes to focus on the event marketing. You can send automated, targeted emails to your leads and offer unique promotional discounts ahead of the event to incentive your prospects. It is very important to keep your email list clean and updated to get high conversions.

6. Try Promotional Billboards

Offline marketing can augment your digital efforts in more than one way. When you’re promoting your business for an upcoming event, you can put up your company’s billboard for promotion. It is a sound technique for B2B businesses and helps you to gain attention.

7. Focus on Event-ROI

A carefully constructed event strategy will help you to secure the maximum ROI for your business. The best way to get the most from the event is to, of course, follow up with all the leads you’ve gathered right after the event.

To do that, you need to make sure you are capturing your event leads instantly and accurately. You can use the ScanBizCards business card reader app for capturing event leads. If you’re hosting the event, the app doubles as an event badge scanner and can help you capture contacts from conference badges, and even append missing contact info such as email, phone company address and LinkedIn URL wherever it’s available.

Conclusion

The tips we’ve listed here will help you to generate more qualified leads from your events. Always keep measuring your performance so you can focus on what works best. Events teach you a lot. Keep learning and improving!

It cannot be very comforting to meet new people at events if you aren’t fully prepared. If you are a sales or marketing professional or a business owner, B2B marketing events are a crucial source for generating leads and creating brand awareness. As such, the most important part of attending events is business networking and generating new leads for your business. There are possibilities in every conversion. Marketing events provide the perfect platform to meet new people, make connections, nurture leads, and grow your sales funnel. The key is to make sure you capture every single contact so you can turn opportunities into potential revenue.

You need to keep a few simple yet effective points in mind for successful networking at marketing events. Done right, these to-do things will create a positive and rewarding experience, and help you to find qualified prospects.

1. Know All the Key Details About the Event Beforehand

It is always important to acquire information about the event you’re attending. Conduct some basic research about the guests attending the event, the companies sponsoring, the sessions being held and so on. If you’re targeting a particular company account and the company you’ve been pursuing is also attending, know who is representing and try to set up a time to meet beforehand. Be prepared and be informed about the schedule so you can pick what’s most important for you. It is also essential to set your priorities and goals ahead of the event so you can focus on achieving them.

2. You Don’t Need to Impress Everyone – Focus On What and Who Is Important 

As pointed out above, focus is key. Thousands of people attend events and you’re not going after everyone. It’s impossible to meet everybody. Strike conversations with the right people, ask the right questions, get the right info, and have your follow-up plan in place. Don’t sell, but build rapport. Start with general discussions and slowly start building up your pitch without being salesy. 

Of course, everyone is there to do business, but it doesn’t have to be all about selling. Remember, you are not selling your brand; you are building it.

3. Carry Your Business Cards, Exchange and Capture 

Don’t forget to exchange business cards during the event. You’ve spent time and resources in preparing and getting to the event, you’ve done your research, you’ve met the right people – it’s important you capture their contact so you can nurture your leads. 

It’s not uncommon to collect hundreds of business cards at an event, only to lose them and miss out on potential sales opportunities. Use technology to overcome these problems. Apps can help you capture leads easily, like the ScanBizCards business card scanner that adds contacts to your phone’s address book from business cards instantly, simply by snapping a photo. It even exports contacts to a csv or CRM systems such as Salesforce and others. You can download the app on Apple App Store and Google Play Store.

4. Listen, Interact, Show Interest and Build Rapport 

Remember, everyone present at the event has something to take and something to offer. The important thing is to find synergies. Always show genuine interest in what your prospects have to offer to you to expect them to show the same level of interest in your offering. Ask relevant questions, listen carefully and be in the conversion. 

5. Don’t Forget to Follow Up

All networking will prove to be futile if you don’t follow up on your leads. You can follow up with your prospects or the specific companies you’re prospecting through email, phone, on social media platforms or perhaps at a future event that they’re also attending. Make sure to thank your guests before leaving the spot. For when you meet up the next time, consolidate your connections and greet them with short and sweet messages. Of course, if you have the right tools to be able to do these effectively, you’re going to succeed! 

Summing up

Networking events are an essential tool to develop and nurture new connections. It will promote your brand and build your funnel. Key is to blend interpersonal skills with the right technology tools. Apps like the ScanBizCards business card scanner app will help you to capture leads with its OCR powered scanner and add them on your phone’s address book or CRM. CRMs and email marketing tools will help you follow up, track and convert. There are tools for every aspect of event marketing, you just need to have your plan in place and execute with the right tools.

So when attending the next meeting or event, go with confidence and create a favorable impression!

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.