Author: Santosh Ramnani

Trade shows bring together major players in the industry to talk about, and display their latest products and offerings. It is an extremely important event with respect to lead and subsequent revenue generation. This is a golden chance to impress potential customers.

But, organizing trade shows is no mean feat. It requires meticulous planning, keen attention to detail and ability to execute.

However, without a well-planned pre-show strategy in place, your chances of success are greatly diminished. A whopping 63% of trade show leads fail to convert because sales follow up is too late—we’ve talked about this in one of our short videos on tradeshow marketing technology.

Here are some ways to develop a great pre-show strategy for your next trade show:

1. Build a thorough list

Preparation for a trade show should ideally start three to four months before it is scheduled to take place. The first step should be to build a thorough list of the companies or people you want to potentially meet there. It is a good idea to start building the list as early as you can, since you might just miss out on crucial names if you are under a time constraint. The list can include your existing and prospective customers and any leads that you might have. You can also request the management’s list of attendees to get an idea of who is attending, and get a clearer picture.

2. Send out emails

Once you have built your email list, it is time to start your email marketing campaign. This is one of the most efficient and reproductive ways to reach the customer. Starting this exercise early can give you an advantage over your peers. You can evaluate the click-through rates on your emails, and gauge the number of people who are interested. Once you have a clear idea about the number of interested customers, you can change your game plan accordingly. It is also a good exercise to send an email just before the event is taking place, as a gentle reminder. It can improve your brand recall in the customer’s mind at the event.

3. Identify your core value

Getting this right is very important. Even though you may have many products, you have to decide where you want to emphasize on, during the trade show. You must decide on what kind of value you are offering to the customer at the trade show. You should start by strategically deciding on your value on offer at the event, and abide by it. It can improve focus and help, and help you prepare better.

4. Market research

Market research is a method that can pay rich dividends at a trade show. It can be used to your strategic advantage. Ideally, three to four months before a trade show, you should start a market research about the industry you cater to. You should research about the current product offerings, latest technologies, industry requirements and needs, and the current industry gaps and opportunities. With this, you can have a clear idea about the market trend of the industry, and gaps that are there to be filled. You can align your product offerings based on the exact industry needs. This way, you will be a step ahead of your competitors, by offering what the market requires. This can create a huge difference ultimately at the trade show.

5. Plan your own event

This is a strategic decision that you may decide to go ahead with. It requires thorough event planning, and if executed well, could generate brownie points for you. Plan on a special counter beside your booth serving the choicest dinner and/or cocktails, aimed at attracting the potential customers. This is a great way to break into a meaningful conversation and advertise your products. It is a costly effort, no doubt, but it has its benefits. It can build goodwill and provide ground for your sales executives to follow up very easily.

6. The booth design

Your booth will play a big role in attracting customers on the day of the trade show. It is thus important to pay attention to the details beforehand, and plan accordingly. A good pre-show strategy must make adequate allowance for an attractive booth.

A great way to start is by booking a strategic location for your booth beforehand. Even if you reserve a premium space at a price, you can make it worth the investment.

In a trade show, time is limited and booths are many. To ensure visibility and lead generation, you must make your booth enticing enough for customers to visit.

After doing a great booth design, you must plan on customer engagement. Remember, the booth design will be useful only to attract customers to your counter. Lead generation, sales pitching and revenue generation will depend on how you take it from there. Alongside an appealing booth design, calculated and well-designed customer engagement protocol is the key to success.

7. Leverage technology of mobile apps

Its high time you implemented the technologies available around you as a viable pre-show strategy. Traditionally, booths collect the physical business cards of prospective customers as they visit the booth. In the humdrum and the melee of the event, cards may be lost or misplaced. You may forget about a really interested prospective lead who really wants to buy, and focus on someone who is not interested at all. Along with cards, you may misplace your priorities as well. This can hurt your revenue stream.

However, with increased smartphone penetration, powerful business card scanners have become very popular. Business card scanning apps have essentially eliminated the need for physical storage of cards at one go. These apps pool all the information about your contacts, including contact details, onto a single platform. The platform can be accessed anytime from anywhere. This results in extremely flexibility to access customer data whenever required, especially during a sales pitch, which can lead to a much more value-based selling experience.

For example, ScanBizCards, one of the most popular business card scanning apps, can capture B2B leads in real-time with accurate business card and conference badge scanning, CRM export, email, among many other features.

Summing Up

Trade shows involve a sizeable amount of investment. Rather than walk into it unprepared, it is advisable to have a strong pre-show strategy in place. You get time to mull things over, do an effective customer segmentation, selective targeting, and prepare strong positioning statement that instantly connects with your target customers.
A little bit of necessary preparation never hurt anyone!

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.

Event exhibitions can be quite an ordeal. It is not only tedious to organize, but the execution can also result in a lot of hassle. It takes weeks of meticulous planning, not to mention the time, effort, and money. Hence, it is incredibly disheartening if the entire effort falls flat. The final aim of event exhibitions is, after all, to maximize ROI, and things must be planned ahead to ensure no stone is left unturned to that end.

Here are some tips to help you maximize your ROI from events:

1. Use Business Card Reading Apps to Capture Leads

It’s the 21st century, and technology is all-pervasive.

So, don’t you think now it’s the time to get rid of old methods of lead capture and contact building?

For instance, if you still use lead-forms and badge scanners, you might not even know what you are missing out on.

Life has become exceedingly fast-paced, and there is always too much to do. With the rampant use of smartphones and the multiple apps they provide, it is a great time to shift to business card reading apps to embolden your lead directory.

This way, you can pool all your collected business cards on a single platform, which is accessible through multiple devices and available on the cloud. Moreover, you can retrieve it anytime and anywhere, and do not need to handle physical cards anymore. This way, you can always sync up with your contacts, remain in touch and also never lose out on a single acquaintance, since everything is backed up digitally.

2. E-signatures

An excellent method to drive traction and whip up public interest is using the event promotion on company and employee e-signatures. This should primarily be used while communicating with your vendor or client organizations, for the maximum spread of the news.

Digital promotion can exponentially increase the reach of the event within a short period and can lead to many converts, helping maximize your ROI.

3. Online and offline advertisements

You can use both online as well as traditional offline platforms to advertise and market your upcoming event. You can make the event details a backdrop of your website so that your visitors notice the event banner in the background first of all. Offline banners and posters are also very effective at attracting interested people to the event so that you can significantly enhance your chances of more significant ROI.

4. Build an online community

After the event, you can set up an online community for you to converse with interested customers. This is a great way to keep in touch, even if no sales were promised or made during the exhibition. It is a professional platform, where you can talk with your prospective customers, and maybe try to influence them in your favor. However, some boundaries must be placed here. Trying to hard sell on an online community platform is not a very healthy practice, and may cause you to lose interested customers.

5. Create Magazine-buzz

You are unlikely to be the only one taking part in the upcoming event exhibition. Thus, it is essential to try to leverage unique methods to promote your product. In order to stand out from a pool of competitors, try to approach the organizers for more space on the cover pages of promotional event magazines, brochures and leaflets. These brochures and pamphlets will be distributed far and wide, as the organizers want to maximize the attendance. With you being in the middle of it all, you might just end up piquing someone’s curiosity. That way, you can ensure you occupy a center-stage in offline promotional materials and get noticed easily.

6. Leverage Social Media

More than half the world is present on social media, and it is time to take advantage of that. Advertise and promote here at every chance you get. You can think of novel ideas to draw attention to your event, like creating a hashtag. You can keep the organizers in the loop, and maybe start a contest with a hashtag and try to engage interested and prospective customers. This way, you and your organizers both can generate significant traffic online, which may translate into increased revenue for you.

7. Communicate Within Your Organization

One of the areas where most companies lose out is internal communication, within the organization, departments, and employees. You should make sure that the fact that you are going to be at the event is advertised, communicated, and relayed to every person in every department of your organization. Someone somewhere might have a friend or a relative who is interested, and maybe he or she can bring along more interested folks. You never know unless you try, so this is one avenue that definitely should not be missed.

8. Offer Incentives to Your Target Audience

During the event, your focus is increasing footfall at your exhibition. You need to do something to draw in the more qualified customers. The more qualified your audience is, the more easily you can target and pitch to them selectively. As a result, you can positively influence them and hope that they end up making a purchase, sooner or later.

To engage them, you can serve the choicest snacks, put on groovy music, get a play zone, or even invite someone over for a book signing session. You will have to decide and see what works for you. In this method, you are basically incentivizing prospective customers to visit your exhibition so that you have a better chance of shaping their views.

9. Buckle up, PR department!

If you want to spread a certain level of awareness about the event, you must employ a strong PR team. A PR team will be responsible for spreading necessary information about the event exhibition, and publicize it to the extent that you can reach your target customers. It is not a simple task to do and is time-consuming, so you must plan ahead and start early.

Summing it up

Event exhibitions are susceptible to a variety of mishaps that can occur. Even if one of them takes place, the entire session has to be suspended, and thus, the time leading up to event exhibitions are bided with bated breath. However, just as important is making an impact at the event exhibition. You must exude the right vibes, and for that, the right attitude, and approach is critical.

Moreover, to acquire all the productive leads that you captured during the event, make sure to create a post-event checklist as well. It will help you follow-up with your prospects and ultimately turn them into lifelong customers.

The ultimate goal of any event exhibition is profit, and a great event exhibition can always ensure it.

They key to holding a successful business and networking event lies in creating a solid event marketing strategy, building collaboration, and tapping into your professional networks and connections.

But there’s one another crucial thing is often overlooked, and that is interpersonal skills.

Interpersonal skills go a long way in facilitating productive conversation at events. But more than that, they help you build a deep connection with your prospects. This helps you to make them open up to you and to express their challenges, thus giving you an edge in negotiations and solving their critical business problems.

Here is how you can use interpersonal skills at events to create potential lead capturing opportunities for your business:

To Foster Active Listening

Active listening is one of the most valuable parts of communication.

The truth is, your clients and prospects don’t care about how great your product is; they care about how your product or services can solve their problems.

And in order to solve the business challenges affecting your clients, you have to work at honing your listening skills, which is an integral part of interpersonal skills.

Active listening is not only about listening to what your clients are saying, but it also means giving your full attention to the client, and consistently providing visual cues to let them know that they have your full attention.

Listening cues include making eye contact, nodding your head whenever required, and giving verbal affirmations.

Once you listen to your client attentively, you will be in a better position to understand their problems, which will result in offering better solutions.

Naturally, the more attentive you are, the more leads capturing opportunities you will have.

To Help You Follow-Up Over Emails/Phone Calls

You are happy with your progress at the event you participated in. The business card scanning app that you used to capture lead information is now brimming with countless valuable leads.

However, the sales process doesn’t end here.

You have to now follow-up with your captured leads to let them know that you value their interests and would like to proceed with your proposal.

Here, again, your interpersonal skills come into play.

With exceptional interpersonal skills, it becomes easier for you to have a follow-up conversation via phone or email. It also comes in handy while articulating your sales pitch, whether it is verbal or written.

Sales representatives with better interpersonal skills always have the upper hand in breaking the ice and get the conversation going.

To Help You Relate to Your Audience

With impressive interpersonal skills, you naturally acquire the practice to make everyone around you feel comfortable. As a result, your potential clients are likely to find you approachable enough to share their problems with you. They will be comfortable interacting with you and will be at ease seeking your help and advice.

It also helps you foster a unique relationship with your client, which results in encouraging a great professional relationship. On top of that, you will also find that your ability to put people at ease and relate with them makes it easier to work with them, which ultimately leads to generating more valuable leads at events and ultimately more revenue.

Wrap Up

Excellent interpersonal skills, both verbal and written, are crucial to discern the requirements your leads have and then again comes in handy while articulating what you can do to meet those requirements.

Failure to get your point across can result in you losing your lead or worse, causing a rift between you and your client.

Thus, before you attend an event or conference in a quest to generate valuable leads, it is essential to work on your interpersonal skills.

Other than interpersonal skills, it is also vital to be armed with Martech-based sales productivity apps in order to generate the maximum ROI (return on investment). The blend of excellent communication skills and advanced technology will work wonders at events and help you make the most out of them.

Do you think that excellent interpersonal skills give a sales professional an edge when it comes to generating leads at marketing events? Give us your feedback in the comment section below!

The recent years have beckoned a welcoming change in the world of marketing technology. And in this fast-paced world and increasing customer expectations, it is especially important to stay up to date with all the recent trends.

That’s why, in this article, we are going to discuss some of the most important up and coming martech trends that are impacting the events industry in 2019.

But before that, let’s get a solid grasp of what martech exactly is.

What is Martech?

Techopedia defines martech as: a portmanteau combining the terms “marketing” and “technology.” As such, martech represents the intersection of marketing and technology in today’s highly digital business world. Any type of technology that has a bearing on marketing operations can be called “martech” whether it is a part of an analysis platform, a device-facing benchmark tool, or any other type of digital or high-tech resource.

Simply put, Martech refers to the integration of marketing and technology, where technology is used to solve traditional marketing issues and increase the outreach of the companies.

So, embrace all the upcoming martech trends that are impacting the events industry without any further ado.

Here are some important martech trends you need to look out for:

1. Leveraging automated tools

The top priority of every marketer is to capture qualified leads at the events.

And if you want to achieve your set goals as smoothly as possible, then conflating automated tools with your marketing strategy is the way to go about it.

For instance, using something like a badge scanner or plain old tactics of collecting business cards are not only too troublesome but they also lead to wastage of time. On top of that, you always stand a chance to either enter incorrect data in your CRM system or miss out on important contact details altogether.

On the other hand, this can be easily alleviated with the use of modern tools such as business card reading apps, where you just have to click a picture of the business card and all the contact details get imported into your CRM right away, automatically.

Which option seems more credible and dependable? Of course, the latter one.

2. Conflating marketing with data analytics

Data analytics is tricky and not the easiest thing in the world. That said, it is something that you can’t do without anymore, especially when it comes to your events business where being privy to even the minute details is imperative.

Robust data analytics reports allow you to optimize your KPIs, measure your conversion rate, track return on investment (ROI), and track whether your event campaign is on the right track or not.

This results in formulation of clearer goals and strategies, which in turn leads to a streamlined execution of your event marketing plan.

Having a cohesive plan also makes it easier for marketers to keep track of their follow-up strategy as well

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing has been around the block for a while now and is a great way to grab eyeballs for an upcoming event.

You can also increase your outreach using paid ads and promotions and target your potential prospects directly through their social media profiles.

Another field of social media marketing that is in trend these days is influencer marketing where you connect with macro and micro influencers to promote your brand or event and accumulate a wider audience.

These influencers often have thousands or even millions of followers. They are remarkably active and the best part is that their followers are able to relate to them and hence tend to believe them more easily than any A-list Hollywood Start.

However, connecting with these influencers is not as easy as it may seem.

First, you have to find popular influencers in your niche and then decide on what incentives you can offer them in order to get them to promote your event.

Summing Up

Most of the marketers fail to meet their lead generation goals at events. And the main reason behind this is the use of outdated methods to collect leads and lack of a proper lead generation strategy.

Leverage the mentioned Martech trends to scale up your lead generation process at events and generate qualified leads. However, don’t just chase these trends and use them out of an obligation. Instead, create a proper layout how you will go about the whole process and at what point you will incorporate the latest automated tools like the business card reading apps.

While you are at it, don’t shy away from getting in touch with influencers in your niche to get them to promote your upcoming events. It will surely help you boost your attendee count like never before.

So, what martech trend do you think is most relevant to the events industry? Let us know in the comment section below!

Brand promotion is the core of any marketing strategy. And event marketing is arguably the best way to promote your products and services.

But what is the perfect even marketing strategy? Trust me, nobody knows that! Because there is no event marketing template which meets the requirement of every business. In fact, event marketing can be done in multiple depending upon your business and marketing strategy.

One of the major perks of event marketing is that it provides marketers direct access to the customers. So, how is it done? What are the critical steps which you must take? In this blog, we will discuss every relevant detail about event marketing.

1. Invest in Resources and Process

Chalking out an event marketing strategy and implementing it efficiently are two completely different things. For the latter, you need capable people, marketing tools, and the right strategy to achieve desired results. It is essential to source the right resources well in advance to meet your marketing goals.

Here is how you can choose the right resources for your event marketing process:

Manpower – People who are working at the event are supposed to meet your potential customers. And you would never want your potential clients to not come to your stall because the people present there don’t look friendly. In fact, you want your event marketing guys to be approachable, pleasing, good listeners, and always willing to help with any queries related to your products and services. Look for highly motivated people who are always to go an extra mile to make the event successful.

Process – The right process plays a crucial role in defining the success of your event. Think about the business requirement and priorities carefully while chalking out the event marketing process. Some critical things which you must plan well in advance are the logistics of the event, how will you capture the leads and follow up on them later, and the placement of your staff at the event to ensure smoother operation.

2. Know More About your Target Audience

For instance, you are planning an event for small or mid-sized SaaS-based entities in HR, but you don’t know much about them. And without knowing them better, you will not know about their needs and problems to pitch your products and services efficiently.

There is one solution to it – track conversations of people on social media who are associated with these companies to know them better. You can use social media monitoring tools like Brand24 for tracking them.

The social media monitoring tool allows you to churn out essential information like where they hang out, their age, hobbies, problems, interests, and much more. It can bring out the entire profile of a person to help you converse with them in a better way.

You can also run pre-event surveys to identify the expectations of your potential clients and what are the problems they are facing with their businesses right now. It will help you plan a more effective event marketing strategy.

You can also segment your target audience.

Focus on demographics including job title, industry, location, etc. to go after top prospects (especially for direct mail or call downs), and remember that location matters. Always consider company location, personal location, or inferred location, like IP address, to ensure that you are sending your communications to the right person.

After all, you would never want to send an invite to someone who lives and works in Boston for an event in Wisconsin, unless your data shows that they have attended events in that area before. But always take this process with a pinch of salt as you will never get 100 percent right.

3. Create an Effective Promotion Strategy

When putting so much time and energy into planning your event, you want to make sure that you do the promotion right. To ensure that more and more people register for the event, you should deploy a mix of email, social media, PR, and other forms of paid promotions to achieve the best return for your buck.

Effective communication with your target audience is compulsory before an event to spread the word and expect a better turnout. A successful event promotion includes a series of promotion activities, including emails, press releases, and call campaigns, among others. The promotional activity also depends mostly on the kind of event promotion you are looking for. For instance, webinars and online events’ promotions can be done online, but offline events require multi-dimensional efforts.

There is also one channel which you would not like to ignore – social media.

Whether it is a webinar, virtual event, or a tradeshow, having someone managing your Twitter presence will keep you engaged with attendees. Also, you can instantly reply to anyone who might have a question or comment.

For instance, Twitter is the most effective tool for marketing and promoting your events. It also helps in engaging and connecting with the audience and attendees in real time. Leverage Twitter to live tweet, engage with partners and influencers, and drive traffic to your event landing page. The first step is to make sure you set up a hashtag for your event to use on Twitter, and make sure this is well publicized. If you are doing a webinar, the hashtag should be communicated by the moderator and written on the slides as well. If you are attending a live event, make sure you tweet the hashtag beforehand and include it on promotional materials

And once the event is over, you can measure the buzz using social media tracking tools and collect the best tweets. Also make sure you post contest results, submitted photos, and thank your attendees for taking time to come to your event.

4. Event Marketing Technology Stack

In the world of digital marketing, every decision has become data-driven, and you always need actionable insights to run your business. This is why it becomes extremely crucial to have the right technology stack for any kind of successful event marketing. From your registration software and billing to mobile apps and email marketing tools, everything comes under the umbrella of event marketing technology stack.

The time is now to shun archaic marketing tools and embed the efficiency of technologically advanced tools.

For instance, a business card scanning app can be a handy tool at events where exchange of business cards with potential clients is a common norm. Business cards are the quickest means to share contact information. But how do you manage the information of hundreds of business cards?

Business card scanning apps are capable of scanning all the details on the card and import it instantly into your CRM. This means, you can store all the information about your potential customers at one place without any hassle.

Wrap Up

So, these are some of the most essential tips that will help you a great deal in scaling up your lead generation process at events.

Apart from the above points, you must also track the results of your event marketing efforts.
Here also, you can use automated software tools and dive into the goldmine of data to capture crucial metrics, including the number of tickets sold and revenue from sales, among other things.

While you are at it, also send event surveys to the participants to gauge the satisfaction level and success of your event.

How do you plan to scale up your event marketing efforts? Let us know in the comment section below!

After all the hard work, brainstorming, and funding, your company is finally going to attend a marketing event. 

And of course, the end goal is to capture qualified leads and eventually turn them into paying customers. 

Then there’s another important metric — ROI. 

Once you wrap up your event, return on investment is the only metric that matters the most. 

This means you have to work on mitigating your expenditure and maximizing revenue. 

And this can only be achieved if your sales team is adept at using a variety of sales productivity apps to meet targets and have a solid lead generation follow-up strategy in place. 

There’s one problem, however. Many sales professionals find it hard to make use of new technology to spruce up their results.

That’s why it’s important to give more opportunities to your teams to make sure that they make the most of the marketing events they attend. Moving away from ineffective lead generation methods like renting event badge scanners, manually capturing data on paper lead generation forms, etc. and empowering your sales teams with more advanced tools like business card scanning apps goes a long way in maximizing events’ ROI. 

Here’s how you can do it. 

1. Educate your sales team about the benefits of new technology

For the most part, sales representatives capture leads at marketing events and then pass them on to their marketing and sales team. 

Naturally, the use of new technology and top-notch tools like ScanBizCards, a business card reading app that automatically scans and captures more B2B leads at events, is going to help your team solidify their lead generation efforts. 

While the sales reps may get a bit skeptical by the transition from using current methods to more tech-savvy methods, if you articulate the benefits and educate them about the new technology, they will realize how the benefits far outweigh anything else. 

For one, the use of manual ways to capture leads at events leads to unwarranted delays, Helvetica Neue, and other deviations, which ultimately result in lost opportunities. 

If you could encourage your sales reps to use the new technology and teach them its importance, you’ll not only make things easier for yourself but for your sales reps as well. You just need to find a viable way to make them aware of it. 

2.Deploy sales analytics tools

When you are working hard towards meeting your lead generation goals, it is important to analyze whether you are on the right track or not. 

Therefore, it’s excessively important to encourage your sales team to keep track of all the metrics using advanced sales analytics tools like Google Analytics, etc. 

These tools give your team insight into how well your strategies are faring. You can see what is working out and what is not — and find out why. 

Sales analytics also reveal how newly captured leads are interacting with your brand. 

3. Provide regular sales training  

I know what you are thinking…

“Of course, we have trained our sales reps and taught how to go about the whole lead generation process.”

If you are thinking along the same lines, then you are certainly overlooking the main keyword here, i.e., “regular training”.

This means, training your sales team once or twice after you purchase modern technology and lead capture solutions are not nearly enough. You have to regularly provide assistance and training

to your sales team to make sure that both of you are on the same page and the results align with the goals set by the management. 

Always keep them updated with the new developments and updates, especially right before they are required to attend a new event.

4.Incentivize the lead capture process 

Offering viable incentives to your sales reps for achieving a great feat goes a long way in motivating them to do better for the next event as well as for the next step in the lead generation funnel. 

You can either encourage some healthy competition in your team by offering a bonus to the sales rep who captures the most qualified leads, or offer a collective incentive to the whole team if they meet or surpass the goals set for them. 

Both approaches can help you a great deal in encouraging your sales reps to make use of new tools and strategies to augment their results

5. Set clear goals but don’t be restrictive

Having unclear goals and an ineffective sales process can drastically impinge on your sales productivity and efficiency. 

That’s why a documented lead capture process and clear goals can assist your sales reps when it comes to generating better results. 

Clearly, point out all the pain points of your leads and how your sales reps can tackle them in the event. Teach your reps to pitch the product in such a way that they succeed in touching the nerve of the leads and offer them the solutions they have been looking for. 

However, you have to be cautious of one thing. While you create a model for the goals that are to be achieved along with the sales process, don’t be stringent and restrictive. Recognize the fact that every sale and client has a different thought process. So, make sure your sales team knows that they can step out of the box whenever necessary.

 Summing-up

Managing a sales team is not easy. 

But with great training and new tools in place, you can achieve a lot more in a decidedly lesser number of days. 

When all is said and done, your sales team is the backbone of your organization, which is why you have to rely on them to make use of all the new tools. And once they realize that using new technology and documented sales processes work in their favor as well, they would have no qualms about working the way you want them to. 

Also, don’t forget to motivate and reward the sales reps who achieve great results at events, trade shows, and organization in general. 

How are you encouraging your sales team to capture the most qualified leads at B2B events? Let us know in the comment section below! 

So your event is over. Owing to all the effort you put in, you have impressed your leads with your offers and a lucrative sales pitch.

Now what?

If you think that capturing qualified leads at an event is then you are drastically mistaken.

In fact, you have barely started.

Following your event, you need to devise a solid follow up plan, engage your leads, share your experience on social media channels, and so forth

Today we have rounded up the ultimate checklist for exhibitors to ensure better results post event.

1. Thank your leads as well as your employees.

First and foremost, thank your leads to take the time to visit your event or event booth and showing interest in your product or services. By sending out a detailed thank you message, you are letting your leads know that you are genuinely interested in their input and value them. It also shows how great your customer service is and how stealthily you can assist them in the future.

To make it even more effective, you can even offer a discount coupon along with your thank you newsletter. This will surely give them a nudge in the right direction. Plus adding a personal touch is always a great idea!

While you are thanking your leads, don’t forget your staff members and employees in the midst. Remember that it was their efforts that resulted in this great success at the event. This helps them keep motivated and provide room to further growth.

2.Segment your leads 

Once you have generated plenty of leads using various sales productive tools such as business card reading apps, lead-generation forms, and more, you are now likely to have a long list of event qualified leads.

Notice the emphasis on event qualified leads.

Yes, the leads that you generated are not qualified yet…they are still only event qualified. What you have now is a blend of hot, cold, and warm leads.

To push them further down the sales funnel, you need to start with an aggressive follow-up routine. However, depending upon their interests, requirements, and preferences, your sales and marketing team would require different methods and messages to send across.

That’s why it is important to segment the leads into different categories and follow up with each category accordingly. For instance, with warm leads, you need to share your product details and its benefits to take things forward. On the other hand, with cold leads, you still need to give them a nudge by sending out discount coupons and more.

3. Import leads into your CRM  

Before you even start with your follow-up strategy, you need to import your leads into your CRM right away. There are clever tools, for example,business card reading apps like ScanBizCards allow you to automatically import all your leads into your CRM without missing out on even a single contact’s details. 

This way, you can also keep track of the follow-up messages that you have sent to your leads. Otherwise, you risk sending out similar messages multiple times to the same prospect, which is likely to ruin your chances of getting your lead on-board with you.

4.Follow-up with your leads 

Now that you have already segmented your leads and imported them into your CRM tool, this task becomes decidedly easy.

First and foremost, follow-up with your warmest leads, the ones that you think will convert faster than other leads. Also, make sure to follow up sooner rather than later, possibly within 24-hours of your event.

Your follow-up message will decide how your relationship pans out with your prospect. Make sure to personalize each of your follow-up messages and make it relevant to your target audience to get a better return on investment.

5. Calculate your ROI (return on investment)

Engaging your leads is not nearly enough!  

To check whether all your efforts are bearing fruit or not, you need to track certain metrics including your ROI (return on investment). 

When you see that you are not receiving an intended ROI, then you can evaluate where you are going wrong. However, if you don’t check such metrics in the first place, then you might never get to know what needs to be changed.  

Wrap Up 

These were some of the important steps that you need to follow through in order to scale up your lead generation efforts post event.

Also, make sure that you stay in touch with all your leads disregarding the fact they get converted this time around or not. 

The leads that you failed to convert this time might end up turning into your permanent customer during the next event. So keep on engaging them despite their response or lack thereof. 

Are you ready to convert your leads into permanent buying customers? Do you think we missed out on something important? If yes, then let us know in the comment section below!

ScanBizCards has a lot of exciting new improvements.

We’re running a massive 66% discount on ScanBizCards Premium
Download the iOS ScanBizCards Premium app or upgrade from ScanBizCards Lite for just $0.99 — we’ve reduced the price from $2.99 for a limited period.

The Android app is also available for $0.99 (discounts are currently available for USA users only).

We have new features and updates

Conference Badge Scanning: You can now easily save contact information from conference badges of your attendees at conferences, trade shows, and events.
Learn more about our badge scanning feature and how to use it

Batch Scanning: You can now batch scan multiple business cards all at once.
Learn more about our batch-scanning and how to use it

In addition to this, ScanBizCards also has a new and improved Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to ensure higher scanning accuracy.

We have a brand new website
We posted this story in an earlier blog post. You will find everything about ScanBizCards on our updated features, pricing, and support pages.

Follow us on our social networks
Follow ScanBizCards our new social media pages to get the latest updates on our app, industry news, insights, perspectives and more. Here are our new Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook pages.

The Importance of a Solid Follow-Up Plan After a Conference

Are you successfully done with your marketing conference? If you followed all the tips and tricks required to achieve the best results at the events, you should have generated plenty of leads.

But now how do you take those leads to the next level?

Let me be honest. Converting your leads to permanent customers is rather difficult.

Prospects today are not easily convinced, which is why devising a solid follow-up plan after a conference is very important.

Don’t wait for your prospects to contact you because the chances of them contacting you are very scant.

That means, following up with a client after a conference is imperative.

Here are the other reasons why you should have a solid follow-up plan following your event or conference.

  1. Lead Nurturing

You might think that lead generation is the most important aspect of your business.

Generating qualified leads is just a starting point, your conversions are going to occur from nurturing these leads.

According to statistics, “61% of B2B marketers send all lead generation directly to sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified.”

This is why lead nurturing is important.

And lead nurturing is not possible without a solid follow-up plan.

You have generated some perspective, or market qualified leads (MQLs).   

Now, you have to follow-up with your prospects to make them feel important. It is always a great idea to shower attention on your prospects.

Start by sending out a ‘thank you’ message following the conference and further talk about your prospects’ problems and the solutions that you think will work out for them. Such follow-up emails are also great when it comes to setting up a communication tone with your prospects.

Naturally, a follow-up email will also help make sure that you and your prospects are on the same page.

  1. Collect More Relevant Data

Considering that you scanned all the business cards you received using a credible business card scanning app, you are already armed with useful data on your leads, including their contact number and email address.

But this data is not enough to take the process forward and close the final deal. The experience during the actual event is very fleeting. You have to interact with so many people at once, which is why it is not possible to collect more insightful data.

Again, to collect more data that will help you provide a solution to your leads and convert them into your customers, you need to send out follow-up emails right after the event, while your brand and services are still fresh in their mind.

  1. Discover Ways To Improve

Your event success doesn’t end here. Now you have to work on improving yourself and making sure to work on the things that still have room for improvement

Send out follow-up emails asking for feedback on your event, your brand, sales pitch, and more to discern everything from your prospects’ point of view.

Beyond regular mishaps, focus on discovering feedback regarding your core offering, your sales pitch, services and how you can improve on client experiences.

  1. Start Planning For The Next Step In Your Sales Funnel

When all is said and done, your main aim is to get a head start from your prospect and make them move further down the sales funnel.

For that, you need to further engage your lead, get them to see all the benefits they will get if they avail your services, and then take your cue from them to move forward. But before everything, you need to follow up with all the potential customers that you interacted with in the event.

I know it can be tempting to simply take a day off, however, just hold it off until you send out follow-up emails while your sales pitch is still fresh on your prospects’ minds.

Now, It’s Your Turn

Now that you know how important sending out follow-up emails are, get started with your own follow-up plan right away.

It’s important to avoid any delay in your follow-up plan because it is possible that some other brand will lure away the customer by then. Also, it is also easier to persuade people to move forward with your proposal when everything is still fresh in their memory.

So device a winning follow-up strategy to convert more leads, make your customers happy, and constantly improve the quality of your services.

Are you also planning to host a conference or a B2B event? Let us know how you plan to engage your leads by commenting below!