Creative Strategies for Your Next Trade Show or Marketing Event

Want the executive summary? Download the infographic here.

To access our Event Lead Management Kit, which includes this resource, click here

Looking for creative strategies to use at your next trade show or marketing event? Look no further! We’ve gathered lots of ideas that can help you before, during, and after an event.

Before an Event

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

Planning for an event is the most important part of your process. If you don’t get the right tools in place, you’re bound to make mistakes.

  • Do your research and see what your biggest competitors’ booths look like. Track competitors in your CRM so that you know if any competitors stopped by your booth.
  • Invest in a great display, so that prospects will want to invest in you. If your display looks pathetic, so will your company.
  • Send 1:1 emails and offline marketing pieces, such as direct mail, ahead of time offering people a chance to schedule a meeting at your booth.
  • Send a marketing email (or a series of emails) announcing your presence at the event and what you’ll be showcasing. Offer educational content in these emails to establish yourself as a thought leader at the event.
  • Send a reminder email (or text, if possible) to stop by your booth.
  • Engage with conference attendees prior to the event – ask for attendees to vote on what swag they’d like best. This is a great excuse to reach out to attendees and an easy way to get them to engage. Lists of registered attendees can usually be found by contacting the event manager.
  • Speaking of swag, reconsider your definition of swag. A few ideas are: headphones, socks, or a free t-shirt with a offer for a free beer if they are seen wearing it to networking parties after the convention.
  • Post to all of your social media accounts. Choose a different image or message for each platform to keep readers’ attentions and reduce redundancy.
  • Consider how you’re going to capture leads at the event (badge scan, business card transcription, upload registrants, manual form fill, etc.). Some event lead management solutions offer all of these!
  • Do all of these things in your marketing automation platform to track key engagement prior to the event. Find one that does it all.
  • Extra Tip: Ensure consistent lead follow up by setting up an automated process to segment, tag, distribute, and follow up with those leads. Create a nurture campaign in your marketing automation platform to distribute leads, assign tasks call tasks, follow up with educational content, and more. (LL)

During an Event

You already believe in your product or solution. Now, it’s time to show off! Make sure you’re the star of the show.

  • Keep your display clutter-free. Don’t distract visitors. Clean lines and a simple, sleek design allows your message (and the experience) to play center role.
  • Don’t list features on your banners. Keep your message simple. Answer “How will your product make their lives easier? What makes you better than your competitor? What problem does your product solve?”
  • Host a wireless charging station at your booth with a fun activity, or snack, for people waiting.
  • Place devices in front of your booth and run them as a kiosk for leads to self-service (watch videos, submit an inquiry to learn more).
  • Use an event lead capture app, such as Lead Liaison’s GoCapture!™, for all representatives to use in place of outdated badge scanners. (LL)

After an Event

Evaluate & measure ROI. This is key to growth and future success.

  • Evaluate your process. What worked? What didn’t? Did your team run into any issues? Did your technology support your properly?
  • Measure ROI of your event using Cost Per Prospect (CPP), Revenue Generated, and overall ROI metrics. Some event lead management solutions offer an Events Dashboard to compile and report these key metrics, which makes things really easy.

Hopefully you picked up some great tips today. We’ve included this infographic below for you to download and/or share with your colleagues. And, if you’re interested in our home-grown event lead management solution, request a free demo here.

Lead Liaison Press Release

Broadleaf Commerce Chooses Lead Liaison to Execute Sales & Marketing Strategy

Dallas, TX – Broadleaf Commerce provides robust commerce solutions to support enterprise retail brands. They’ve recently been named in Inc. 5000’s List of Fastest-Growing Companies in America for the second year in a row. Their brand is rising to the top, and that’s no accident. The company practices effective and efficient strategies, both internally and externally, in order to compete.

Broadleaf has experience with marketing automation solutions outside of Lead Liaison. Prior to using Lead Liaison’s solutions, they used a competitor for email campaigns, website tracking, and social media. They started looking for an alternative solution that would enable them to do their wholistic prospecting and marketing automation within a single platform. They needed a solution that better aligned their sales and marketing team, with automation tools and the ability to personalize content.

After much research and consideration, Broadleaf Commerce chose Lead Liaison to replace their current marketing automation solution. In the video testimonial released this week, Broadleaf Commerce’s Chief Operating Officer, Brad Buhl, and his team speak to the reasoning behind that decision.

“Lead Liaison helps us have a single platform to look at visitor views into the website and their interaction with us, on a more passive basis,” says Buhl. “We’ve also gone through Sales Enablement with them, so now all of our emails are synced up with Lead Liaison from our sales team. We are able to get a full picture of when a customer comes in the door, what they click on, what they are interested in, and how we personally communicate with them.”

Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement is one of two cutting-edge solutions the software provider brought to the table over the last year – the other being their innovative event lead management solution. Sales Enablement provides a suite of sales solutions designed to make salespeople’s lives easier.  It provides two-way email sync so reps never have to use Bcc addresses to get content into their CRM, a sales automation functionality called Rhythms to help reps book more meetings, and even more customization options.

From a sales velocity perspective, Lead Liaison’s solutions allow Broadleaf to see when their team starts working with a customer, how long it takes to close and what the steps are to get them closer to close. What’s more, they can zoom out even further and look at the leading indicators for how a lead originated, to getting to the point where the customer reaches out.

“When it comes to content creation and building emails,” says Cassandra Gaston, Marketing Specialist at Broadleaf Commerce, “I’m able to both use the editorial mode but also edit in HTML, which means that I can get as granular as I want to. When it comes to picking the right messaging for a campaign, you need to be able to get that granular.”

Broadleaf Commerce’s account executives also use Lead Liaison’s CRM and Sales Enablement functionality for organization and outreach purposes. Their marketing team uses Lead Liaison’s marketing automation and website visitor tracking solutions to create and distribute relevant and educational content, thus creating meaningful exchanges that build brand awareness. Their leadership team utilizes the reporting and analytics that come standard in Lead Liaison’s software.

“We have five people on our business development team,” say Nick Staargaard, Account Executive at Broadleaf Commerce. “We are competing against organizations that have thousands. By being able to use Lead Liaison in an effective manner, it allows us to compete with those bigger companies and really brings us to the forefront of that competition where we are being recognized by bigger companies now.”

The collaboration between departments gives Broadleaf a lot of insight into their prospects and the kind of information they should be leading with when they make contact.

“In order to do a lot, you have to spend a lot,” says Buhl. “But with Lead Liaison, you can do a lot without having to spend a lot. That’s not only in the price of the software, but it’s in the time that you have to consume in order to get there.”

This video testimonial, plus many more, are available here.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Infographic: Post-Event Lead Nurturing Strategy

Want the executive summary? Download the infographic here.

To access our Event Lead Management Kit, which includes this resource, click here

Marketing events can be a very costly effort. There’s the booth rental, the booth design/display, travel and expenses for your employees working the booth. Service costs like electricity, cleaning, or wifi can sneak up on you. Badge scanners are expensive (have you looked into other options?).

I think you get my drift: marketing events cost a lot of money. Return on investment (ROI) is paramount. Once your team has captured hot leads at an event, you should be prepared to follow up with those leads quickly and effectively. There’s no time to waste – don’t let your competitors beat you to the punch.

We are often asked for examples of how a business can (and should) nurture leads post-event. Below is an infographic that examines a tried-and-true post-event lead nurturing strategy. 

Technology to Support Lead Nurturing Strategy

The first step in determining your post-event lead nurturing strategy is to make sure you have the technology in place to automate it. Don’t count on these things being done manually – it’s just not realistic. Companies are busier than ever these days, usually with multiple people wearing multiple hats – stretched thin. There’s also tons of room for distraction at (and after) marketing events. The more administrative tasks you can automate, the better. Let your employees spend their time building relationships and making connections.

There are lots of options out there, but we recommend a wholistic approach. Look for technology that works together, so you don’t have to spend time exporting and importing. For example, our event lead management solution allows businesses to create and customize lead capture forms, prepare intelligent post-event workflows, quickly capture leads onsite, instantly sync with a CRM, and then place them into those previously mentioned workflows. No additional technology is needed.

Of course, we love our solutions. But, there are lots of options out there! Just make sure you have something in place to be able to effectively execute your plan.

Lead Management Strategy – Instant Tasks

Create a list of all the actions you want to take once you’ve captured the lead’s information, and separate them into groups based on the time of the outreach. Here are a few examples of what you might want to do instantly:

  • Tag the Prospect with the Event Name
  • Add the Prospect to the Event Leads list
  • Assign a grade or score to the Prospect based on your ideal buyer criteria
  • Distribute the lead (Prospect) – based on round-robin, geography, or product interest
  • Sync the Prospect Record with your CRM

Side Note – Lead Scoring vs. Lead Grading

Let’s talk more about lead score versus lead grade. You may want your reps to call a Prospect if their score is high and their grade is high. Or maybe just one or the other. To make that determiniation, you should know the differences. 

Lead scoring is a way to measure engagement, and it happens over time. Even before your event, a Prospect may have already been to your website, scanning a few of your webpages, which would increase their score. It will continue to increase as they continue to interact with your website or your content.

On the other hand, grading is a way to measure how well a Prospect matches your ideal buyer criteria. Your reps can qualify and assign a grade onsite at the event. With our event lead management solution, reps can collect lead data quickly and either grade them in the moment, or they can go back later and grade them when they have a lull in booth traffic.

Lead Management Strategy – Starting Your Nuture

Once those organizational actions have been completed (usually within seconds), what do you want to do next? Let me answer that for you…you want to follow up. Insidesales.com conducted a study that found 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. That means that the timing of your follow up matters.

If at all possible, reach out to your leads within an hour of them visiting your booth. A great example of this kind of outreach is with a text message. If you’re capturing a lead’s mobile phone number, use your marketing automation platform to send a text message saying, “Hi Jane, it’s Bob. Thanks for stopping by our booth! We’ll be in touch soon – but in the meantime, here’s my number if you have any questions…” That is sure to make your company stand out.

24 Hours Later

Send an email. Even though you already sent a text message, send an email 24 hours later. Give your Prospect time to filter through messages from other booths, but not enough time that they forget who you are. Remind them of a product feature that sets you apart from other exhibitors at the trade show.

Pivot

At this point in the game, you may want to consider customizing your lead nurturing strategy based on the previously mentioned lead score and/or grade (depending on what matter most to your business) and how the Prospect interacts with your outreach or content. Your marketing automation platform should have the capability of customizing the workflow using this kind of criteria. If the lead score is high, assign a task to a rep to make a call. If it’s low, continue to nurture via email.

Don’t disqualify leads with a lower score or grade. They may be hesitant because they are taking this decision more seriously. Offer a piece of educational content, like an infographic or a case study. Try to be their source of education in the industry, so they begin to see your company as a thought leader.

If they download the content, you may want to pivot further based on that. If they downloaded it, offer another link to an informative blog post with a powerful call-to-action (CTA). Make the decision to reach out to you easy.

If they didn’t download the content, perhaps they need the same information as the lead above, but rather they need it summarized within the email itself to reduce effort. Include your CTA within the email itself, to make it even easier.

In Summary

Continue nurturing your Prospects for several weeks until they are ready to buy, or place them into your newsletter list so that you can continue your educational content without being too pushy.

It’s all about creating a sense of authority and innovation within your industry. Those that actively attend trade shows, conferences, or other marketing events are not passive. They are engaged, and their presence at an event will make them hyper-aware of you and your competitors.

If you decide to exhibit at an event, be prepared to make it count. Here’s an infographic that you can save for when the time comes. And, good luck!  

Lead Liaison Press Release

Texas General Contractor Chooses Lead Liaison to Support and Simplify Marketing

Dallas, TX – Bartlett Cocke General Contractors has been in business since 1959. They are one of the largest, most respected and trusted general contractors in the state of Texas. So, it’s no surprise that they found themselves in need of an enterprise-ready marketing automation solution that would support their efforts.

In a video testimonial released this week, Bartlett Cocke’s marketing team explains why they chose Lead Liaison as their partner. “Lead Liaison was very proactive,” says Kirk Kistner, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development. “They helped us get set up with what would work best for us. As a general contractor, we are unique to a lot of the other users of a product such as Lead Liaison. We have a very defined audience, and Lead Liaison helped us define our outreach and messaging.”

“Unique” is what Lead Liaison does best. With a world-class support team behind the scenes, the sales and marketing solutions provider is able to zero in on a client’s process and pain points, and provide support exclusive to those needs.

Bunmi Collins is the Manager of Corporate Marketing and Branding at Bartlett Cocke. In the testimonial, she explains how Lead Liaison’s White Glove service gives her exactly what she needs. “Lead Liaison’s support team is very helpful and prompt, but I’m that kind of person that really appreciates having that one-on-one phone call walking me through the process if I have a question,” says Collins. “The Lead Liaison’s White Glove service gives me that opportunity.”

The testimonial goes on to cover several ways that they put Lead Liaison to the test. Bartlett Cocke wanted to determine if Lead Liaison’s platform would work for their company and for the construction industry. They focused the initial campaigns on a few upcoming events. They were able to thoroughly test out the platform and better understand their engagement with clients and prospects. They were pleased with the results.

“My favorite feature of Lead Liaison is the ability to create reports and to filter them down, so that I can get a better idea – very quickly – of what the end user is doing, and how they are utilizing our content.” says Sharee Bridges, Digital Marketing and Multimedia Specialist for Bartlett Cocke. “For me, in a position like mine, that’s one of the only ways to track what’s happening on the other end.”

From start to finish, Bartlett Cocke found that Lead Liaison streamlined their process and gave them the insights they were looking for. The platform is flexible enough to accommodate their unique needs, and Lead Liaison’s support team empowers them to be more effective and efficient.

To view Bartlett Cocke’s video testimonial, plus many more, click here.

About Lead Liaison
Lead Liaison provides cloud-based sales and marketing automation solutions that helps businesses accelerate revenue by attracting, converting, closing and retaining more prospects. Filling a void in the small pool of marketing automation providers that focus on marketing-centric functionality, Lead Liaison gives equal focus to sales providing sophisticated visitor tracking and additional website engagement tools to boost sales effectiveness. Lead Liaison blends ease-of-use, a flexible business model, deep external integration, marketing across social, web, mobile, email and offline channels and powerful functionality, all specifically tailored for mid-sized businesses, into a single platform, called Revenue Generation Software®. Lead Liaison is headquartered in Dallas, Texas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).