11 Proven Ways to Use Event Marketing for Lead Generation

Event-Marketing-for-lead-generation

Event marketing has always been an impeccable way to fuel your branding endeavors. Event marketing is much more than just a staged advertisement for your brands and can be used for lead generation as they provide you with a platform to create a long-lasting impression of your company and its products or services in the minds of the prospects, while they participate in your event in physical space or on the virtual digital platforms.

According to a study published on MarketingCharts.com, 68% of the respondents affirmed that with the help of event marketing they can generate top-of-the-funnel leads.

In an era of omnichannel marketing, it is important for marketers to remind that alongside online advertising they also need to optimize the physical and offline experiences for their customers, and arranging event marketing is an excellent way to do that. Events work, whether taken offline or virtually.

Read more on How Virtual Event Marketing Benefits B2B Businesses

Event marketing offers a unique opportunity to the prospects, as well as, the customers to interact with brands on a vibrant platform and get an idea about what the core purpose of the brand is. Event marketing also allows companies to inch closer to their business bottom-lines. As an integral part of the demand generation mix, strategic planning, and execution of online and offline events fuel the lead generation endeavors.

Fab Dolan, Head of Marketing at Google Canada, explains this intersection between digital and physical spaces of customers and its impact on their buying decisions as follows:

“The brands that are winning are the ones that understand and own the fundamental interplay between experiential and transactional. If we were to believe that retail is dead, then we should be spending all of our money doing online ads and guiding people to our website. And yet, what we’re seeing time and time again is that building anticipation and an appreciation for the magic of our products happens in the real world even though most people buy online or through call centres.”

Now that the basic idea of why event marketing is important for your overall branding and lead generation endeavors is clear, let’s some of the effective ways to use event marketing for lead generation:

1. Event Marketing provides you with an opportunity to follow up the leads

Once you have a list of target audience groups, you got to take regular follow-ups for them to sign-up for your event or even afterward when they are further down the sales funnel.

According to a study by Salesforce, only 20% of the salespeople follow their leads generated from events.

Squandering the trade show leads isn’t a wise idea. Once you have done all the hard work and amassed the valuable list of prospective customers do follow-up with them and try to keep the conversation flowing for them to be moved further down the sales funnel.

2. Event Marketing Promotes face-to-face Interaction Fueling the generation of New Leads and Sales

Event Marketing inspires trust. When there is face-to-face interaction with customers in real-time, they are more likely to show trust in your solutions, which eventually leads to conversions.

Owing to the current coronavirus crisis we can’t exactly predict what the future of offline B2B events will be. Nonetheless, several agencies are speculating that such events will be largely localized in nature.

Read more on Top 10 tips for Content Marketing During Coronavirus

In such a scenario there will be an upsurge in the number of virtual events.

According to a report by Retail Dive, 62% of the customers still want to physically see and touch their products before committing to a buying decision, even if they are planning to purchase a product or service online.

So, in that way, offline events might have a slight edge over the online virtual eventsbut considering the post-pandemic era, you never know if the fresh cultural perspectives evolved suit virtual events better.

Craig Hanna, EVP North America, Econsultancy, explains this disparity in the impact of different types of events as follows:

“Not all events are created equal. Companies must consider live events an extension of their brand and content marketing and build events that really engage. For me, that means thinking about the customer experience you REALLY want to portray. A 6×6 static stand is unlikely to meet that need!”

But does it really matter? No matter what sort of event marketing you are in, it will still help you accomplish your branding endeavors and will help increase the number of leads and thus, enrich your list of buying prospects.

The following insights from research by ATN EVENT STAFFING substantiate that event marketing actually helps you generate more leads and creates more opportunities for prospective sales:

  • 91% of the customers accede that their positive vibes towards brands are considerably enhanced after attending events and having the experiences that follow.
  • 85% of the customers affirm that they are more likely to purchase a product or service after attending a live marketing event.
  • According to 80% of businesses live events are an essential component of their company’s success.

Events might or might not give you a chance to close a sales deal then and there. However, the impact created by event marketing is long-lasting, and lead generated by events are hot leads. These leads generated by event marketing can be followed up with later. Apart from seeing the benefits of event marketing from an obvious sales perspective, the marketers should understand that event marketing can be an effective way of gaining some additional revenue through positive Word-of-Mouth-Marketing (WOMM) and also fetches a golden opportunity for building up customer loyalty.

3. Prepare a Descent Pitch

For enhancing your confidence and consequently the chances to succeed with event marketing, you should research well what to say when addressing someone. You can also think about the maximum probable reactions that you will get from the participants and accordingly prepare answers to the questions. A confident pitch is an essential pre-requisite to inspire trust in the minds of prospective customers and panicking while answering or dealing with the prospects is certainly not an option. You should work on your confidence and skills to showcase yourself as a subject-matter-expert.

4 Decide an Optimum Timing for Your Pitch

Marketers should know how to manage their time while pitching their customers. They should decide an optimum length for their pitch and time within which they want to finish pitching so that the customers don’t get bored.

If your pitch gets long and boring, it will leave the prospects unengaged and they simply wouldn’t be interested in your products.

5 Train Your Team Well

Your team matters and it should be comprised of well-trained professionals who are wise enough to demarcate that they are salespeople and not just stewards. They need to have a fair idea of how to deal with the questions of the prospects and the customers and they should be competent enough to confidently address all their queries.

6 Give the relevant Information

If the goal of your event is to promote a product or service, you should have ample information about that product or service. If the prospects and customers come up with any questions you and your staff should be confident enough and should provide them with all the essential information regarding the product or service. Also, you should be confident with the advertising material you have.

7 Try to Influence the key-decision Makers

As the popular saying goes: “Not all leads are created equal.” At the events, you can try figuring out the key decision-makers among the attendees. You can try and understand who has buying power. Once you have figured out the key decision-makers try to connect with these people and influence them for a prospective sale to expedite.

8 Try to Connect with Maximum Number of Target Audience

One of your core areas of focus should be trying to interact with as many prospective customers as possible and build a connection with them.

Convey them as much information as possible verbally and try to subsequently put the information into writing.

9 Ask for Relevant Information

Event marketing is an opportunity to establish a healthy two-way communication for lead generation. You should ask for relevant information from the customers, ones that resonate with what you’re trying to sell. Also, try and explain to your customers why you are questioning them beforehand. Asking irrelevant questions can be a big turn-off for the customers and can piss them off.

10 Your Registration Forms Need to be Precisely Articulated

The registration forms for your events should be brief and should only have relevant fields. Asking the relevant information makes moving on to the next step easier and intriguing for the customers.

11 Data Collection

The objective of your event marketing can be to inform your prospective customers, to upsell or to cross-sell. In any case, you need to collect as much information as possible about the attendees of the event.

An enriched database not only makes follow-up easier but can help you research further details about specific industries and people holding specific job roles that might specifically be interested in your products or services.

Data collection might be underrated, but it can help you do so much more. You can research on social media channels for your look-alike audience groups once you have ample knowledge of attendees participating in your event. Thus, knowing your event marketing audiences better with the help of data can help you maximize your prospecting and lead generation endeavors.

Wrapping Up

The concept of selling to the most interested people lies at the core of the philosophy of inbound selling and event marketing is the best way to capitalize on the idea. Event marketing, when done right, can help you amplify your business bottom-lines and revenue goals exponentially.

You need to understand what is your customers’ motivation behind participating in the event and need to address their queries and/ pain-points accordingly. Remember the concept of customer-centricity again comes to the picture, whether you are trying to maximize your lead generation endeavors or just trying to sensitize your customers.

Event marketing is a widely used method to generate leads. Assimilating the above tips can help you maximize your lead generation endeavors with the help of event marketing. Your live events are an extension of your branding and content marketing endeavors and with the help of the above tips, you can make your events highly engaging to fuel your lead generation endeavors.

Valasys Media is a well-renowned name in providing B2B customers with tailored solutions to accomplish their business bottom-lines and revenue goals. Our services including lead generation, lead nurturing, account-based marketing, list building services, contact discovery services, content syndication services, event promotion, appointment setting, business intelligence, and CRM services have been specifically designed to address the pain-points of our customers to help them solve their marketing and advertising problems.

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