Improve the profitability of your trade shows with marketing automation!
Organizing trade shows and events beforehand, as well as following up afterward, is very time-consuming for both Marketing teams and Sales teams. However, it is important to know that a large number of low-value-added tasks can be automated.
Registration is the first mandatory step in properly preparing for a trade show. It is the first sign of interest from a company in your event. It allows the contact to enter the automated system by confirming that their registration has been successfully recorded. A few hours before the event, a reminder is sent by email or SMS.
First scenario: the prospect does not come to the trade show. Schedule change or change in priorities? You need to learn more, so follow up with them by offering to register for your next event.
Second scenario: the prospect attended, yet you do not have any more information about them. This is the right time to offer a post-event satisfaction survey in order to assess how advanced they are in their project and any possible obstacles. Depending on these results, a nurturing phase begins with content corresponding to their specific areas of interest.
Third scenario: the prospect attended, quickly requested a meeting, and shows up for that meeting. This lead becomes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) and can enter the negotiation phase with your sales team until closing. Mission accomplished! In this kind of case, your salespeople only receive qualified, hot leads, which automatically improves your conversion rate.
During your trade show, you will collect declarative data (contact details) as well as behavioral data (show vs no-show, attended a given conference or not, came to the sales meeting or not). Marketing automation will allow you to immediately follow up with leads and turn up the heat to encourage the next step.
One of the keys to success is post-event responsiveness. However, your sales team comes back exhausted from a trade show with urgent matters to deal with. By immediately integrating trade show contacts into a marketing automation scenario, you gain speed while complying with the GDPR by requesting an opt-in confirmation from these new contacts.
My advice: the day after the trade show, thank the visitors and provide information about respecting personal data. You will score points compared with competitors whose salespeople will manually enter each business card!
At Webmecanik, we have observed across all our events – trade shows, webinars, conferences – a 4x increase in registrations and event attendance rising from 50% to 80% thanks to automation. In addition, if you record your presentations during your events, you will benefit from premium content that you can then make available on replay, thereby creating a new opportunity for nurturing and qualification. On replay, the audience is generally doubled over a longer period.
In conclusion, marketing automation saves time and increases the productivity of the marketing department. It can focus on inviting targeted clients, analyzing event results and optimizing them, strategy, etc. Marketing automation also frees the sales department from the early stages of the sales process so it can focus on closing the most mature and hottest deals.
In general, by implementing this type of scenario, the rate of SQLs converted into customers is tripled.
So, when will you automate the organization of your events?
This scenario is part of the first book on Marketing Automation with more than 20 highly detailed, concrete, illustrated, and quickly actionable scenarios to get started with or improve automation.
