Many of our clients at GoViral come to us to help with lead generation for their big events they’re attending. Over the last four years, we’ve worked with our long-term client, Jabra, getting them the best visibility and capturing leads pre-, during, and post events with our strategies.
In this blog, we’ll unveil how to use lead generation to get the best results for your events and give an insight into how we plan out our campaigns with Jabra.
Every year we always go bigger and better so that our clients attract the customers they’re looking for, making lead generation easier for them.
What is Event Lead Generation?
In simple terms, lead generation is the process of attracting new clients to your business that might be interested in your products or services through different methods of marketing and sales.
On the other hand, event lead generation uses business or networking events like conferences, summits, webinars, and exhibitions.
It’s a great way to interact with potential prospects, showcase your products and services, and convert a warm audience.
If people attend the event, they already have an interest in who you are and this is a great opportunity to pitch your product and brand.
If done correctly, you can collect contact information and have your sales and marketing team follow up with them post-event.
During this blog, we’ll be discussing the best way to map out an event and the key aspects you need to consider pre-, during, and post events to guarantee success.
At GoViral, we use a combination of methods to ensure our clients get seen and attract new leads that will eventually turn into customers.
Throughout we’ll be focusing on the strategies we’ve carried out with our clients, specifically Jabra as an explanation and show the process in action.
Lead Generation Before the Event
- Set objectives and goals for attending the event
- Map out a roadmap and strategy to hit your goals.
- Plan a social media campaign to build awareness and excitement
- Leverage social media, email marketing, and industry leaders to build hype
- Invest in sales kits and PPC to drive traffic and reach a wider audience
- Use social media to drive traffic to the landing page to collect leads
- Offer limited-time promotions or exclusive giveaways to increase attendance
Understanding your businesses objectives in attending an event is important because it helps to create clear goals and a strategic plan.
Our client, Jabra, attends events like GITEX Global where they attend to exhibit their products and attract new customers.
When B2B and B2C customers attend these events, it’s a great opportunity for you to network and nurture them as they’re already interested in your product and brand.
Planning out a social media campaign a minimum of six weeks out can maintain a consistent and clear pathway to success at the event. By leveraging social media, you increase your visibility, start to build hype, and attract potential customers.
At GoViral, we create a landing page specifically for the event to capture leads through an offer. Jabra’s offer is focused on booking a demo or a booth tour at the event.
Lead generation strategies are useful to capture leads that will be attending the event but also those who can’t attend but are interested in your business.
You can leverage social media to drive traffic to your landing page eventually leading to qualified leads which the sales team can then follow up with.
Limited-time offers and giveaways are a fantastic way to get potential customers involved as urgency marketing is a tactic where businesses use phrasing around scarcity, immediacy, or timeliness to compel consumers to make a purchase.
By offering a lead magnet pre-event like a brochure download or an e-book, it gives an insight into the audience you’re attracting and whether your messaging is correct.
Having an email list is great to be able to send out personalized emails to inform them about everything that you’ve planned for the event.
Setting up automated email campaigns 2 weeks, 1 week, and 24 hours before builds up excitement and keeps you top of mind.
We recommend investing in a sales kit that’ll make your business stand out amongst the crowd.
For our clients, we create a sales kit that includes email signatures, LinkedIn banners, invitation email assets, LinkedIn posts, and videos.
If every person on the sales team has their own personalized sales kit, it can generate more leads for the event and reach a much wider audience.
LinkedIn is the easiest way to reach a wider audience when done correctly so having a sales kit specifically for the event means more eyes and more brand awareness.
Before you even attend the event, people will already know you are because of your consistent branding and messaging.
To generate even more visibility leading up to the event, we launch a PPC campaign to target audiences that’ll be attending the events.
By gathering, segmenting, and organizing qualified leads, we maximize the value of our clients’ campaign efforts from beginning to end.
For you to achieve the best results, the pre-event production needs to be well thought out and requires more preparation than during and post events.
Lead Generation During the Event
- Maintain a consistent brand identity across all promotional materials and at the event
- Post updates from the event, using event-specific hashtags to build hype and encourage people to check out your booth
- Live-stream activities and interesting talks at the booth.
- Implement fun and engaging activities to attract people
Just like your brand’s presence at the event is the visual representation of your identity and values, it’s important to have consistent branding across all promotional materials from booth designs, digital assets, and promotional materials.
Creating an eye-catching booth reflecting your brand identity will make you stand out amongst others in the exhibition space.
The last thing you want is someone not remembering who you are because your branding wasn’t consistent.
Get people involved in the fun by using event-specific hashtags and encourage people to share experiences such as winning a giveaway, attending tech talks by industry thought leaders, and the fun activities at the event.
Create valuable content during the event and live-stream if you have the resources to do so. This increases visibility and reach and instills the “FOMO” effect which will build hype for the event for the following year.
This year we worked with Jabra on bringing nostalgia to their area.
We wanted to add a playful and interactive aspect that would incentivize people to come check out their booth. Introducing the vending machine.
This not only brings back childhood memories but they have the opportunity to win grand prizes like their Evolve2 65 and smaller prizes like teddy bears and sweet treats.
To play, they need to explore their booth and learn about their products, where they’ll then receive coins to play.
Implementing a fun activity is a great way to get customers to stay longer at the booth and learn more about your products and business.
Lead Generation Post-Event
- Create recap video of the highlights and post onto social media channels tagging the influential people you met
- Send out a thank you email to leads captured
- Offer additional content to nurture the relationship
The event is over so the marketing must be over? Nope, not just yet!
The leads you collected at the event and those who couldn’t attend but still wanted to learn more about your products need to be nurtured.
Having a CRM (customer relationship management) is important because you can determine the quality of the leads collected and see where they are in the funnel. Some leads may need more nurturing before they convert more than others.
You don’t want people to forget you so sending out a thank you email post-event and a recap of what happened is a great way to remind people of the fun they had at the event.
Relationship-building is important at this stage. Offer additional resources and exclusive offers to thank them for attending and visiting your booth at the event.
GoViral Conclusion
Attending events to showcase your business is exciting as you can increase your brand awareness, open up more opportunities, and position yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
Planning for an event doesn’t need to be stressful. At GoViral, we’ve worked with Jabra for the last four years and each year we continue to exceed expectations because we know what works by analyzing and measuring metrics pre-, during, and post-event.
If you need help mapping out a successful roadmap for your next event, Contact us!