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40 Event Marketing Statistics

Want the executive summary? Download the infographic here.

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

Business is changing at the speed of light. As marketers, it seems like every time we feel like we’ve mastered a new strategy, a new one emerges. Advances in modern technology drive marketing organizations at a fast pace. But, just because more and more people are adopting new technology, it doesn’t mean that one-to-one contact is gone. In fact, most of the technology that we create is intended to give businesses the opportunity to automate administrative tasks to make room for more person-to-person contact.

Marketing events are a great way to engage in one-to-one contact. Multi-day conferences, trade shows, conventions, seminars, thought-leadership workshops…these are all great examples of event marketing. They give businesses the chance to interact with consumers who are already 10 steps closer to purchasing, just by the simple fact that they are at the event in the first place.

Perhaps you are trying to decide if your business should invest in event marketing. Maybe you have already started exhibiting at events and you just want to learn more about them. Or perhaps you are a seasoned exhibitor who’s just looking for a few good stats. Either way, you are in luck! We have rounded up 40 important statistics that help shed light on event marketing for business-to-business (B2B) companies.

Why do Companies Invest in Event Marketing?

  • 63% of marketers use tradeshows as a form of lead generation (source)
  • 79% of US marketers actually generate sales using event marketing (source)
  • 81% оf trаdе ѕhоw attendees hаvе buуіng аuthоrіtу (source)
  • 77% of marketers use experiential marketing as a vital part of a brand’s advertising strategies (source)
  • 52% of business leaders say event marketing drives more ROI than any other marketing channel (source)
  • 48% of event attendees say face-to-face interactions are more valuable today than two years ago (source)
  • It takes an average of 4.5 calls to close a sale without an exhibition lead, and only 3.5 sales calls to close a sale with a lead from an exhibition (source)
  • 73% of B2B marketers say events are better than other tactics for customer engagement (source)
  • The three most commonly used B2B lead generation strategies are email marketing (78%), event marketing (73%), and content marketing (67%) (source)

Strategies

Businesses around the world are investing in marketing events. Here’s how those strategies are affecting budgets and goals.

  • Annually, companies spend about $24 billion on exhibiting at events (source)
  • The top three event marketing goals are to increase sales (83%), increase brand awareness (73%), and to enhance product knowledge (53%) (source)
  • Events occupy 14% of budgets, which is the largest share of B2B marketers’ budgets. (source)
  • B2B companies spend 29% of their marketing budgets on events, on average, versus 19% for B2C companies (source)
  • 91% of event professionals stated that increasing engagement at their events was an important priority for their organization (source)

Event Lead Management

Managing the leads from your event is only part of a robust event lead management strategy. An event lead management solution should not only assist you in capturing your lead, but also in properly managing the data, enabling you to follow up quickly, and helping you track ROI.

  • 17% of respondents still use spreadsheets to store information on their leads. (source)
  • Just 6% of marketers believe their company converts trade show leads, contacts and conversations into customer business extremely well, although 27% feel they do so moderately well, and another 41% feel they’re getting better (source)
  • 14% of marketers plan to integrate marketing automation with their events and only 7% currently do (source)
  • 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first (source)
  • The top benefits for event technology adopters are: improved ability to track and measure their events (40%), increased process productivity (31%), and a better attendee experience (30%) (source)
  • 76% of marketers say their event and experiential marketing initiatives are integrated with their other marketing campaigns (source)
  • 22% of brands do not have a way of measuring their events (source)
  • 91% of event planners say that adopting a mobile event app has provided a positive ROI (source)
  • The top 5 metrics marketers feel are best for quantifying event value are: new referrals and introductions; quality and quantity of leads; deal closure; value of sales; and upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Yet, only 34% use those 5 metrics to assess trade show and event ROI (source)

Looking into the Future

  • The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics stated conventions and events are expected to expand by 44% from 2010 to 2020 (source)
  • 40% of marketers say they’ll increase spending on hosted events in the year ahead (source)
  • Companies are spending on event marketing at a growing rate, with 54% boosting their event activity over the past three years, and only 17% cutting back (source)
  • 43% of marketers believe the value of face-to-face interactions will continue to increase over the next 2 years (source)
  • 85% of executives say the number of exhibitions will stay the same or increase over the next several years (source)
  • 75% of marketers believe that in the upcoming years, live events will become increasingly important to their organization’s success (source)

Conclusion

You get the picture, right? Event marketing holds a significant position in the future of growing businesses. It’s never too early to start mapping out your strategy – whether you are a seasoned event marketer, or you plan on trying it out for the first time. Below is an infographic that summarizes all of these important stats. 

Luckily, we have many resources to help companies make the most out of their marketing events. Here are a few we think you might like:

And, to learn more about our enterprise-level Event Lead Management solution, click here.

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.

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).

When Should a Startup Implement Marketing Automation Software?

When should a startup implement marketing automation? It’s a great question and we decided to answer it with 10 reasons every startup should implement marketing automation.

If you’re a startup you’ve got a lot of things on your mind. We totally understand, we were a startup once. We’ve been through the struggle, and it’s not easy. Fortunately we’re a bunch of sales and marketing-minded people that have an affinity for building cool software. We liken the Amazon model wherein they build solutions for themselves and then sell it. Amazon created their ecommerce platform for book sales, built out capacity, then began to lease that capacity to other businesses. Bang! The Amazon Web Services (AWS) offspring appeared. AWS is now the cash cow for Amazon, and they’re making billions from it. We’re not that greedy now…but we enjoy building software to help our company and then sharing the software with others, at very competitive rates – especially for startups.

If you’re an early stage startup with seed stage funding or Series A, or even B funding, and you haven’t implemented marketing automation yet – it’s time! Here are 10 reasons why a startup should implement marketing automation:

1) Implement scalability (ideal for future fundraising)

Startups typically have limited resources. Resources spanning from time, to humans, to money – there’s no doubt there’s a shortage for the average startup. It’s impossible to grow your business by adding more resources. In short, you’ve got to do more with the resources you have. You’ve got to be more efficient. Marketing automation is the means to scalability and efficiency.

2) Create a customer acquisition machine

Marketing automation has many offshoots, such as Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement, which integrates with marketing automation and helps sales reps book more meetings. When sales automation and marketing automation work hand-in-hand it’s a customer acquisition machine. Wouldn’t it be nice if your startup can begin to forecast how many meetings and demos you can book with automation at the core to help book those meetings?

3) Emphasize sales and marketing (most startups are enamored with prod development)

It’s the classic example of the ostrich with their head in the sand. Startups have horse blinders on. They typically have a myopic view of their product/service that they’re creating. They want to perfect it. They spend countless hours tinkering, revising, tweaking…to no end. At some point you’ve got to draw the line in the sand, create your Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and go to market. Even if your product/service is not 100% ready you’ll be able to land some customers – which is gold for startups. Customers should define your product, not you.

4) Cost isn’t a barrier. Minimal upfront investment. Cash flow is critical.

You’re probably thinking you cannot afford marketing automation as a startup. Some companies, such as Lead Liaison, have specialized programs that offer qualifying startups a 90% discount on Services. Most companies can get a full sales and marketing suite of products for less than a few dollars a day. Stop eating out for lunch, pack a brown bag lunch, and use that money for a sales and marketing platform. Your brown bag lunch will buy you a digital sales rep and marketing assistant, another way to think about the software, which you won’t find on job sites for that kind of money!

5) Measure Efforts

What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done. Whether you’re a startup or a large enterprise, this metaphor holds true. Track website visitors, form conversions, social media engagement, prospect engagement, qualified leads, and more. Start looking at your business from a holistic perspective with a lifecycle funnel that tracks prospects from anonymous through to customer and beyond. Spot check your growth or track trends over time as your database and business grow.

6) Gives investors visibility into your business.

So you got your funding. Maybe it’s an initial round or follow up round. As a startup one of the hardest things is to hold periodic meetings, prepare your data, present at the board meeting, etc. That’s time consuming and it can be a drag. It’s a heck of a lot easier if the data is prepared for you via an application. Alternatively, if you give your investors a login to your sales and marketing automation platform so they can see firsthand how their money is working for them.

7) Recover lost time.

Without marketing automation, or sales automation, you’re going to do a lot of things manually. Save yourself the pain of shopping for disparate email, form, landing page builders and bring a single platform into your company. As noted above, it’s about efficiency. If you can do less but accomplish more why wouldn’t you do it?

8) Attract new personnel.

As a startup it’s hard to recruit talent. There’s got to be something in it for new hires. As a company, you’ve got to give them a reason to want to work for you. A professional sales and marketing platform can make eyes glow. It’s a platform that can help attract talent. If they know you’re investing in your company and you care about sales and marketing, it makes a bold statement. Use marketing automation as a magnet and don’t look at it as a deterrent.

9) Care for your customers.

Startups don’t have a lot of customers, and most don’t have any as they’re just starting up. But once you get those customers you’ve got to take care of them. But, therein lies the conundrum! How can you care for your customers if you’re too busy creating your product/service. Take some of the pressure off by implementing client communication plans to nurture your new customers. They’ll appreciate it and you’ll build stronger relationships.

10) Get with the times.

Marketing automation is like CRM 10 years ago. It’s a necessary thing. If you meet a company these days that does not use marketing automation it makes you wonder what they’ve been doing. Also, most startups have much more mature competitors. Rest assured your competitors are using the latest and greatest tech. And rest assured they’ve paid a hefty price for it.

Thank the lucky stars that you’re a startup. Take advantage of your status, and sign up to marketing automation while you can get your discounts. To learn more about Lead Liaison’s Startup program click here. To refer a VC, incubator, accelerator, or University Startup Program to apply and help their startups click here.

Lead Liaison Press Release

Lead Liaison Launches Program to Help Startups

Dallas, TX – Lead Liaison, a software provider that helps companies build scalable sales and marketing processes, announced today the launch of their Lead Liaison for Startups Program. The new program provides premium sales and marketing solutions at a deep discount for qualifying startups. It also offers VCs, incubators, and university startup programs an opportunity to provide more value to their portfolio of companies.

“We have a special place in our hearts for startups,” says Alan Page, VP of Customer Success at Lead Liaison. “Not that long ago we were in the same position, and we remember how challenging it could be at times. As a startup, you tend to take an ostrich-like approach to business. Most companies have their head in their sand, obsessing over technicalities and product development. Sales and marketing tends to be the last thing on their mind. Sales and marketing is also not a natural skill for most technical founders. Our platform alleviates pressure on startups and gives them a foundation, as well as a head start, to focus on sales and marketing. Over the years, we have successfully built first-class solutions that accelerate sales and marketing initiatives and we’ve grown our business rapidly by using our own software. Now’s the time for us to ‘give back’ to those in a similar position.”

Startups often struggle with taking their businesses to the next level of growth. Lead Liaison designed their Startups Program for companies that need a helping hand as it relates to customer growth and retention. The program includes an array of sales and marketing solutions coupled with free education and world-class support.

What’s more, Lead Liaison’s discounts are far deeper than comparable programs. An investment in Lead Liaison’s Startup Program is 86% less than big-name competitors such as HubSpot. Discounts are valid through 2nd and 3rd year as well, which is 50% longer than competing plans like HubSpot.

Solutions in this program include a marketing automation platform, a CRM, website visitor tracking, event lead management, sales enablement, and more. Lead Liaison’s goal is to become a startup’s system of record for all marketing and sales initiatives.

“There is a uniquely low discount on all of their software, which we found extremely appealing…” says Ryan Cochrane, Head of Commercial Operations at Good-Loop, a startup delivering impactful, purpose-driven digital advertising.

Good-Loop achieves this through offering viewers a free charity donation in exchange for watching an advertisement. This moment of shared good between the brand and the viewer combines with the ad to create a powerful halo effect, leading to improved brand perception, recall and engagement.

“We aren’t limited to specific solutions offered by Lead Liaison under their Startup Program, it covers their entire suite of sales and marketing software. We have looked, and we haven’t found a program like this from any other provider. It’s affordable for startups of all sizes, as it’s a small investment with a monumental return. We’re using their software to identify people and businesses that are visiting Good-Loop’s website and for striking up more conversations with non-profits and brands looking to advertise in specific channels.”

Lead Liaison developed their software from client feedback and from the needs of their own startup challenges. The company was founded in 2014 and has continued to be privately funded throughout the lifetime of its existence. Rather than acquiring software and bolting it into their solutions, Lead Liaison has built everything from the ground up – giving startups one ideal platform to build and scale their sales and marketing operations.

You can learn more about Lead Liaison for Startups by clicking here. To become a Startup Partner (VCs, Incubators, Accelerators, or University Programs), click here. And to refer a partner, 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).

Decision Guide: Comparing Pros and Cons of Badge Scanners vs Mobile Apps

Want the executive summary? Download the infographic here. 

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

It’s time to prepare for your upcoming trade show, but lately you’ve heard a lot about new mobile apps that allow you to forego the pricy badge scanners and use your own devices. It sounds intriguing, but you’ll need to know a little more before making the jump.  

We’ve rounded up the pros and cons of badge scanners vs mobile apps. Really, what you’re comparing is a standard lead retrieval system that captures basic information that attendees provide to the event host, versus a customizable, enterprise-ready event lead management system that can empower you to actually do something with those leads post-event.

Badge Scanners

Pros

  • Contact and rental info may be easier to find as most trade show organizers partner with lead retrieval companies who promote their solution.
  • Proven and reliable.
  • Badge scanners are fast. Scanning takes mere seconds.
  • Builds a list of contacts.

Cons

  • Managing and distributing leads after the event is a manual and time consuming process, and it could take days to retrieve your lead list.
  • There is only one way to capture a lead (by scanning a barcode). You’ll lack the ability to have multiple sources of integrated lead capture (like a kiosk for when your sales team is tied up with other attendees).
  • There is no qualification – unless you count your salesperson’s scribble on the printout from the badge scanner. Hopefully, he remembers all the notes he meant to write down!
  • You have to go through the process of renting and setting them up for each event.
  • They are expensive (ranging from $200 to $500 per device). Some might also require internet, which is another expense.
  • They are bulky and can get misplaced.
  • Limited ways to respond to leads, if at all.
  • No GDPR compliance options.
  • No control over entire experience.
  • No lead enrichment.

Mobile App

Pros

  • Leads are captured and in your possession instantly. This results in instant replies, instant lead routing, instant flow through your business process. And apps usually integrate directly with enterprise CRM and marketing automation systems.
  • Less setup & more options. Once you select your mobile app, you don’t have to keep going through the process for each trade show. You don’t have to set it up each time, outside of connecting your Media Kit. And, you’ll benefit from multiple lead capture methods, such as business card transcription, pre-registration, manual submission, and badge scanning.
  • Integration & automation makes it easier than ever to show a clear ROI for the tens of thousands of dollars spent on trade shows. Depending on the martech you integrate with, you should be able to easily track which leads actually convert to sales.
  • Sales and marketing staff can use their own mobile device instead of carrying around a bulky scanner.
  • Works offline, eliminating the need to rent internet which could cost 100s of dollars. You have complete control over the experience with your event visitors and managing leads internally.
  • Mobile apps are usually more current. For example, some mobile apps (like ours) offer GDPR/Privacy Management compliance options.
  • Consistent user experience as sales reps and marketers manning the booth only have to learn one system.
  • Leads are automatically enriched with social and demographic information.
  • Automation, automation, automation – mobile apps allow for immediate qualification, scoring, and follow up utilizing the integration mentioned above

Cons

  • There’s some legwork that needs to be done when choosing a mobile app solution provider. But keep in mind, you only have to do that legwork once.
  • You still have to purchase a “Media Kit” in order to activate badge scanning using a mobile app. These usually run around $500. That’s still significantly less than purchasing internet PLUS a badge scanner for each person.
  • Mobile lead capture apps are typically priced as a monthly subscription, so if you’re not going to a lot of trade shows, it may not be worth it. There may also be limitations on how many shows you can do or how many salespeople can use the app at one time.

Take Away

Using an event lead management system will reduce the amount of headache collecting leads during an event and managing leads after an event, while badge scanners are more convenient to rent prior to an event. Clearly define your goals, and if you go with a mobile trade show app, find one that integrates well with your martech.

To learn more about Lead Liaison’s mobile app, GoCapture!™, or our entire Event Lead Management soltuion, click here.

Plus…

We put together this infographic with the key points from above. Feel free to print and hang this at your desk, or pass along to your colleagues.

Badge Scanners vs. Mobile Apps

Badge Scanners vs. Mobile Apps

event strategy

Event Strategy: How to Properly Manage Leads from a Trade Show or Other Marketing Event

Want the executive summary? Download the infographic here.

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

Does your company do marketing events, like trade shows or conferences? Whether you’re just dipping your toe into marketing events, or you’re a seasoned pro, it doesn’t hurt to learn more about how to perfect your event strategy. When preparing for an event, there are two main focuses: getting your “gear” ready for the show, and setting up a process for managing the leads you get from that marketing event. We’ll save the “gear” topic for another day…today we’re thinking about LEADS!

What do marketing and sales always have in common? The answer: leads (duh). Marketing teams generate leads, and sales teams pursue them. Marketing events, and the like (conferences, trade shows, etc.) are incredibly effective ways to generate leads. But there’s often a lot of prep work that goes into these events.

The first step in planning for a marketing event is to come up with an event strategy, which should include a well-thought-out lead management process. Without this, you risk losing a lot of potential leads – leads who have seen your booth, spoken with your sales rep, and shown real interest in your solution. What a waste that would be! Here’s our guide to coming up with the perfect lead management process as a part of your overall event strategy:

Do Your Research

Find an event lead management strategy that works best for your business. Do you prefer to just order a lead scanner and do the rest manually? Or, do you prefer to use a lead capture app that already integrates with the rest of your marketing and sales technology (ex: marketing automation platform and CRM)? We prefer to use our lead capture app, GoCapture!™, as it integrates seamlessly with our marketing automation platform and our CRM. We can easily connect the dots between our event-specific marketing campaigns and the end results. We can also customize our forms so that we capture all of the information that we want/need, and we have limitless options for lead capture (not just badge scanning!).

Map Out Your Lead Management Process

Meet with your team (marketing AND sales) and lay out a plan for how you wish to follow up with your leads. A quick text saying, “Thanks for stopping by our booth!” goes a long way – especially considering the amount of email follow-ups those folks will probably have the next morning. Are there any special offers or messages that you should incorporate into your follow-up? Get to the drawing board (quite literally, if you have to!) and map out how you will nurture those leads (your “nurture campaign”). Part of a thorough event strategy is making sure that everyone is on board and knows what kind of messaging that lead will receive.

Here are a few things you’ll want to consider, when laying out your post-event lead nurture:

  • Determine the proper lead score for this event and incorporate that into your post-event lead nurture plan. Either manually, or automatically if you’ve got the technology, add that number to Prospects’ overall scores.
  • Ensure proper lead distribution. Many marketing automation platforms will allow you to automate your lead distribution based on specific rules, or round-robin. Make sure everyone is on the same page about how those leads will be distributed so there is no confusion later.
  • Incorporate omnichannel marketing in your nurture campaign. Sure, emails are great – of course those should be included. But text are powerful, postcards are unique, and handwritten letters give a personal touch.
  • Set up your post-event nurture in your marketing automation platform prior to your event, so that once that lead is captured, it is automatically tagged, segmented, scored, and placed into an automation.
  • Keep in mind that you can usually clone your nurtures (aka automations). Put the proper legwork into creating a killer nurture campaign, and then rest easy knowing you just have to edit a few minor things (like event name, etc.) next time around.

Train Your Team

Okay, now back to your event strategy: Don’t assume that your sales reps (or other team members attending the event) are up to date on lead capture technology. Although there will probably be some complaining, try to get your reps into a room to refresh them on the process or train them on new tech. If you are using an event lead management app, you can have your reps install it on their devices (or the company’s devices) ahead of time so they can get some real-life practice.

You want your sales team to be on board with your process. If they are not, you maby be less successful than you could be.

Ensure Attendance

More often than not, trade show organizers will provide an email list of people who plan to attend an event. Put some thought into your plan for encouraging attendance at your booth and start building those relationships early. Gone are the days when attendees just show up and wander around. With more and more millennials attending trade shows, conferences, and other live marketing events, we find that attendees are doing more research ahead of time so that they know who they want to visit and can plan accordingly.

Make it easy for them; properly distribute and advertise your location and booth number through marketing emails, social media, and 1:1 communication (like Lead Liaison’s Sales Enablement). And don’t forget to include past attendees in your communication (based on location).

In Summary

Marketing events can be costly, so it’s important to ensure you are getting the most out of it. Properly managing your leads is essential. Include team members from both sales and marketing through as much of the process as you can, so that everyone is on board with (and will follow through with their part of) “the plan.” Below is a quick graphic you can print out and stick on your desk, so that you’re ready for trade show season!

Event Strategy: How to Properly Manage Leads from a Marketing Event

interactive lead generation

7 Interactive Lead Generation Ideas to Try at Your Next Trade Show

Let’s face it: generating leads at trade shows isn’t as easy as it once was. Vibrant booth displays and creative signage may catch the eye of trade show attendees, but this alone won’t result in new leads for your business. We’ve rounded up a few interactive lead generation ideas that you can use to maximize the success of your next trade show.

To draw in high-quality attendees and get their information, you need to make sure they are engaged with your booth. One of the trendiest ways to boost engagement at your trade show booth is to create interactive experiences for your visitors.

Interactive experiences are highly effective for lead generation because they allow visitors to learn about your product or brand in an engaging way. And if you’re thinking that this will no doubt be expensive to execute, don’t worry — interactive lead generation exercises can be created on any size budget.  

Interactive Lead Generation Idea #1

Host a Fun Trivia Game

Make learning about your industry more engaging with a fun trivia game. Half the fun of trivia is winning, so you’ll want to have some cool prizes and giveaways. Although everyone should leave your booth feeling like a winner, be sure to reward the actual winners with something of higher value than what you give everyone else.

Interactive Lead Generation Idea #2

Use Digital Games to Draw Visitors

If you’re marketing to millennials and the generations after them, digital games are a wise investment. Digital games provide a fun experience for attendees and can help you drive qualified leads — if you use them correctly.

Before visitors play your games, collect their contact information with some sort of lead capture app. Many exhibitors neglect the importance of this step and wind up with everyone playing their games for nothing in return. Be sure to have an event lead management plan in place, so that once you capture your leads you’ll actually be able to do something with them (at least send a “Thank you for stopping by!” text/email). 

Interactive Lead Generation Idea #3

Let Visitors Spin a Wheel

As cool as technology can be, who doesn’t love a good spinning wheel? These flashy, colorful wheels may not be original, but they are extremely effective at grabbing the attention of passersby.

If you use a spin wheel at your next event, be sure to have quality prizes. Cool tech giveaways are always a winner with audiences, they fit into any promotional budget and they’re guaranteed to be held onto long after the event is over.

Interactive Lead Generation Idea #4

Use Virtual and Augmented Reality

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) may not be new, but both technologies are novel enough that they are guaranteed to captivate your audience and drive traffic to your booth. In fact, don’t be surprised if people form a line!

Best of all, VR and AR are surprisingly cost-effective lead generation strategies. It can take some technical know-how to get them up and going, but virtual reality headsets with your logo on them are extremely appealing.  

Visitors will be so eager to try your AR and VR that getting their information will be easy. Ask them for it during the setup process.

Interactive Lead Generation Idea #5

Let Attendees Test Your Product

Allowing visitors to test your product is both a fun experience for them and an effective way to turn a casual visitor into a potential customer. By removing some of the anxiety from the purchasing process, you’re already one step closer to converting your lead.

Interactive Lead Generation Idea #6

Set Up a Branded Photo Booth

Renting a photo booth for your trade show is far easier now than it was just a few years ago. Today, branded photo booths are sleeker and easier to set up than their bulky forebears.

Best of all, they can benefit your brand in so many ways. Not only can they increase engagement, but modern photo booths can easily be customized to promote your brand’s message and collect consumer data.

To capture visitor information, simply give visitors the option of entering their email to receive their photo digitally. Then they can share their photo on social media and provide your brand with even more exposure.

Interactive Lead Generation Idea #7

Display Touch Screens with Interactive Content

Touch screen displays are now a common sight on the trade show floor. But today, the content we use in these displays is far more engaging. Interactive content such as quizzes, games, product demonstrations, digital product catalogs and videos can spark engagement among visitors and easily double as a lead generation tool.  

In addition to being a great lead capturing tool, interactive content is a great conversation starter. Everyone will want to share their quiz results or the score they received on one of your games.

Conclusion

After spending months planning and budgeting for your trade show, you no doubt want something to show for all your hard work. Offering interactive experiences to your booth visitors will give you the edge you need over the competition and drive qualified leads for your business.

And, if you’re looking for an event lead management solution be sure to check out Lead Liaison’s GoCapture! app (which includes an onsite lead capture app AND “back office” capabilities to make it easier to take action ASAP!). 

 

Author’s Bio: Kelsey Stage is the VP of Business Development at PROMOrx. She enjoys sharing marketing and branding tips through blogging and local meet-ups. Outside the office, you can find her at the yoga studio and playing with her dog, Luna.

Lead Liaison Webinar

Event Lead Management: What You Need To Know Before Your Next Live Event – Webinar Transcription

Summary

Learn how to make the most out of your next live event with proper event lead management. We’re talking about planning, lead capture, and post-event nurture.

Presenter

Chris Kipgen, Lead Liaison

Transcription

*Please note that this content was presented in first-person live and then transcribed. It will read exactly as presented in the webinar. Welcome message and company introductions have been removed.

Slide 10

So we’re gonna go into a little bit of Event Lead Management and why it matters right now. Why we should be using this live events and why it’s very important that you have something on the backend to help you manage the events as well.

Slide 11

And when we’re talking about live events we expect to have- if I’m gonna have people in two kind of major brackets right now: Business to Business and Business to Customer. B2B, B2C. A little bit of a different purpose for the live events but we’re basically doing the same thing at each one. This is about face to face interaction. It’s about generating excitement. So B2B- we’re gonna be working on some Prospecting. So we’re trying to find our influencers, maybe gatekeepers while we’re out there. We’re now working, we’re finding out who else is in our industry. We’re getting awareness of our brand out. In some extent we might actually also be talking to some existing accounts. This is a good time to do some relationship building with those existing accounts and of course generating more revenues – the end goal of all of this. For B2C, it’s a little bit of a faster sales cycle and B2C live events are actually really fun and really exciting. This is where you gonna have product demonstrations. We tend to have handouts for everyone. I always love getting the freedom of knickknacks [inaudible]. Customer interaction can be huge at these B2C events if they’re public events. But of course let’s not forget that we also have the possibility of vendor relations. So this could be an event where you’re going and you’re meeting with your vendors for your organization as well. And that can also apply to B2B a little bit there as well. Brand awareness is gonna be huge for B2C and again generating revenue. So these are a few different reasons why you might go to a live event. These are the areas where live events tend to be most effective compared to other types of marketing like emails or even physical media.

Slide 12

So just a couple of things to be aware about live events. So first off let’s talk about Social Media a little bit. Social Media is one of the biggest ways that marketers are trying to spread brand awareness right now. Especially in that B2C field but also big end B2B. And based on some recent sales we actually found that 98% of attendees to a live event or a trade show generate some kind of social media content. A lot of those are photos. So if you do have a set up there, if you’re attending one of these live events and if you have something that catches their eye, there’s a good chance that that’s gonna end up on social media and that doesn’t hurt anyone. 72% of consumers say that they positively view a brand after a quality event. So if they go to an event, it was a great event and they thought yet a good presentation, they’re going to view you more positively. And in fact 84% that do make a purchase from you eventually are going to repurchase after that first purchase and that’s if they’ve attended a live event first. So we can’t really underestimate how important this is.

From the marketing point of view, 44% of marketers claim to experience a 3:1 ROI from live events and what all this come down to is you’re dealing with a lot of people face to face, you’re building rapport. If you can just close a few of the deals you get out there, you’re going to make your money back on it. And in fact, 85% of marketers say that events accelerate the buying journey so you can skip some of those earlier steps on the funnel. So there’s a lot of really great reasons to attend these live events. This is just barely scratching the surface but I wanted to give you an idea of how big this numbers can be. But there’s kind of another side to this…

Slide 13

For a lot of organizations, you get to lead and that’s where a great marketing could go home, they could give the sales team a lot of prospects but at the end of the day, recent studies have found that 85% of event leads are never followed up with which is crazy when you think about it which is crazy when you think about it. And if you don’t follow up with this leads they’re probably not gonna come back to you. In fact, especially in that B2B marketplace, it’s very rare that you have someone reaching out to you like, “Hey! I met you there I thought you’re gonna send me stuffs?” They’re probably just gonna move on to a competitor. So it’s huge that we have some way of managing what happens to this leads after the event is over. 22% of companies say that they have no way to track ROI from one of these events which again is very crazy. I’ve actually seen several of our clients where they’re throwing money into live events but they have no idea if they’re making anything back from it or not. And that’s one of the things that Event Lead Management or ELM can really help with.

And finally, only 14% use event management software. Now it kinda depends on which bracket we’re in. About 22% of companies in B2C will use Event Management Software. But only 9% in B2B are using Event Management Software. And really that’s not a surprise. When you look at those top two numbers: the 85% not followed up on and the 22% of companies not being able to track ROI, well it comes down to this bottom number. There’s just not a lot of penetration out there. People are not taking advantage of the tools that are available. So we’re gonna show you how you might be able to use an Event Lead Management tool today and we’ll be showing off our platform a little bit in the ways we can help at. Hopefully, we’ll give you some good ideas for your next event on how you might want to handle it.

Slide 14

So the Event Management Process- I’m gonna break that down into really three major areas. There’s the planning stage which happens before the event, the attending stage – that’s the event and following up which of course is what happens afterwards and that’s the really key important part. That’s gonna be where you make your sales.

Slide 15

So talking about planning a little bit. The first thing we need to establish is a way of tracking ROI, a way of tracking our lead sources and getting our content organized together. So I’m gonna show you real quick an example of how Lead Liaison handles campaigns and a lot of ELM software. You’re gonna see something like this and you’ll see the importance of it.

So I’m here in our platform and this is our campaign’s area – these are our marketing campaigns, and I created a campaign. I called it the 2018 Webinar Trade Show because I’m not ultra-creative. So here we are one of our webinar, we’re talking about trade shows, there we go. And with this campaign, I’m able to associate a cost to it and so this cost might initially be what we’re estimating the cost is gonna be once the event is over we know we’re gonna have expense report, we’re gonna have all the things. We can go back, we can edit this cost and adjust it as necessary to whatever the trade show ends up being or conference or whatever live event we’re talking about.

The importance of this is any content I create like my webform that’s gonna be set up for our lead capture device, any automations I have ran that are doing nurture, all of those are gonna be associated with this campaign. And we’ll see at the end of the presentation, as people come in here, we’re gonna be tracking our cost per prospect, we’re getting opportunities from this or we’re getting wins from this or we’re gonna show you how we’re can convert this number into a full ROI and in addition to campaigns we also have a concept of what’s called programs so you know this campaign is in our trade show program. So each individual trade show or event is gonna have its own cost, its own people, its own content but the overall umbrella that is under trade show. So this is actual way of tracking how events or trade shows, in general, are doing for your company and that’s a really key part that people miss.  You might have one or two events that are doing really well but then you have 10 others that really aren’t doing so well. So your overall program isn’t as efficient as it could be. And again that’s a big area that we wanna help you out with.

So just to start out we wanna make sure that anything that we create is associated with the campaign and it’s in those campaigns are associated with the programs and that’s really gonna pay off later on we’ll see on the following up side of the presentation.

Slide 16

Now in addition to planning and setting up our campaigns and programs, we also have to decide who to invite. I’ll tell you in this day and age it’s really not enough to just show up to a trade show. If you just show up there to a conference event trade show, and you’re just standing behind your booth, you got your nice pens that you’re gonna hand out to people and some physical brochures, you’re gonna be that really friendly person who’s standing in there smiling in the corner with no one in their table.

So it’s important that you start generating some people to come and meet you at these events. So who are you gonna invite here? Some great sources that we’ve identified. If you have a newsletter, you know talking to your newsletter subscribers can be a great way of doing that. They’ve opted in so they’re interested in your company in some way.

Anyone who’s a current opportunity. So if you’re in a middle of the sales process with someone, then go ahead and invite them out. This is a good time to see them face to face. And of course prospects that may not currently be opportunities, maybe you’re just in the initial stages of that sales pipeline, get them going too. Or maybe they’re even former prospects. We had someone where for one reason or another the deal didn’t close. I mean if we’re amicable with them? If we parted on friendly terms and we kinda understand why we lost that deal. Yeah let’s invite them out! You never know someday down the line but not a customer today, they could be a future customer. So it’s a great time to invite them out as well.

Slide 17

And for the invitation process, we really do recommend going with a multi-channel approach. So what we see most of the time and industry-wide it’s about 63 to 70% of these invites are going to be done directly through email and that’s great! Email is easy to put together. You can reach a large number of people, but email isn’t always the most effective way of getting people’s attention. We do also have the ability to send things like postcards or handwritten letters. You can also take advantage of pay per click advertising and landing pages. And the idea is to start pulling people in from this different channels – social media is obviously another place where you’re really going to want to start inviting people to come in and that’s gonna really fall into the same category with the PPC and landing pages. You have your social media accounts, you’re getting them into the landing page to throw out ultimately the form. And this is actually similar to how this webinar setup was where we send out this invites to you. You went to a landing page, you filled out your information and that registered you for this webinar. It’s the same thing except with an RSVP form for an event.

I wanna show you real quick. And if we go in here, this is an automation that I just had set up beforehand. So this is an example of what an invitation automation might look like. So we’ve identified the clients we’re looking for, we’ve made our list, we’re targeting this list and I’ve put a couple things in here. So first off we’re sending them an email to invite them into an event but we’re also gonna be sending out a postcard and what’s cool about our system is when we do a postcard you can create the postcard in Lead Liaison and those postcards can all be personalized down to individual data points. So when you send the postcard out, it’s not just a generic “Hey! we’re gonna be at this event. Come see us.” It’s a “Hey Robert, we’re gonna be at this event. We love working with [the name of your company] (whatever that company is). “Why don’t you come out and visit us at this table?”

And this is really a good way to get people’s attention. And from there, we’re going to actually tell the system to wait until a certain date. In this case, I’m saying May 2nd but you might wait till maybe a week or so before your event. And then we’re gonna send an email again but in this case I’m using a condition. And I’m telling the condition to look out for if someone has filled out our event registration form. And there’s a few ways they could have gotten to this form, so it could’ve been through the email or the postcard. But if I’ve been running my pay per click ad campaign through adwords and they come back to my landing page and they caught the form that would also qualify them here or if we did through social media that will also qualify them here. But what I’m telling the system is if they’ve submitted the form, we’re not gonna send them another email, we’re not gonna bother them. But if they have not submitted the form, we’re gonna go ahead and send one more invitation just to remind them “Hey! if you haven’t RSVP-ed yet, go ahead and RSVP. We’d love to see you here!”

And this is a way of basing the communication around their interaction. If they’re already showing interest. If they’re already engaged, we don’t wanna bother anyone. But, otherwise, we can continue to try to get their attention and  this is where we can also get more creative and do things like send a second postcard if they haven’t filled out the form instead of doing an email. So several ways of handling this.

This is just a quick example though how you might have that set up.

Slide 18

So back in here with the planning there’s a few other things that you gonna need to decide what data points you wanna capture. And this is where it’s really going to affect your sales team as well as any marketers or any representative that you’re gonna have on the floor. So this is where things get really important and we’re gonna go back into Lead Liaison here.

I’m just gonna show you our form builder just so I can give you an example as we’re talking here. So I have a form that I’ve set up here and I’ve identified a few areas that I might wanna capture information so. I’ve left an area for my sales people to capture business card. I’ve given them a [inaudible] for their name, email, phone number, their company. Pretty standard contact fields. But I’ve also made some custom fields. So I have this one field called VIP.  And this would be if we have a sales person who feels like this is a really qualified lead we really wanna to talk to them a lot.

We have area of interest so we can decide “Hey are they looking at marketing sales, public relations and other…” Just an example from our Verticum. I even have a checkbox field here for Product of Interest. They can select multiple products if they need. And of course I’ve left an area for notes for them here. And I’ll show you just what this looks like on the front end. This is the actual trade show app. So this is what we would be running on your devices at the event.  And let’s say I just look in here at this particular form, you can see that it’s been captured from here. So here’s my name fields, email, VIP etcetera. So this all transfers over.

Another new thing with the Event Lead Management software, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if you’ve used those scanners at trade shows before, you know kinda how you can scan the barcode and move from there. What’s great about this is the customized ability. So I have those custom fields but I can also make changes on the fly. So you see an example here I’m just gonna go ahead and add an image field into this so maybe they just wanna be able to take a picture or save a picture from their device. I’ve saved that and I’m gonna go ahead and reload my form here in my device. My device says it syncing right now cause it already received that update. If I’m going to capture, you can see that we  have that image element down there already at it. So we can add things in real time if needed.

But I tell you what? The best way to handle this is to make sure you have the form ready to go before the event is there. And again, marketers sit down with your sales team. Find out what information they feel they need  for a qualified lead. Sales – sit down with your marketers and find out what information do they need to be able to support you later on.

Slide 19

So back at our presentation here. We’re gonna talk about actually attending now. So this is gonna be the part where we’re capturing the leads and there’s a few common ways of doing this that you’ll see at different events. One can just be a simple form submission. So I’ve seen companies with clip boards. You can actually use a device like we have for GoCapture that’s our form submission application. Barcode scanning is increasingly popular especially in the United States where you can just go up scan their barcode on their badge and you’re good to go and then Business Card Transcription is something that’s really taking off and transcription is really unique. And then say that being in the computer trying to guess what the appropriate field is there. I’m giving you about 70% of the way there an accuracy. Transcription is done by a live person. It’s guaranteed 100% accurate so you know you’re getting good data as it comes through.

And of course, we also have the old-fashion way of passing business cards around. I’ll tell you without a system to really help you capture those leads and  upload them immediately you’re gonna start losing things.

So let’s look back at GoCapture real quick. Let’s look into are forms. So I’m here on the form screen of Lead Liaison. I’ve got GoCapture opened here. I might just give you an example where I could fill out this information and go through. Put in the name, the email. We’re gonna talk about this VIP field, in just a second. But if this is maybe a B2C event or an event I’m hosting, I might actually know who some of the attendees are already so I can also attach a list to this field as well and just select their name from a list.

Doing that, the system will fill that in for me automatically, which is really great. Maybe I’ll say this person’s a VIP and they’re interested in the sales and they want site engage and Event Lead Management. We can leave some notes and then I just hit ‘Submit’. And that’s really all there is. That’s lead capture at its most basic. I’m gonna go in here. I’m gonna review that submission. If I need to, I can check the submission make edits. I could block it if this is with someone from another vendor. They’re trying to sell me something. I just wanna be polite. Taking their information, scanning their badge. I could block them and not upload it. But I want somebody to upload. I’ll just click this upload button and it immediately goes back to Lead Liaison. Infinitely, this can also be set to auto-uploads so the moment your representative hits that ‘submit’ button, it’s gonna go to our back end.

And if I refresh the page here in our web app, you can see that that submission has already gone through. And this is where event capture tools are so important is you’re getting that information immediately. Nothing is getting lost out or falling between the cracks and what’s really important using a solution more like GoCapture is that its instant transmission. Unlike where you go to the shows, you have the scanner and you get a list later on at the end of the day. That’s not bad. But when we get it instantly like this, there’s a few other really cool tricks that we can do. Now before I move on to the nurture in the other piece, I’m gonna show you here. I do also want to mention barcode scanning. Because like I said before, that’s gonna be a huge way that people capture leads at these events right now.

You can use an Event Management software solution like Lead Liaison’s Event Lead Management and you can still do your barcode. So with regards with the trade show tells you most of the time, you don’t have to use their scanners. They will have some kind of software developer kit that solutions like Lead Liaison are able to use.

So I have some sample barcodes here and I’ve got an identical version of the form with the barcode reader. And you’ll notice one thing, I’ve put all of the contact info down at the bottom here and here’s really what the idea of this. I’m gonna move this over since it’s a little close to my phone here. I’m gonna choose to scan the barcode and the device will recognize it. What it’s gonna do is it’s gonna make a call back to the barcode provider and then you can see down here. It’s actually filled in that contact info for me. So if I’m at a really busy event, I don’t wanna have to stop and type everything. I can just scan that code. And I put this custom fields at the top, so I can just fill those in really quickly. And we’re done. I click ‘Submit’. And the submission’s through. I’ve moved on for my next person already.

So if you want your representatives to love you, give them a shortcut like that where they can just scan a barcode and fill in those custom fields. Now where things get really important with event management is the nurture during the show. This is something that not a lot of places talk about. They talk about pre-show nurture and post-show nurture. We’re talking about nurture during the show.

So this is another automation that I have setup here and this is something where we can just start getting people excited during the event. So my representative has used GoCapture. They’ve uploaded the form immediately. So I already have their data in the system just seconds after they captured it. What’s gonna happen with this automation, it triggers as soon as the prospect is submitted and I’m telling  the system to wait five minutes and then just send a ‘thank you’ email. And this email will just say something like, ‘Hey! We really appreciated you coming by our table. It was wonderful to meet you. We were really excited to learn more about your company!” And again, we can use merge fields to actually insert the name of their company.

By the way, here’s a few things that have coming up or we have a link back to a special landing page with an offer that they can try to go to. So basically we are trying to get them re-engaged and back visit our website. It’s just a nice little thank you to send them. Now remember in the form, I have that VIP field and so if I’m the representative there and I feel like this person is a really good solid lead. I might say that, “Yes! They are VIP!”

And I have a condition down here, that if they are already VIP, we’re gonna use one of our Webhooks with Twilio to send out a text message and this text message will say something like, “Hey Jennifer! Thank you for coming by our booth! By the way, we are doing a cocktail tonight at 6 p.m. at the Marriott. Won’t you come and join us?” So I’m actually inviting them out there and recommending that they come back and see me. That’s because this person I feel like they are a VIP. I want to interact with them again as quickly as possible. And you can even go further than that.

We’ve actually had a user use the text message feature to say things like, “Hey! are there other people from your company? Send them back our way and we’ll give you a special offer.” And what’s cool is if someone does text back since this is handled through Twilio. Twilio is able to forward that message back again. And again those text messages just like our postcards and emails use data merge fields so we can personalize these messages without having to do anything beforehand.

So really great way to get people engaged in at events. This is the key is getting people jumping back in.

So we’ve kinda gone through attending through this slides so I’m gonna go and skip over this side.

Slide 21

The big thing afterwards is gonna come with the post event nurture.

And so I’ve got one last automation here. And this is for our post event follow up. So this is somewhat similar to what we would recommend when you’re using your event software. So the first thing we’re doing, we might tell this to wait maybe a couple of days so after the event and then send another follow-up thank you email or hover when I handle that. If you’re using a CRM like salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, you do wanna make sure that your events software is able to sync up to it. We do actually have a direct connection with both of those programs. We also do have ways of pushing leads into other CRMs like Pipelines or SOHO. We even have our own complementary CRM. But in this case, I’m using Salesforce as an example. So once the event is over I can tell the system to sync those leads that we capture directly into salesforce.com and really I don’t even have to wait I could be doing this at the same time so everything’s immediately in Salesforce.

Once it’s in Salesforce, I can add it to a campaign. I can even create a task. So remember when I said earlier on only about 15% of those leads are ever being followed up on. 85% are being ignored. Well, we can use Salesforce, our CRM, to make sure we have a task to these people, are being followed up on.

So this is a great way to make sure it’s in there. Another feature that I’ve mentioned before is are handwritten letters. So let’s talk about VIPs again. These are the people that we invited out to that cocktail party. Well, instead of just sending them the regular ‘thank you’ email and all the rest of it maybe I’m gonna send them a handwritten letter instead. Handwritten letters carry a lot of weight and a lot of value.

So I can send them a handwritten letter. It’s personalized. And when I say handwritten, I don’t mean we’re gonna make you write a letter. We’re going to write a letter for you. So this our handwritten letter template here. You type in what you want the letters to say. [inaudible] right here there’s a merge field. So we’re going pull this from the prospect profile and what’s awesome is you can choose the pin color, the type of handwriting. So if you want female cursive or a male print, that’s not a problem. You can even add a drop in. So here’s an example of a five-dollar Starbucks gift card that we could drop in.  I’ve seen some companies drop in some brochures. I’ve even seen a company that does a send along that we call down here. They were sending t-shirts out to people.

So this is another really good way of re-engaging them with them once the show is over. And again you can handle this towards just your VIPs. So it’s only those most valuable people that you’re getting this letters to go to.

If you wanna make them feel really especially that’s an awesome way to do it. And from there that’s where we gone through our sales process. We have our sales team taking over. What’s gonna be important from the more marketing side of things and the sales management side is okay that’s great that we had all that but where is our ROI. How much money are we making from this?

Slide 22

So I mentioned before that you can put all of these things into a campaign. Well once inside a campaign, we’re gonna start tracking anyone who comes in.

So let’s say that we have our form. The form is a part of the campaign. So anyone who comes in, submitted from that form is automatically added to the campaign. So the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna tell you how many people have actually come in from that and prospects. Prospect- the idea of these two columns. Prospect means we have an email. People means we don’t have an email. But we’ll tell you who’s come in as a result of that campaign and from that we can get you the cost per prospect. Pretty simple so far. But again if you are using a CRM like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Dynamics, we’re gonna continue to monitor those prospects once they’re in there and hopefully you’ll eventually convert that lead into a contact and attach it to an opportunity.

And so then we can tell you how many opportunities were created as a result of this trade show and the cost per opportunity plus the value of your opportunities. And then of those opportunities we’ll tell you how many of them are one and how many revenue dollars have come in which then gives us our total ROI for everything coming in from that campaign. And this is huge because the system is doing everything for you automatically. You just let it do its thing. The only thing you have to do is just set it up beforehand and then let your representatives capture the leads, everything else is happening automatically. And that’s the beautiful thing about having event lead management combined with lead management automation or marketing automation.

And like the campaigns, we also track the ROI on the programs for theirs so again I had a trade show as the program. So it would tell you the same data points of how many people have come in as result of that program. How many opportunities? How many wins? And then the same thing for lead source too. So if you wanted to put in trade shows as a lead source, you can get an idea of how effective those sources are in comparison to your other sources. So you might go into your lead source report and realize, “Hey! I actually closed a lot of deals from people who come in from pay-per-click advertising and from social media and I actually don’t get that much revenue from events, so maybe I can start closing out a couple of events.” Or maybe you go in and you realize, “Oh wow a huge amount of my revenue is coming from these events. Let’s really ramp it up!” And you’re not gonna know that unless you’re actually going in there and your tracking the ROI.

Now if these all sounds like a lot to set up and it all sounds a little overwhelming, don’t worry! If you do have a solution like Lead Liaison as I mentioned before you do have the Integration Specialist like me. I would be helping you set this kinds of things up and especially through your through your first few months worth of shows. We’re gonna be there with you. We’re gonna be making sure that everything is working correctly.

So it’s a great tool in general and again, if you’re not using events yet, hopefully you can kinda see by now there’s a lot of value to go into the events. And it’s not that complicated. There’s nothing too crazy about it. As long as you have the right preparations, you can handle the event and you can run them and you can get ROI on them.

So if you do have any questions about that, we’d love to hear it. Now I believe that we do actually have a couple of offers going on today. So I’m gonna hand it back to Jen so she’d be able to talk about for you and then we’ll take some questions.

Slide 23

Jen: Thank you Chris. Yes, absolutely. So I’m going to take over the presentation as well and get you guys over to our special offers here. So our first special offer is if you would like to purchase our stand-alone solutions and as Chris mentioned GoCapture several times at our Events Lead Management solution. That’s powered by GoCapture. If you want to purchase a stand-alone solution, it’s two free months off of your subscription. If you currently have a Lead Liaison license and you wanna add this to your Lead Liaison license, we’re offering one free hour of training, which the training can get fairly pricey. So that’s an amazing offer there. So let us know if you guys are interested in those. Just mention the webinar and we’re happy to assist there.

Slide 24

Now so I’ll go into the questions. Everybody, you should see the question area on your Gotowebinar screen to just so you can type your questions in there and I’ll go through and kind of asked those. We’ve got a couple here and that I’ve seen come in. So the first one is can you highlight some information about the users and the amount of devices that you can have? Is there a limit to that?

Chris: Yeah. That’s actually a really good question. So it kinda depends on the solution you’ll go with. A lot of solutions are going to limit you like 3 or 4 devices and then you’ll pay like an extra 50 or 60 bucks a month per user. I’ve seen up to 200 per month per user. Our Event Lead Management solutions a little different in that we don’t have any limits on the number of users. So it’s a flat rate and if you have 50 different reps, send out 50 different invitations.

Jen: Awesome! Thank you. Alright, we have another question and which lead capture method do you recommend in those or do you see used the most?

Chris: If we’re in the US, the one I see used the most is definitely going to be barcode scanning. That’s just something that became very prevalent in the event industry in the last 10 years or so. And the event industry has been just growing like crazy. So that’s the one that I see commonly used the most. The best thing about it, is like I showed in the demonstration is you can just do the barcode scans so it’s filling in all the important information for you. And then you just fill in your custom fields for your particular organization. Hit submit and then you’re done. A single submission takes less than 10 seconds. You can just go through one after another.

Next I would probably say the next most common would be the business card transcription. We have a lot of companies where they’ll just say, “Hey go out there and take a picture of the business cards, then they hand the business card back to us. We transcribe them and do the rest.” But most used in the US, that’s gonna be barcode scans. In Europe, we tend to see more business card transcriptions.

Jen: Wonderful! Thank you Chris. Alright, let’s see one other question here. What information can be included or captured on the form?

Chris: Yeah so, the information that you can capture is pretty limitless. So you can create any number of custom fields for our forms. So you saw that I had some fields in there for VIP or for product of interest. Those were all fully-customized forms. I created those fields myself. Put in the possible responses. If you’re currently leaves on client, it’s almost identical to our web form builder. For some who’s new with Lead Liaison, it’s a simple drag and drop builder. Generally for me it takes less than 3 minutes to put a form together even with custom information. The custom fields you can have is a single line of text, a paragraph of text, a drop-down menu, checkboxes which is your multi-select field and then a radio button which is kind of a true or false multi-select with only one answer kind of thing.

Jen: What is an absolute no-go when in contact with leads at events?

Chris: A no-go. Well, one thing like in all cases when it comes to marketing and I’m assuming with that no-go, you’re talking about what are some things that you’re just not supposed to do. One if you do have an automation setup on the background, if they haven’t opted in to email, you don’t wanna start putting them on to Marketing lists. It’s generally fine to send a thank you email or something like that because that’s considered transactional. But you do wanna be careful putting them on some marketing lists. Beyond that I mean be general trade show etiquette. But if you kinda meant something different with that no-go, just let me know and we’ll circle back to this question. But really there’s not much that I would say that you just can’t do with a lead from an event especially since you’re face-to-face with them. You can talk with them. You can build those expectations. Email marketing is the only area I really say to still be careful on. Depending on your country, text messages, as well. So yeah. But if you need to clarify that more, we’ll go in a different direction with that. Let me know.

Jen: You said that this is also available as a standalone solution. How does that work if I do not have Salesforce?

Chris: Yeah so the Salesforce connection that we showed there, that’s an add-on that you can do. We have that because a lot of our partners out there, they use CRM like Salesforce or like Microsoft Dynamics. We actually have our own CRM that you can use as well. So if you’re also wanting to save the organization level and whether there’s deals or opportunities, we actually have our own CRM that you can actually add it for free to event lead management so it’s another just add-on. If you don’t already have the CRM, then we’re happy to provide that for you. And really, we can also work without a CRM altogether cause we’re still gonna store the prospect records for you. We’re still gonna store all the submissions but if you’re in a little bit better in organization and you don’t have anything else or if you’ve been looking to make a change on your CRM, that free option is actually a really nice CRM with everything you’re getting. So it’s stand-alone. If you have Salesforce, we’ll integrate with Salesforce. It’s a very deep integration. If you have Dynamics will do that and if not we can work with you as well.

Jen: Alright! Thank you very much! I believe that wraps up our questions here.

Slide 25

Thanks everybody for those. So that is the end of our presentation. Everybody keep an eye on your inbox, I will send in the recording like I said from the next week and there will be a survey that pops up after we close the webinar. So we’d greatly appreciate your insights on that. In that way it can help shape future webinars as well. So thanks everybody for joining today. I appreciate your time. Hope you learned a lot. Let us know if you have any additional questions afterwards and have a great rest to your day.