Welcome to part two of our series on how you and your team can get the most out of your trade show experience, optimize lead capture and enjoy a high level of customer lifetime value from these leads.

In a previous article, we discussed some valuable ideas you can leverage to capture more leads at your next event. Today, we continue that conversation. Let’s discuss specifically how you can harness the power of technology to capture and collect as many leads as possible, engage with them right away (even while you are still at the event) and set the stage for converting them into eager prospects and buyers.

Rethinking Your Lead Capture Form

Put yourself in your booth visitor’s (your potential lead’s) shoes. Attending a big industry event can be an overwhelming experience for them! This sense of overwhelm felt by so many trade show attendees can cost your company lead capturing and nurturing opportunities.

So what can you do about this situation and turn it to your advantage?

What can you do that will make their experience more enjoyable and help you have a more meaningful engagement? What generates a massive impact that will help keep you and your brand in the forefront of their minds? Keep reading to find out…

When you are engaging in conversations with leads at your booth, don’t waste your time or theirs by asking the same dull, boring, unimaginative questions every other exhibitor is asking them. Aside from the basic information you can get from their badge scan, add targeted, relevant questions to your all-important lead capture form. Questions that will not only help you follow up more efficiently and effectively but will also help you keep your lead, the one you worked so hard to capture at the event, engaged.

Why is this important? The more engaged your lead feels during the buyer’s journey, the more of their very limited attention you will win and keep. The more likely they are to buy from you. So how can you keep them feeling engaged?

Remember what we talked about in our review of lead capture tips: every time you ask your leads and prospects to do something, they are asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” You want to tell them what’s in it for them. So take the answers they give to the questions on your lead capture form to help you do this. Analyze the information they give you, and craft responses that show your leads how your product solves the problems they want solved.

Doesn’t it make sense that if, in response to their questions, you were equipped with answers they found to be highly relevant to their situation, that you could give powerful answers to the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Ask Better Questions. Enjoy Better Lead Capture Results!

On your lead capture form, ask questions that relate to the problem they have – the one that your product helps them solve. Include conditional questions that pop up based on their answers to the questions you previously asked.

Here’s an example of a conditional question: if you ask a lead what role they play in the company, and they say “I do the research for new technology”, you’ll select “Product Research” from your dropdown. With a little research, you’ll be able to create a list of potential job titles that you are likely to run into at the event. Selecting “Product Research” will then trigger a new, role-specific question: “What’s the first thing you look at when researching?”

Do you see how this approach can help you target your post-show marketing responses and deliver a win-win solution for both you and your leads?

As you are communicating with them post-engagement, use the answers they gave you to deliver content, in the format they prefer, that keeps them engaged and interested in what you have to say.

What’s the bottom line? You want to use your lead capture form not just to capture the lead’s contact information. You want to use it to help you make your post-show marketing process more personalized, persuasive and, ultimately, much more effective

Embrace Audio Notes

Like we discussed a moment ago, a trade show or industry event can be overwhelming. And given your primary goal of lead capture, you don’t want to ask your team to spend their vitally important booth time typing notes into their phone or writing them down on a notepad.

If your salespeople at the trade show are taking too much time scrambling to finalize their notes from previous conversations, they are likely losing valuable opportunities to engage with new booth visitors.

The perfect buyer may have just passed by your booth and been snatched up by a competitor!

Rather than burdening your team members with these highly inefficient methods which could easily cause valuable information to be lost, why not find a lead capture solution that gives them the option to record an audio note which can automatically be transcribed once the event is over?

Tailor Follow-Up to the Individual

Here’s the thing: your booth visitors have talked to a lot of exhibitors at the big event, including your competitors. Will they remember you after the show, or will you be promptly forgotten?

You must do something that will really help you stand out in the eyes of your new leads. Don’t merely employ a “default”, one-size-fits-all event follow-up strategy. Ask them how they prefer to be followed up with, and with what type of content. Use a lead capture form that contains a dropdown selection which allows you to select their preferred method of follow-up (phone call, email, or text).

Then, tailor your post-show communication to that specific prospect’s wishes. It will mean a lot to them. And it will leave a positive, lasting impression. The type of impression that just might help your company win another customer!

Obviously, if you are going to successfully carry these ideas out, it helps you to have the right marketing and sales automation platform. This is how our team at Lead Liaison can really assist you.

Our innovative, robust, cloud-based software combines fully-customizable lead capture forms, real-time lead tracking, lead qualification, lead distribution, database segmentation, lead nurturing, social media engagement and ROI reporting into a single platform.

We make some bold claims, but as our happy clients can attest, we can back them up. Want to find out more about how you might become the next Lead Liaison success story? Contact us today to arrange your complimentary demo of our event lead capture solution, GoExhibit!™.