Tag Archive for: Lead Capture

event strategy
Ryan Schefke

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

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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

Ryan Schefke

How to Prepare for a Marketing Event

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There are various types of marketing events to attend; traditional marketing events like trade shows, corporate events, social gatherings, and more. Regardless of the event, a marketer must go through some checkpoints before the event. In this article we’ll cover how to prepare for a marketing event to make your event as successful as possible.

Prepare your Booth

We’re assuming your next event will require you to showcase your brand a bit. Companies typically do this with a booth. If you don’t have a booth contact your local print shop and inquire about trade show or event displays. Lead Liaison uses a three (3) panel display with plenty of images. As a tip, keep your text to a minimum. Yes – you do want people stopping by your booth to engage in conversation with you, but you don’t want them blindly staring at your display struggling to read the text. You’d rather tell them what you do and converse with them, right? Try to think of adding only broad headings and key bullet points (no more than three per panel) to your display. If you don’t already have a graphics artist on your team, hit up a site like upwork.com and hire someone. For us, we used the graphics person at the print shop so we got a bonus. We got a graphics artist to help us out without having to shell out more money.

Once your display is ready, consider how to prepare for a marketing event that focuses on your audience. You can run a drawing where you have your booth visitors drop a business card into a fish bowl. You can offer some candy (in another fish bowl or tray), or you can give away some company swag. Here are some other ideas if you want to take a more creative route:

  • Talk to a handful of local companies in the area and have them sponsor services to run an auction. Hotels, restaurants, nail salons, etc. should all be happy for you to promote their services while visitors bid on each service. It’s a good interactive idea.
  • Do something off the wall such as a wheel for people to spin to win a prize of some sort. Most people will like playing the game and see that as a nice break to the monotony of the event.
  • Have a raffle for your services. For example, if you’re a software company give away a subscription to your software for a period of time. If you’re a professional services company offer a complementary version of your services (free consultation, free training, etc.).

Lead Capture

One of the most important things to consider when thinking about how to prepare for a marketing event is how you will capture your leads. Marketers must think through how they’ll capture leads at the marketing event. There are varying levels of lead capture. You could do what many companies do and only collect business cards from each person. If you did that, it would take a while to get the leads into the system, you risk human error losing cards or entering in information, you rely on the sales person to enter in the data, and even after all of that’s done – you’ve got to merge all the leads together, get them into your system, and properly distribute them.

An alternative method is to contact your trade show organizer to see what system they suggest. Most event organizers will contract a company for their lead retrieval system. The lead retrieval system will likely be a handheld barcode scanner or a mobile app. Choosing a system from the lead retrieval company will still limit you though. For example, the forms that are provided are limited. They are designed to only capture certain information, such as name, email, phone, etc. Even if you’re using their barcode scanner, only select information gets pulled in. If your company prefers to capture key information from your booth visitor, too bad – you’ve got to cram that information into the notes section, making lead capture even more cluttered when it’s time to get that data into your system. Moreover, you’ve got to get the captured leads into your system. Lead retrieval companies will put your leads into a central repository for you to download, or give you all of your leads while you’re at the show. Once you obtain them, they still have to be curated, uploaded into your company’s CRM, and distributed. This is just the capture part, and doesn’t include any follow up with attendees.

The last, and best option, is to use a professional-level event lead capture system. These systems have a backend and frontend to help you manage the end-to-end process for your event leads. On the backend, marketers can build and provision forms with custom fields and information relevant to the company. Marketers can also electronically roll out forms to different sales people and fellow marketers who might be attending the event. The forms can be pushed out to each user’s Android, iOS, or Windows device as the application should be cross platform (HTML5). The mobile event lead capture application will provide multiple lead capture methods. We’ve listed a handful of lead capture methods present in leading event capture apps:

  1. Barcode / QR code scanning
  2. Manual entry
  3. List pre-fill
  4. Business card scan

Leading event lead capture solutions will also work offline as most events could be in the basement of a hotel or in a crowded area where internet or cellular connectivity is limited or not available at all. The device should work seamlessly, whether offline or online, and hold the leads on the device or automatically pass them to the backend once the device connects. This leads us to the backend aspect of these systems. The backend should be sophisticated enough to help the marketer qualify, communicate, distribute, and nurture leads automatically. Here’s a short summary of each of these areas of the workflow on the backend:

  1. Qualify: Leading systems will use scoring or grading as a way to qualify leads. Scoring is a way to measure engagement or interests. For example, if the prospect chose a specific value on the form then give them more points. Similarly with grading, if the prospect has a title that contains “Chief” then consider automatically giving them an A+ for their grade. Scoring and grading will help your sales reps separate out where to focus first, as they should look for the highest graded and scored leads from the event.
  2. Communicate: Responding to the lead right away is important. Text the visitor back after an hour or so thanking them for their time and visit. Alternatively, send them an email, postcard, or handwritten letter shortly after meeting them.
  3. Distribute: Make sure you route the lead to the route sales people as soon as it is submitted. Use various rules such as geography, demographics, or any information you collect on your form to determine where to send the lead. Getting the lead in the hands of your sales rep as soon as you can is critical for success.
  4. Nurture: Build stronger relationships with your leads by running them through multi-step nurture processes that intelligently sends out touch points across traditional and digital marketing channels.

Coordinate your Team

Gather your sales and marketing team members together and do a recap of your upcoming event. If each person is using a lead capture app like Lead Liaison’s GoCapture!™, make sure each user is in the system and their device is authenticated to receive the event form. Your team might also benefit from having one or two devices around the booth and putting the GoCapture!™ app into Kiosk Mode to more easily manage lead collection. Whatever your approach, make sure you have a documented process for capturing the leads and make sure your reps are fully trained on this process.

Distribute your Leads

The final, and possibly most crucial step, in thinking through how to prepare for a marketing event is to nail down how you will distribute your leads. As noted above, it’s critical to have a sound lead distribution plan following your marketing event. Make sure your reps are not taking their business cards back home with them or losing them in transport. To avoid this, leverage the OCR or business card transcription services offered by your event lead capture service. With Lead Liaison, we provide a transcription portal as a component of the backend lead capture system. Businesses can manage the portal themselves by transcribing their own cards. Alternatively, Lead Liaison’s transcription team could transcribe the card for a nominal fee. Either way, get those cards out of the hands of your reps and into the system in digital format for prompt lead distribution.

Lead Liaison provides the perfect solution for event lead capture, called GoCapture!™. Get a free demo of this solution today to see how you could make your next marketing even a smash hit.

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Lead Liaison

Connecting the Dots – Lead Nurturing After Event Lead Capture Is Important

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Did you know that 73 percent of B2B leads aren’t ready to make a purchase? They’re still gathering information, and while they will eventually pull the trigger, it probably won’t happen at the exact time of event lead capture. That is why it is so important that you have a lead collection system that integrates with your lead-nurturing platform. GoCapture!™ pairs with Lead Liaison’s marketing automation platform, allowing people to track leads through the entire lifecycle. If you use this system, you can collect the leads when you are at an event and then push them through the lead-nurturing process via marketing automation instantly!

Nursing Leads with Marketing Automation

When you gather leads with GoCapture!™, you can choose how to nurture them. The system begins the process by qualifying the lead based on your predefined qualification standards. It then begins nurturing them in the way that you determine. You can have the system send emails, postcards, handwritten letters, or SMS messages. Don’t feel as if you must pick just one, either. Omni-channel marketing is a proven method for success. 

Breaking Down Lead Statistics

When you use a fully-integrated system such as GoCapture!™, you have the advantage of tracking the lead through its entire lifecycle, starting with where it came from. This is vital if you want to put the right amount of marketing dollars into various events. You will be able to tell how much it costs to turn leads into customers at your various events. You can then use that information to determine future budgets.

For instance, you might find out that you convert lots of leads from trade shows, so it would make sense to put more money into that type of marketing campaign. However, you might find out that your lead conversions for conferences are weak, so you either need to spend less on conferences or change your marketing strategy for those specific events.

Lead generation is only powerful if you nurture those leads and turn them into customers. GoCapture!™ makes that as easy as installing the app. Then, it gets to work for you, capturing and nurturing leads to improve your bottom line.

Want to learn more about GoCapture!™? Click here to speak with an expert today!

Lead Liaison

Challenges With Event Lead Capture

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New technology means there are more lead capture options out there than ever before, but they come with some challenges. It’s important to identify the challenges and come up with solutions to those challenges. Let’s look at some common challenges and solutions.

Transcription Problems

Scanning business cards is growing in popularity, but what happens when you collect all of those cards? They have to be transcribed and entered into your lead generation system, but unfortunately, most services either don’t offer transcription or they charge a high price. GoCapture!™ is unique in the sense that it doesn’t just offer transcription. It does it for less than half the price of the leading competitor. This makes it easy to overcome this challenge.

Lost Leads

According to trade show insiders, as much as 80 percent of the leads collected at trade shows are never followed up. That isn’t because the exhibitors don’t want to follow up. It’s because the leads get lost in the shuffle. GoCapture!™ solves this problem by adding all of the leads into a centralized database, meaning that you can have hundreds of people collecting them, and they all go to the a singular, safe place.

No Internet Signal

Have you ever tried to make a phone call at a trade show? It isn’t easy due to the location. Most trade shows are buried deep inside of buildings, and the signals are weak. Unfortunately, lots of exhibitors need Internet signals to collect leads. That isn’t the case with GoCapture!™ though. The application works offline without any problems. By having a solution that works both digitally and offline, you can work in any situation.

 

GoCapture!™ makes it easy to overcome the various lead capture problems that sales and marketing teams face at events. If you want to get quality leads without running into trouble, this is the way to go.

Want to learn more about GoCapture!™? Click here to speak with an expert today!

Lead Liaison

Lead Liaison Leaks a Glimpse of First-Ever, Fully Integrated Lead Capture App

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Lead Liaison LogoAllen, TX – Lead Liaison, an innovative marketing and sales solution provider, is elevating the scope of B2B mobile software with a first ever, fully integrated lead capture app, conveniently named GoCapture!™. Although it is not available for public consumption yet, the Lead Liaison has released a few specifics that have the technology world buzzing.

The app is intended to be used at events such as trade shows, seminars and conferences, and even in door-to-door sales, to capture hot leads or take surveys onsite. This new technology allows Lead Liaison to span the full life cycle of an event, from onsite lead capture and data collection to nurturing with marketing automation, and beyond. This application pairs with Lead Liaison’s Marketing Automation platform, Lead Management Automation (LMA)™ and their CRM, OneFocus™, allowing exhibitors to instantly capture, qualify, distribute, and nurture leads with a single system. It will be initially available for iOS and Android operating systems with support for Windows in a subsequent release.

Information is limited, but according to Lead Liaison’s engineers, GoCapture!™ will provide the ability to quickly capture leads using several methods. The first method is through a mobile form submission. Trade show attendees will be able to walk up to a company’s booth and manually fill in the form on a smartphone or tablet. Exhibitors can also directly fill in the form.

The second method for onsite lead capture is through a business card transcription portal. Employees working an event can simply take a photo of the lead’s business card. From there, OneCapture!™ offers the option to transcribe the business card using a self-service portal at a later time. Alternatively, Lead Liaison also offers a paid transcription service.

The third method for lead capture is by optical character recognition (OCR). OCR provides the ability to scan the business card, capturing the information automatically.

“The methods and flexibility in which we allow someone to capture a lead has grown. It is tailored around an event or a show,” explains Lead Liaison Solutions Specialist, Chris Kipgen. “What sets us apart is the fact that we own all of these pieces, from the CRM to the automation, which can deliver different kinds of touch points, digital and offline. The fact that we are not integrating with systems we do not own really makes this experience stand out from our competitors. It’s seamless.”

GoCapture!™ is scheduled for release in the fall, according to Lead Liaison. However, they are starting testing with early adopters over the next few weeks. To sign up for alerts about this mobile technology, visit this webpage.

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 Allen, Texas, near Dallas. For more information, visit http://www.leadliaison.com or call 1-800-89-LEADS (895-3237).

Lead Liaison

Are Your Landing Pages Ruining Your Business?

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Are Your Landing Pages Ruining Your Business?Conversion optimization is the key to continually improving landing pages. Your landing pages have only one purpose – driving sales. Regardless of whether your landers collect email information, pop up a chat box, inform people about your services or simply brand your product – or all of these things – landing pages are there to sell you and what you have to offer. For some small businesses, landing pages are so poorly optimized that a potential sale is dead in the water less than 30 seconds after a new customer hits landing pages.

Conversion Optimization and Landing Pages

One of the biggest problems with conversion-optimized landing pages – and web design in general – is that the design expectations of the business owner don’t fit what customers need to see. Many business owners don’t make an aesthetic distinction between what their personal website and business website should look like. The result is two-fold:

  1. The landing page doesn’t meet the needs of the consumer. Meaning the look, general appeal or feel of the site are a turn-off to the user. This can happen when the business owner goes for a site that matches their own preferences and aesthetic rather than meeting the needs of his/her target audience.
  2. The landing page doesn’t meet the customer’s needs for conversion optimization. This can mean several things, including lack of a clear path to leave an email, no contact information for the business, sales copy that isn’t compelling or missing listings of key product features.

Don’t Just Use Your Imagination

When it comes to conversion optimization, let the data speak for you. Google Analytics is one way to get an idea of how users are moving through your website. Marketing automation like Lead Liaison can give you a fuller picture by identifying web actions with a particular user or company. This sort of deep analysis and business intelligence can help you ensure your conversion optimization is timely, cost-effective and enhances your website.

Business owners should also remember that multiple pages on a site have multi-functional purposes. Running an Adwords campaign that sends people to a business index page isn’t always the best way to go – for starters, index pages often aren’t keyword or service themed and using a .com index page as an Adwords destination URL can decrease your quality score. This can drive up the costs of your advertising and CPA when using Adwords.

Instead, create multiple pages that speak to all your services, then practice good conversion optimization on those pages over time as data comes in. In this way, you can ensure your customers get what they need and your business keeps closing sales.

For more information on how a well-placed marketing automation platform can inform your conversion optimization efforts, check out Lead Liaison today!

Lead Liaison

Three Key Rules for Developing Lead Forms

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Three Key Rules for Developing Lead FormsB2B marketers have a plethora of tools available to gather information about marketing leads. One of the more effective methods is using online lead forms. Using a form to capture relevant data about a lead allows you to organize leads, personalize marketing messages, and score behaviors. There are three key rules for developing lead forms.

Developing effective forms requires thoughtful consideration about what information you want to gather and how forms will be used within a lead nurturing system. The first rule of lead form development is: don’t get greedy! Asking for too much information too early in the qualification and nurturing process can put any future relationship at risk. The most effective lead forms for a newsletter subscription or white paper download will only ask for a name and email address. Once the email address is collected it becomes an alternate communication channel, and an opportunity to deepen the relationship. So ask for minimum information up front then earn permission to request more.

The second rule of lead form development: keep it fresh! Rotating questions is a form development technique in which new questions are posed each time a lead revisits a form. For instance, a lead that visits a product page must enter a registered user name and answer a few questions that reveal qualifying criteria – such as company size, revenues, and industry – in exchange for an in-depth video about the product’s features. The next time that lead visits the same product page, she enters her username and answers three different questions that reveal need – such as purpose for visiting page or growth expectations – in exchange for a live chat Q & A session.

Protecting personal identifiers should be an essential factor in developing lead forms to gather information. Therefore, the third rule of lead form development is: keep it safe! Security verification certificates are commonplace among internet vendors providing online transactions, and should be included in any marketing page that contains a form. Secure socket layer (SSL) certificates present you as a trusted vendor to your leads, and can provide them peace of mind when sharing company information.

A final note: default form fields should be left blank. If your form has a default setting which returns a certain score in your lead scoring matrix, then the possibility exists that the lead will not select the another option. Often a lead will plow through a form by selecting the default option. Therefore, the score may be inadvertently skewed, and worse, not clearly represent a lead’s actual circumstance. For example, using “executive” as a default setting for a lead’s position may not clearly specify her position within the organization. If the associated score for a response of “executive” is 100, but the lead turns out to be a middle manager with a score of 15, then the resulting score won’t accurately reflect that lead’s appropriateness.

Lead Liaison offers companies professional-grade web form and landing page design solutions.  If you’re interested in visually creating forms and landing pages using drag/drop technology and using advanced techniques such as progressive profiling, form pre-fill and more let us know! We’d love to earn your business.