The B2B industry depends majorly on events to generate leads. However, if you are not following these simple tricks, you might be losing out on prospective leads, and in turn the opportunity to grow your business. To generate high-quality leads, you need to have a well laid out event marketing strategy put together with a focus on customer engagement and conversion.
Most of us in the event marketing industry are still unsure when physical B2B events will resume fully. So a lot of the companies are now turning to virtual events. With 2020 past us and 2021 round the corner, what should businesses do to face the new and altered dynamics of organizing and attending B2B events?
Here are 5 tips that you should follow to maximize your lead generation at events in 2021.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
When planning your event, it is important to understand who your target audience is. This will help you to promote your event more effectively, thus making your investments worth it and increasing your chances of higher conversions. In order to do this effectively:
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- Know the type of audience you want to attract and build your target persona list. For instance, their job department, title, company, location and others
- Go through all the marketing collateral and customise / personalize it to so that it is most appealing to the attendees
- Know what your prospects are looking for, their business challenges, and include your solutions to address their challenges in your promotional content
In 2021, when it comes to hosting physical events over online events, personalization is all the more important as events will most likely be done at a smaller scale and targeting prospects only in a certain region and target market. Hence, the better that you know your audience, the better you will be able to plan your small-scale events.
2. Have an Easy Event Registration Process
The easier your registration process is, the more users would want to fill in the forms. This will lead to greater attendance. In this regard, there are two factors to take into consideration.
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- If you have a form that takes a long time to fill in with a lot of information that needs to be written/typed, there are chances that you will lose potential qualified leads.
- If the page takes long to load or is not built to be viewed on smartphones then you can lose prospects.
While designing the registration form, it is vital to design it such that you are able to gather all the information that you need. For instance, it might be important for you to ask about the attendees’ organization and email, but you could leave out asking for the company website URL as it can be found from the organization name and email domain.
3. Have a Robust Follow-up Strategy Pre and Post Event
Pre-event follow up is an essential component of lead generation at events. For this you can:
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- Have a live chat option on your event page. With this, you can engage and answer all questions from the prospects and increase the chances of their attendance. Also, most live chat tools capture visitor email IDs. When you have this data you can add it to the centralized database and use it to follow up both pre and post the event.
- Pre-event curiosity can be piqued through social media and also through websites like Quora. Here, you can give more information about your brand and product and answer various B2B questions that the audience ask. The more visible you become on this site, the more the audience would be interested in attending your event when you announce one.
Having a proper post-event follow up plan is equally critical in generating qualified leads from events. A prompt follow-up makes the prospects see that they are valued and thus warm up to the idea of buying from you. For this, integrate your registration process with your CRM so that no contact data is lost. This is where the contact management software,
Whether it’s pre event or post event marketing – ScanBizCards our business card scanner app, will dome in handy. With this app installed on your phone, you can take pictures of all business cards and conference badges with a simple click. Once this is done, the app saves the scanned data and all information can be easily exported to the CRM.
4. Be Open to Hosting Virtual Events
Maximizing B2B lead generation in 2021 means you need to be open to hosting vital events. While economies are opening up and events are being planned, it is still low and still at a smaller scale. On the other hand, if you host a virtual event, trade shows, product launches, and others you would have access to a wider audience, thus increasing your chances of getting more prospective clients. This would also help:
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- To reduce expenses on hospitality. At a time when budgets are tight for many organizations, online events thus come as a boon
- Get important stakeholders who have not been able to attend your events due to the lockdown, would now be able to attend the shows in person
To host an online event that attracts the audience you should have:
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- Great content
- Not an extremely long event as that would not hold their attention
- Interactive discussions
- Easily downloadable resources
- An exciting backdrop
- Freebies like e-books as this would loop in greater participation
5. Engage With Attendees
Events and shows are not only about attendance, but it is also about the interaction your attendees had with you. Only when engagement is high can you expect to have more closures. Even now, when you might be hosting the event online, you should use technology such that you are able to have discussions and talks with your prospective buyers. For this you can:
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- Reach out to attendees after the event on a one-on-one basis
- Use screen sharing to make the event more meaningful
- Allow prospects to speak and listen to them carefully so that you can offer useful solutions
- Pause during webinars just to address queries and concerns
- Find out which time would suit the prospects most before you schedule an event
Concluding Thoughts
Events are time-consuming and an expensive method of generating leads. Hence, setting your KPIs from before will help you to measure your ROI once the event is over. To reap the maximum benefit from the event and generate the most number of leads, follow these suggestions and you are sure to see a positive impact on your sales pipeline after the event.