by WireBuzz, on May 24, 2022 5:55:07 PM
What’s the single thing your team needs for conference success? A double whammy event strategy.
Conferences can be overwhelming. With so much happening, it can be easy to get distracted from your goal of generating leads. However, there are simple solutions to help your team stay focused for a successful conference return on investment that will benefit your marketing and sales teams for the rest of the year.
Remember it takes 120 days to be fully prepared, and in last week’s blog, we talked about the necessary steps to take during that time to define audiences and build momentum. Now, we’ll dive deeper and explore how you can use those pre-conference resources during the event to attract attention, generate leads, and build valuable future content.
After all, isn’t the goal of going to conferences to grow your business?
Interested in learning more? Download our Ultimate Conference Checklist for a comprehensive look into the steps and assets your team can take for a successful event ROI. Schedule your strategy session today to make an impact at your next medical or life science conference.
Divide and Conquer
During the event, it’s about working smarter, not harder to generate leads. Start by dividing up your team into two distinct groups: one for meeting prospects and nurturing leads and the other for capturing content at the event.
At the end of the day, your team walks away from the conference with a solid list of interested, segmented prospects and a valuable pool of captured video content for both your sales and marketing teams.
That’s efficiency you can’t argue with.
Engage with Your Audience
The lead-nurturing team at your booth plays an active and instrumental role at conferences.
While your pre-event materials did a good job attracting prospects to your booth, now it’s time to put your strategy in motion. Your lead-nurturing team stationed at the booth is there to engage with your prospects and actively enter their information into your database.
The goal is to sort each lead by persona group, determine interest levels, and give your marketing and sales team valuable insight for follow-up emails.
Write down your lead-generating goals before the event and inspire your team to surpass them. Set up a friendly competition between members of your team on who can get the most number of leads into their badge scanner. Offer irresistible prizes to motivate them to hustle harder, get more leads in your database, and have fun while doing it. Now you’re making an impact during the conference while putting your own unique twist on it.
Use Email Sequences to Mature Your Leads
When prospects get into the lead database, your team should be sending out hyper-relevant email drip sequences geared to that prospect’s persona group. These email sequences are important because they direct your prospects to those relevant journey pages you created in the pre-event phase.
Now you’re ready to crush your conference ROI goals because you have personalized follow-up materials targeted to each persona group by their recipient’s needs. The more personalized and relevant your follow-up communication is, the higher their attention span and conversion rate will be.
That's a universal truth that will never go away. Plus, creating the post-conference email follow-ups before the event, enables you to seize on the prospect's excitement and momentum following the event.
Capture Content During the Conference
Concurrently, your second team should be focusing on key opinion leaders (KOLs) and capturing event content.
Identify the KOLs your personas resonate with and schedule as many interviews and testimonial stories as possible. The content captured at the conference can be used by your sales and marketing teams to generate and engage your leads for the rest of the year.
Tactical marketers know that conference events are great opportunities to dramatically decrease expenses and essentially skip two rocks with one toss. Instead of flying production crews around the country to film different KOLs, use conference events to capture all the content you need in one place at one time to be used for your website, social channels, and email drip sequences for the rest of the year.
Talk about a win-win!
Remember the 80/20 Event Marketing Rule
Remember that the event is just as important for those who couldn't attend as it is for those who could. In fact, the audience that couldn’t attend is larger and even hungrier for new content than those who attended.
FOMO is real folks, so capture as much content as you can! If you hired a rock star doctor to speak at a dinner, record the presentation because the investment opportunity is far greater to those consuming it digitally than to the 20 people you were able to squeeze into the dining room.
You should be magnifying that lecture and leveraging it like it’s news to the 80% of your prospects who couldn't attend the event but are still yearning for content and information.
Don’t Just Go to a Conference, Make an Impact
Once the event is over, buy yourself a stiff drink. But don’t get too comfortable, because there’s still one piece missing. Stay tuned for the final blog of the series discussing conference follow-up strategies.
It's not easy to plan for a conference, but it doesn't have to be complicated. Bridging the gap between complexity and impact has never been easier with WireBuzz, your best friend for growth. Schedule a strategy session with WireBuzz today to get a head start on your conference lead-generation planning. From booth loops to onsite filming, we have the resources to transform your conference relationships into an ROI-generating machine.
Like what you’re learning? Download our Ultimate Conference Checklist for more info on how to generate leads and make an impact at your next event.