by WireBuzz, on May 31, 2022 3:36:29 PM
Let's talk about 7-time Super Bowl Champion Tom Brady for a moment. What exactly does he have that other quarterbacks don’t? He’s certainly not stronger or more athletic than any of his peers. So what makes him the greatest of all time? 🐐
It’s his ability to strategically adapt to any situation. Preparation before a game helps him stay calm under pressure and quick on his feet, but it’s the time spent reviewing his internal playbook after a game that allows him to grow as a player.
Developing a playbook of your own post-event marketing tactics can also lead to a winning conference lead-generating strategy. In the final blog on conference prep strategy, we’ll discuss ways to convert interested prospects into buyers by developing versatile post-conference strategies that your entire team can successfully utilize.
When you start your conference planning at least 120 days before your event, your marketing, sales, and events teams are able to run plays like superstars for the rest of the year.
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.
Immediate Post-Conference Action
Leaving the locker room is usually the most insightful part of the game. Just as athletes use this time to review and focus on specific areas of improvement, your post-conference strategy can help determine where to focus your efforts following an event to determine strategy.
Capitalize on the wave of excitement generated from the event. Maintain momentum for those who attended and tease the curiosities of those who didn’t by immediately deploying the assets you created before the conference and actively targeting leads gathered during.
Share footage from the conference as soon as you can. Smart event marketers will leverage information gathered at the event and promote it like it’s breaking news. Audiences urgently want new information and inside information, especially those that didn't attend. Prioritize the content you captured and determine what is the most impactful as well as what can be efficiently produced and distributed immediately.
Highlight videos are a great way to put your best foot forward for your audience unable to attend and fill a valuable content vacuum after the event. Highlight videos can capture the excitement of the conference and are a great opportunity to gain exposure and maintain momentum after the event.
If you plan right, it’ll be easy to prove your event return on investment and you might even have fun while doing so.
Targeting Prospects Using Post-Conference Data
Using the lead data collected at the conference, you can identify interested prospects and develop follow-up campaigns. Thanks to your booth team, these leads have already been sorted into defined persona groups and are ready to be directed to the journey pages set up in the pre-event phase.
This makes it easy for your sales to report back to you any benefit they experienced, whether it’s closed business or strengthened relationships. But remember, management needs data to validate their investment, so quantifiable data is gold.
By creating a tracking segment in your customer relationship management for incoming leads and meetings from the event, you can track business generated by the conference. This puts your best image in front of your customers and competitors, which is invaluable.
If you have personas that have different interests or different vernacular language, you can always update the copy around the page for each one of those different personas or the copy in the email so it feels super relevant. So resist the temptation to do one size fits all outreach to them.
That's why you pre planned it in advance, so everything feels personal to them.
Optimizing Personalized Emails Sequences
Personalized email sequences are important for retaining post-conference interest for your persona groups, but they can reveal exactly how your audience receives and interacts with your content. Design email drip sequences using relevant and interesting content such as videos and blogs based around those persona groups.
Be creative with designs that attract attention by experimenting with content placement. A hierarchy of importance in information can help you determine what to place first or how to bury a lead to further fuel engagement. Experiment with the design to attract attention. Adding a play button to a thumbnail image, for example, can triple your click-through rates.
Viewers of product videos are 85% more likely to buy after watching. So, it's a great idea to send a follow-up email that includes your product overview video to attendees that dropped by your booth. That video should be somewhere between 1-2 minutes in length, highly scripted, and feature motion graphics and supportive video B-roll.
This is like the needle and the thread tying everything back up – but you need to do it quickly to continue the momentum. That's why you spent so much time earlier, so when you got to the post-event phase, your content is ready to go out like clockwork.
Utilizing Analytics
Backend analytics can report average audience retention times and even set up alerts indicating if a viewer watched more than a certain amount of a video. Use this insight to isolate specific prospects watching your videos to completion and direct your sales reps towards prioritizing those leads ready for action.
After the conference, set up alerts for your sales team to receive information about interested prospects and data on their interactions with your provided content. Your sales rep should be getting alerted on who is the most interested of all of the prospects based on how long they're watching. This allows your sales team to use the assets and different journey pages created in the pre-event phase to communicate intimately before their next meeting with a prospect.
While this strategy can help maximize ROI after a conference, you’ll lack the clarity to identify optimal buyers ready to make immediate purchasing decisions if you don’t start prepping early. If you want to win like Brady, you have to prep like him too and that starts 120 days before a conference.
A Winning Post-Conference Strategy Starts Early
Conferences aren’t just an investment for your events team; your sales and marketing teams can also run these plays on a daily basis. The salespeople line up in front of their prospects, analyze how they interact with your content, and adapt appropriate follow-ups to retain interest.
That’s a winning strategy from start to finish, and WireBuzz is here to make that strategy impactful.
Remember that it takes 120 days to be fully prepared for a conference and we’re here as your go-to lead-generating experts. Prepare to make your events ROI positive by scheduling your WireBuzz Strategy Session today!
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.