Event marketing is an excellent way to build leads for your business.
Unlike landing pages, having the ability to talk to your audience face to face is an advantage in itself. You can work your sales magic on people and take a more personal approach in the hopes of turning their interests into actual subscriptions or sales.
However, you may still need to bolster your lead generation efforts in your event marketing campaigns. If that is the case, below are some ideas to help you attract more leads and extract information from them.
Use URL shorteners
Tying your event marketing with your website goals is a smart way to hike up your conversion through non-online means. This will be beneficial to your lead generation campaign especially if your landing pages are not attracting as much traffic and conversions as you expected.
Assuming that you have been applying different content promotion tactics to boost your landing page, you can go a different route by taking advantage of your event marketing opportunities. You can do this by handing out branded marketing tools during the event.
If you have a booth and lots of attendees passing by, you can display your brochures and flyers with your branding on all, on a rack so people can take a copy. For open house seminars and workshops, hand out branded water bottles and packed food.
Aside from branding, include the URL of the landing page you want to promote. I have written a short guide on how you can do this using a URL builder and shortener years ago that still applies to this campaign.
The great thing about URL shorteners is that you can track the traffic from the event alone. By creating a source, medium, and campaign name using the URL builder, you can see how many people from the event used the shortened URL to visit the page.
You can get more indepth with your tracking by creating goals in your Google Analytics.
- Do you want users to stay on the page for at least a specific number of minutes?
- Do you want them to click onto another page after visiting the page of the shortened URL?
- More importantly, do you want them to complete a transaction from your page?
Check out this post at KISSmetrics that looks into the four analytical goals that businesses measure about their website traffic and how you can set them up. The same concept also applies if your goal is to increase your followers on social media.
Ask people to answer a survey
A survey is an ingenious way of extracting information from your audience. If done correctly, you not only gather answers from people that you can use to improve your business but also drive them down your sales funnel by including their emails into your mailing list!
Come up with a list of questions with the intention of bringing up data that you can use for your site or blog.
Ideally, you can ask specific questions about your niche. For example, if you own a niche about health and fitness, run a survey that finds out the roadblocks that prevent them to live a healthy lifestyle.
Make it easy for respondents to answer the survey by offering multiple choices. Also, offer the ‘Others’ choice for each question if the other options do not provide the right response.
Create the survey using Google Forms. This way, you will have an organized list of answers to your surveys saved in your Google Drive.
Use the answers after the event and turn them into content for your blog. Using the example above, you can create a benchmark survey ebook about the roadblock to leading a healthy lifestyle. Use the ebook as an exclusive content on your site – visitors will have to sign up as a subscriber before they can gain access to your findings.
The problem you may have right now is getting people during the event to participate in your survey. Given that most people would want to spend as much time as possible in every booth, it may be difficult for you to get them to join your survey.
One way of encouraging them to join your survey is by giving them an incentive. After answering your survey, give them samples of your products or offer a discount coupon for your services if they decide to sign up.
Once they have joined, you now get access to their emails that you can include in your mailing list. Create a campaign made for your event subscribers and acquaint them down your sales funnel.
Offer consultation services on the spot
Building upon answering the survey, you can get people to listen to your spiel about your business. The fact that they attended the event or convention means that they are interested in what you have to offer. Therefore, give them the opportunity to discuss your services and products with you in a 5-10 minute sit-down talk.
Using the example of a health and lifestyle niche again, you can run a couple of free tests to people to determine their health levels during the event. Have doctors and physicians ready during the event so they elaborate the findings from the tests and give them actionable tips on how they can improve their health.
It is best to prepare at least a presentation that will cover the basics of your business. This will help them visualize your words with visual aid and data to make a better sense of what you are trying to say.
Before running the tests, ask them to enter their email addresses. There’s an excellent chance that people will actually give their emails because they will get the free tests in return.
Once your lead generation campaign during the event is done, you can move all the emails into a mailing list separate from the ones who took the survey. Since they sat down with you, there is a high chance that they are sincerely interested with what you have to offer. So send them transactional emails in the hopes of converting them.
Piecing everything together
These lead generation tactics are clever ways to make the most out of your online marketing campaigns done offline. More importantly, they help amplify your website reach and hopefully boost your conversion rate with more people coming in.
For those how have done event marketing successfully, are there other practical ways that owners can drum up their online business during events and conventions? Share your suggestions by commenting below.
Images: Author’s Own
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