How Can You Leverage Marketing Automation at Events?

A recent report from Sagefrog Marketing Group says, “Trade shows and events provide the highest ROI” – this clearly depicts that event marketing has great potential. And this is the reason why B2B marketers are sinking so much time into preparation and follow-ups. So is there any way that can give same results with lesser efforts?

Marketing Automation – The Rescuer

Till now you have been leveraging marketing automation to follow-up and report on your online marketing campaigns. Marketing automation allows you to do the same with your offline events (trade shows, conferences, and more) as well. Here are some of the ways how marketing automation can streamline your offline events process-

Pre-event Before attending an event, you need to be sure that your prospects and customers know about your presence. The best way to do this is by sending out targeted email blasts to your prospects during the weeks leading to the event. In your email, you can advertise your presence (giving booth number, etc.) and include other details like giving away of free goodies for the attendees. You can also send emails to your prospects mentioning different products – informing how your product can complement their present setup, and also letting them know about your presence at the event.

During the Event At the tradeshows, you get very less time to collect important information from all the prospects. Instead of relying on traditional paper-based forms for data collection, ease your work using marketing automation. It streamlines the process of collecting the most relevant information from the attendees by setting up landing pages and auto responders. Having a dedicated landing page for the event allows you to collect more information in lesser time. A good practice for your tradeshows or events is to set up auto responder emails that deploys as soon as the prospects submit a form.

After the event Once the event is over, make sure you follow up with your prospects. Place them on nurturing tracks and evaluate your ROI. The leads collected through landing pages automatically get added to your database, and attached to a campaign when the form is submitted. Once the leads are imported in your system, you can assign them to your sales reps to follow up. While assigning the leads, you can also check any notes that were made when the leads were imported in the system. After you’ve assigned the leads to your sales reps, you’re ready to start nurturing your leads with post-event information using drip campaigns.

Calculate ROI In marketing automation system, as the prospects are attached to campaigns, it’s easy to attribute revenue to its source. This insight shows you how many event generated leads converted into customers. This information can be used to calculate the ROI of the event.

Want to leverage marketing automation to streamline your event marketing process?

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