3 Lead Generating Tips to Turbo-Charge your B2B Event Marketing

It’s becoming more and more apparent to B2B marketers that people like to buy from people, even in B2B marketing. In fact, for the fourth year in a row, B2B Marketers have rated in-person events as the most effective lead generation tactic in their marketing utility belt.

But when the majority of marketing budgets are already allocated and stretched on events, and more and more businesses ‘wanting in’ on the activity – how do you ensure your maximising your lead generation opportunities from this expensive but effective channel?

Here are some practical tips on how to get the best lead generation results from your event marketing with integrated digital, content and streaming activity.

Tip 1: Create an enticing pre-event campaign (and have some fun!)

Creating a pre-event buzz around your brand is guaranteed to drive delegates to your stand, but you’re going to have to think outside the box if you want to stand out from the competition. If you want to turbo-charge your event lead generation, it’s time to put down the bland ‘Visit our stand’ message and create exciting pre-event content that can engage your audience and capture those leads.

Taking advantage of opportunities before the ‘Society for Human Resource Management Conference 2014’, Payscale (and their purple squirrel) created a pre-event buzz with an email campaign featuring an interactive personality assessment for their contacts to ‘find their inner purple squirrel’ (random we know).

The result? By creating an enticing pre-event campaign and following up with an invite to the event, Payscale generated over 600 leads before the conference had even started, AND created an awesome conversation starter for stand visitors too (nice work for some furry friends!).

Tip 2: Conduct a survey or research study to support your event

Content marketing is all the rage right now, and that doesn’t stop when at a conference or marketing event. With some strategic thinking and a little pre-planning you can boost your on-the-day lead generation with a live industry study or survey, while speaking to delegates on your stand (it makes a great conversation starter too).

By creating a short survey of questions related to your industry, your delegates needs and their future predictions (as an example), you’ll have all the data you need to create an original whitepaper or marketing guide.  

Creating a captivating first-hand research paper and then distributing it to your attendees will help boost lead generation and reinforce your brand as a trusted information resource.

Tip 3: Take the event experience into hyper-drive

Encouraging delegates to visit your stand (or workshop) on the day is kind of the point, but what about all those prospects who couldn’t make it to the stand?

If you’re feeling techy (and brave) hosting and streaming live from your event can be an effective way of boosting your on-the-day lead generation. Engineering.com felt brave enough to pull it off, and saw 4 times as many people attend the webinar as were at the event workshop itself (well, they are engineers!).

By extending your on-the-day reach online with live webinars, social media events or video streaming, you’ll boost your opportunities for lead generation and put your brand at the forefront of tech-savvy online/offline integration (impressive!).

Before you take these lead generating tips away and start crossing wires between the physical and digital – stop. The success of any face-to-face lead generation activity boils down to just one thing – understanding the purchasing habits of your modern B2B Buyer.

It’s time to get started by building an in-depth understanding of the modern B2B Buyer – Download your free guide here.