What to do with the most valuable booth traffic at a trade show

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Johnny Mone

 

So you have worked hard in the build-up to your trade show to make sure you have engaged with your target market and maximized your chances of them coming to see you on the exhibition floor.

Now the challenge is to make sure that you optimize your engagement with the most valuable prospects who come to visit you.

Many events provide exhibitors with some kind of data capture device that scans delegate badges and stores their details. This data is typically collated by the event organizers and sent to you in a spreadsheet via email a few days (often more than a week) after the show.

The more engaged and valuable visitors frequently provide you with a business card on which you jot some notes and put in a pile for processing once you get back to the office a few days (often more than a week) later.

The problems

Three problems arise with this approach:

1. Too much time elapses between the booth discussion and the first follow-up contact during which time the prospect has spoken to lots of other exhibitors and has been bombarded with event information and is also trying to keep up with their day job. So their initial interest gets diluted to the point where their response to the sales call a week later is “just send me some information”.

2. Business cards get lost, damaged or wrongly assigned in the gap between the trade show discussion and the follow-up, resulting in a bad re-connection (or none at all!)

3. Back at the office, the data entry process into the CRM system is laborious and disconnected from the booth conversation, important details are lost and it takes even more time before the sales team gets in touch.

The solution

A powerful solution is to use a marketing software platform to capture data and nurture leads.

Here is how it works:

• Set up a landing page for the show and use it to capture the details from business cards and scanned details in the periods when the exhibition floor is quiet.
• Launch a lead nurturing campaign that automatically sends a follow-up email to all those you have captured using the landing page. The content will be specific to the show and provide some valuable content that is not otherwise available.
• Include a second follow-up email in the nurturing campaign for those who respond to the first with an offer of something more directly engaging such as a web conference, meeting or assessment.
• Ensure that your marketing software platform is integrated to your CRM system so that it automatically synchronizes the data you have captured with the landing page. This way the sales assignment and follow-up can be faster and the prospect warmer as a result of having received relevant and immediate contact after the booth discussion.

We have tried this and so have some of our clients, and it works well.  So well that some of our visitors have come back to the booth after receiving the first nurturing email asking if we can help them do the same thing when they attend trade shows!

Find out some trade show best practices in our complimentary guide below. Download the Inbound Marketing for Trade Shows ebook now!
Image source: ThinkGeoEnergy via Flickr/Creative Commons

Tags: Marketing automation, Outbound Marketing, Trade Shows

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