SMB Marketing Blog

If trade shows are an important part of your marketing strategy then you understand that they are one of the best ways to do both lead generation and face-to-face networking with a large group of qualified prospects. After a trade show, companies struggle with following up on a long list of inquiries with attendees, most of whom are not sales ready, and get neglected by the sales team who focus on ‘hotter’ leads.

Yves Matson, Senior Account Executive at ActiveConversion, & Nancy Nardin, President at Smart Selling Tools shared some strategies and tactics around increasing trade show ROI.

Attendees learned how equipping their company with simple and easy to use marketing automation software drives several benefits that increase trade show ROI:

Other topics covered were:

• Who is visiting your website right after a trade show
  - if you are “top of mind” enough for them to investigate you after a trade show, they are your best prospects!
• How to automate an email nurture campaign after a trade show
  - instead of having sales follow up with the entire list, have them focus on those that show engagement, even if that engagement is months later
• Track the effectiveness of various trade shows and compare the return on investment against each other

Download the recorded webinar from: http://www.activeconversion.com/webinar/webinar-june-2010-access.html

Download the presentation from: http://www.slideshare.net/activeconv/activeconversion-increasing-trade-show-roi

Both before and after the Global Petroleum Show, companies seriously interested in you will likely visit your website. Knowing who is interested in your product and services (and especially when), is something that you can use to increase your trade show return of investment substantially.

Finding The Needles in the Haystack
Research on trade shows have shown that serious buyers will gravitate to doing their research online and arrive at your website both before and after the trade show. But trade shows like the Global Petroleum Show can have two huge wins for exhibitors; Opt ins, and after show website visits.

Opt Ins
By virtue of the fact they are going to the GPS show, anyone visiting your booth is qualified in so far as they are in the energy industry. When one of them asks to be scanned for more information they are doing what is the holy grail of  marketing; they are “opting in”.

When someone asks for their badge to be scanned for more info, you can email nurture them  while always leading off with “you are receiving this because you visited our booth”. Then use a new breed of software to notify you as to who keeps coming back to your website, or visited the right pages on your website; it will tell you who to call, who you stand the best chance of building a relationship with.

The Bigger They Are, The Less They Call
Every exhibitor at the GPS hopes for booth visits from big, sought after accounts. But ironically the bigger the account, the less likely they are to call you after a trade show for fear of salespeople chasing them months on end. Regardless though, if these big accounts are interested in your company they will likely visit your website after the show to investigate your company further. Again, knowing who is visiting, who is interested in your company, who you should target over the weeks and months following the GPS show can be a significant competitive advantage.

eHow To Guide
Here’s a quick eHow To Guide from ActiveConversion that further explains what I’ve mentioned above. Good luck at the Global Petroleum Show 2010!

This is the sixth in the series of ActiveConversion’s very popular “eHow To” guides. This one deals with applying online marketing best practices to trade show marketing.  From the guide:

Business to business (B2B) trade shows can be a cost-effective means of gaining valuable face-to-face interaction with many qualified prospects. Most B2B companies have a reasonable expectation that sales revenue will result from participation at trade shows. Yet too often, experience has shown that for many leads from trade shows the timing is too early in the sales cycle. This experience may explain why business executives are constantly dismayed that so few leads are actually followed up by their sales departments. Trade show industry research indicates that 80-90 percent of all trade show leads are not followed up.

What the guide advocates is that in addition to using marketing automation in the promoting of attendance pre trade show, a trade show booth is analogous to a website for the large number of “inquiries” that exhibitors come home with:

• Most of these inquires are not ready to buy (95% according to the research)
• They have opted-in to receive more information (so they are ideal for email nurture campaigns)
• They need to be nurtured through a sales cycle so that in 3 or 6 or 9 months when/if they reach sales ready, the exhibitor is still top of mind
• They need sorting (scoring of their behavior) to weed out the ones who are, and who are not, worth inside/outside sales resources.

But also key is the takeaway that companies need to know who is visiting their website (marketing automation platforms like ActiveConversion identify anonymous company visits, as well as labelled individuals).  The traffic that visits a company’s website directly after a trade show is often a key indicator of whom at the trade show they got some level of engagement with, especially if there are multiple visits from different individuals from the same company.

To download this eHow To Guide on why marketing automation can increase your trade show ROI, click here or on the image!

ActiveConversion recently published an “eHow To” guide to Lead Nurturing that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With lead nurturing B2B marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

A great post back on Sept 10 from Funnelholic called Increase in Connect Rate = Increase in Conversion Rate made one point vividly clear: it is critical to resist the urge to dump all arguments for buying into an email campaign (or in a trade show booth meeting, or in a cold call) just because we have that prospects attention for once, and because we’re afraid of never getting it again.  Predictably, there is too much content, too big a message to swallow, and the prospect’s eyeballs roll back in their head and they delete the email, or leave the booth, or say “not interested” and hang up.

Marketers ALWAYS try to achieve too much with their campaigns and in most cases they are trying to sell the product when what they really need to do is sell the next step.

He goes on to make great points regarding Marketing Automation software, pre-connect scripts or emails, and opening scripts: use MA to help time the connect, then sell the connect, then with permission sell the next step.  Like any worthwhile, complicated, time consuming endeavour, break a sale down into bite sized pieces, and then achieve them sequentially.  Offering a glass water to a thirsty prospect will be more successful than offering a fire hose.

A lot of press predicts the end of trade shows as B2B businesses gravitate to doing their research online and arrive at your web page for a fraction the cost of arriving at your trade show booth.  But trade shows have one huge win for exhibitors, the audience is already distilled and when one of them asks to be scanned for more information they are doing what is the holy grail of online marketing; they are “opting in”.

When someone asks for their badge to be scanned for more info at a trade show you can email nuture them for months and months always leading off with “you are receiving this because you visited our booth”.  Unsubscribe is much reduced.
But like a bucket of “inquiries” produced from your web page over time, knowing what to do with the bucket of inquiries from the trade show is the key.   I said earlier “you get to nurture them for months and months”, this is usually lots of hard work, lots of phone calls and emails and such.  Mostly we procrastinate about doing these activities by focusing on legitimate leads we have a good chance of getting business from.  The vast majority of leads we get from trade shows leak out of the sales funnel (at which time we promptly spend more money to find new ones).

The answer to this problem is a new breed of software called Marketing Automation software, it is a must have for companies that go to trade shows.   Bring home your big list, write three or four or six emails, an easy set up to schedule them out over one or three or six months, then fire and forget.  The software will notify you as to who is most receptive to your message and engaged with your website; it will tell you who to call.

If you plan to go to a trade show, or are thinking about going to a trade show, take a closer look at marketing automation software; put some very cheap and easy tools in your hands to get more biz out of that bucket you come home with.

All too often I find myself talking to a marketer and end up in a conversation on measuring ROI for a trade show. We’ve all heard, or even made the argument around “waving the corporate flag, so we’re not expected to get a return …. It’s all about building brand awareness and collecting the odd lead”.  Well those days are long gone.

CES 2009

SMB organizations will spend tens of thousands of dollars on activities associated with their trade show booth, thousands on airfare, hotel, meals and entertainment, and most don’t even factor in the costs associated with having employees attending the show versus back in the office. Yet have no concrete plan on generating a return from the show. Most initiate a promotional giveaway at the booth in exchange for a scanned card and attend a conference networking event and exchange business cards. Having collected hundreds, maybe thousands of leads ….. Now what?

Fact: Leads go stale! You are only one of the many companies that a lead will have met at the trade show. They in turn will probably have forgotten about you, so a quick follow-up is imperative. Industry practice recommends that you follow-up with the leads within five business days of returning from a trade show. Reality is that most leads end up going stale as organization aren’t discipline enough, or don’t have a process to contact all of them in a timely manner. The other ugly fact is that some percentage of the contacts you collected were just looking for your promotional giveaway, yet you and your team will expend effort trying to contact every lead given no sense of priority or interest with the collected names. The likely scenario is that the team ends up frustrated and questioning value of their time as they make their way through the list and abandon the effort with other business imperatives taking priority. The end result … lost opportunity.

So what’s the answer? A Marketing Automation solution will give you the tools to address the lead base and prioritize those that are truly interested now, from those that are not. The remainder are put on a nurture program and when they display an appropriate buy signal, like a return visit weeks later to your pricing page, they then can be assigned to sales for follow-up. Statistics show that the majority of the leads will not be in a buy position within the first 90 days, and may need 3 to 12 months before they are ‘buy ready’. A returning prospect is seven times more likely to turn into a customer so knowing when they return to your website is extremely valuable.

The Irony: Organizations will spend tens of thousands on a single trade show, yet wrestle with investing hundreds per month into a marketing automation solution that will easily address the trade show example above and further allow for ongoing automated marketing efforts. With a Marketing Automation solution you are able to drive an integrated marketing program across your organization, while monitoring and tracking down at the campaign level and understanding your marketing ROI.

Measure your marketing ROI and understand where the true value is for your marketing spend.