Have You Noticed More Attention to Events?

We've always done a lot of work helping clients support events - from webinars to road shows to annual conferences. One thing that was brutally apparent over the last two years was the reduced use of events as marketing tool, but that appears to be changing.

I'm seeing a lot of our clients and their competitors renewing their use of events in the marketing mix and while I'm delighted to see it, at first it had me wondering. Let's face it, all the buzz is still about automation, content creation and social media, so why the renewed interest in events?

Since I don't think it has anything to do with a desire to spend money that isn't generating a payback, clearly something important happens at events that is missed in other areas and I'm going to suggest to you that what it has to do with is making a live, personal contact with suspects, prospects and customers in a way that the internet, for all it's spectacular virtues simply doesn't offer. (At least not yet)

Events allow your audience to see, hear, touch and genuinely connect with their thought leaders, peers, colleagues, vendors, prospects and customers. That enhanced personal connection is the one thing that is unique about events. It's the one reason that in spite of rising costs and reduced cost efficiency, event marketing is not dead and will never die.

We have to be smarter about how we take advantage of event marketing's unique attributes by planning our "presentation" more thoughtfully and maximizing the impact of those personal contacts.

Here are some ideas from Brian Carroll and a post he wrote last year called 100 Tips for Trade Show Lead Generation

1. Follow-up quickly after the event. Think about your follow-up process before the event happens not afterwards.
2. Create event follow-up content pieces, talking points and email templates for your sales team to use to add value and continue the conversation in a relevant way rather than “pitching” everybody.
3. Develop a nurturing track that for event attendees connects with the theme or the content of the event. Try to do this at least for a few months at minimum.
4. See the event as a conversation (or conversation starter) not a campaign. Don’t stop the dialog. Brainstorm ways you can keep the dialog going.

Now Brian was mostly talking about Trade Shows in his post, but the same thinking holds true for Road Shows, Seminars, User Conferences and Webinars as well.

Use the face to face connections to nurture an ongoing dialogue and once you've established it, don't sacrifice the personal connection. You'll do a lot of email follow up for sure, but be sure to pick up the phone and remind your contacts that you are a real person with a real voice.

If you don't have the time to make those calls yourself, consider how much further ahead you'll be with a well planned and brilliantly executed voicemail message. Just don't settle for less than brilliantly executed and you'll improve your marketing ROI by increasing the efficiency of your events.

Aligning Sales and Marketing

One of the challenges that many companies appear to be facing is what to do to bring sales and marketing programs more into sync with each other. Eventually, the two departments have to find better ways to work together since, when it comes right down to it, both are trying to achieve the same final objective- more and preferably more profitable revenue.

What's most interesting (at least to me) is that to generate leads marketing is focused on "mass" messaging usually using email and trying to keep from wearing out their lists. At the same time sales is doing more one to one outreach, usually on the phone but when they don't have enough good leads to work with, face the problem of low response rates on cold (or at the very best- lukewarm) calls. Sales only alternative is to simply do what they have always done and "turn up the volume". But there is a a limit to what one person can do.

Oh yes, and there's that wonderful issue of content creation, because astonishingly enough, when sales has to make cold calls because they don't have the leads to work with, they need to be able to offer something of interest/value to the contacts.

One possible option is for both marketing and sales to work together to create combined email and telephone programs - perhaps these can be extended to also include direct mail.

They can - at least to some extent- combine the databases they're working from (I have frequently found them to be different). Marketing can save the day with content creation and campaign management and sales can offer a new "marketing spokesperson" to help add variety to their message and reduce the wear-out on the lists.

You an use this Boxpilot Lead Nurturing outline to show the campaign structure and provide an easy and affordable service to actually deliver these combined voice and mail campaigns.