Did you know that the lead generation market generated more than $3,100 million back in 2021? The market is expected to grow rapidly as companies explore new and advanced ways to generate leads for businesses.
One of those ways, and often overlooked, for generating leads is hosting events. Not just events, but conferences as well. They are a form of “local lead generation” where you get to interact with your target audience and have direct engagement.
This article will cover the following topics:
In fact, events can combine on-venue interactions with digital ones – think: seminars and webinars. This grants you access to an even wider audience. Thus, events and conferences are perhaps, one of the most effective lead generation methods.
So, let’s discuss a few strategies that can help.
When you think of event lead generation, different types of events come to mind. For example, lead generation events could include:
These events are business opportunities for you to interact with prospects, with potential customers and capture them as “leads”. It is also the reason why lots of businesses include event managers, coordinators, and other professionals in their email marketing campaigns, for example.
If you’re looking for a reliable source of high-quality email lists, especially event managers and planning executives’ contact, sign up with BookYourData.
[CTA1]
Firstly, event lead generation is the process where you identify, invite, and engage potential leads during an event or conference. You engage and nurture these leads to turn them into “paying customers”.
Be it an in-person event (seminar) or a virtual one (webinar), it gives you networking opportunities to communicate and interact directly with your target audience. The people attending are already interested in your business – and its products or services.
It thus gives you the chance to convert these leads into valuable business opportunities by partnering, collaborating, or even B2B lead generation. This can be through keynote speeches, product demonstrations, and workshops, among many others.
These events become a platform to increase brand awareness and trust among the target audience by displaying your experience and the value of your brand. In simple words, event lead generation works as a way to help arrange direct contact with your target audience, which later leads to:
Now, there are different types of events. You could be promoting a new product. For that, you’ll set up a product launch event where your target audience will likely include retailers, distributors, and other essential parties in your supply chain.
Similarly, if you’re aiming to collaborate with industry leaders, you’ll be focusing on networking events. Here the target audience could be other types of professionals within your industry. You can approach them through personal contact using B2B databases – or rely on generating leads through LinkedIn.
Conferences are excellent places to network. These typically include keynote speeches, panel discussions, and even educational sessions. This is where your business can generate interest among the target audience and gather feedback.
Be it SaaS lead generation by collaborating with other tech companies or hosting product demonstrations, networking events can boost lead generation at your business.
Another good lead generation source would be through online training sessions and virtual workshops. This is an educational session with Q&A and or a general discussion regarding the industry or your brand. This is a nice way to capture leads since you will not be tied up to a place or a venue. Instead, you get to reach them over the internet anywhere in the world.
A product launch event also allows your business to launch your new product – and collect leads. Host live demonstrations and show your products or services for views in order to get you key feedback from attendees. This helps you in engaging with the crowd and capturing leads and also gives you an update about their preferences as customers.
There are trade shows where you can showcase your products or solutions. This is where brands set up exhibition booths for product demonstration. The number of leads you will attract will depend on how well you participate in or host a trade show.
Webinars probably top the list of all easier, less expensive lead events available. They are inexpensive and global. You can easily invite participants from virtually anywhere in the world. And, as they register, you can collect registration data to segment them.
You may also use the free email lookup tool like BookYourData to verify the emails of your leads. This way, you can utilize segmented email lists for targeted lead generation. For instance, you can develop individualized communication strategies in emails or messaging for nurturing leads.
A 2018 report has it that events helped generate the most B2B leads. Events and conferences offer a chance to get quality leads. During events, you can meet prospects face to face and determine who the most interested and engaging people are.
But this only occurs with a proper strategy. With an appropriate strategy, you can outline everything about the lead generation strategy. More on that below!
Identifying the Ideal Attendees for Your Event
This would be referred to as the strategy of defining the right target audience to start with. You will have to look into various types of leads such as which ones you may want to target. It will help find those people most likely to benefit from the event or services and have already shown interest in your products or services.
Before planning the event, you should set clear goals for the event. What do you plan to achieve? Is it a new product that needs to receive market attention or are you simply focused on brand visibility? Depending on the goal, you could tailor your lead generation strategy which will help you boost brand awareness, drive more sales, and so on.
The success of your event will generate whether you gathered high-quality leads or not. By the way, over 50% of marketers find improving lead quality as one of the major challenges. If you don’t plan the event well, you’re going to end up with the wrong audience and thus, poor-quality leads. So, from scheduling to speeches to content delivery to the finale, you need a well-organized event to capture and engage as many leads as possible.
You have to work with the right event organizers. They are professionals who will help you plan and organize the event down to the last detail. A good team of organizers will facilitate networking, making sure everyone sees what you have to offer. In turn, this will help you gather an audience and ensure streamlined data collection. Some organizers might even offer event apps to improve the overall experience.
Not every event has to be an in-person event, especially if you want to engage a diverse audience. You should leverage virtual conferences and workshops to extend your reach. It is a popular event lead generation strategy where companies include virtual elements into their plan to capture leads from a broader audience.
Furthermore, you can use email marketing to engage potential leads. This way, when you use personalized email campaigns, such as through automated cold email software, you can encourage pre-registration among your audience.
This will not only drive engagement rate but thanks to the pre-registration process, you’ll get access to relevant attendee data. This is where you can also use email verification tools, like by signing up with BookYourData, to verify emails for free before initiating an email campaign.
Another effective event lead generation strategy is to implement structured networking sessions. You could introduce icebreaker activities or roundtable discussions where your teams can interact with prospects.
When they exchange information, they can build strong relationships and increase engagement. For instance, your team can set up niche-specific discussions, like generating roofing leads, by organizing a roundtable discussion for roofing companies.
An overlooked strategy to improve lead generation through events and conferences is collecting lead information. Many companies organize events, but don’t facilitate their campaign with the right data collection and contact exchange setups. Some of the methods include:
It’s helpful to send out digital forms where attendees can sign up using registration data. It could be via emails, blogs, articles, and other types of content or marketing efforts.
Placing QR codes throughout event venues or even pre-event settings like shops, stores, or other places can help capture leads quickly – and effectively.
You can also offer incentives to pre-registered attendees for sharing the event with others. Perhaps, an attendee gets free services or a discount code (or maybe, a chance to enter a lucky draw) for sharing their contact details with the company and referring the event to someone else.
Imagine exhibition booths that are interactive and offer firsthand experience of using products or services to potential customers. It is a way to engage with leads and maintain interest in your brand.
You could also set up live demonstrations, use visually appealing displays, and other elements to actively engage and pull leads toward your brand. This is particularly useful if competitors are attending the same event or conference too.
You can also use events as a venue for showcasing your expertise and knowledge. From sharing valuable market insights to case studies and the latest reports, you can use a number of tactics to build credibility around your brand.
When we say interactive activities, we want to point out the concept of “gamification”. Using activities like quizzes, contests, and challenges can make the event more fun and engaging. This will drive the interest in your brand and also help you showcase the brand's value to potential customers.
You can also leverage “incentives” as a way to encourage specific actions from attendees. Think of offering a free eBook, a digital resource, if the leads respond to pre-registration emails for the event. This can continue up until the event too. For example, you could offer special discounts or unique deals to those attendees willing to interact with products or services from your brand.
Many companies underestimate the importance of designing a good and catchy registration form. The easier and quicker it is to fill out a form, the higher the chances that leads will interact with and submit the forms. It will potentially drive up the participation rate while increasing business opportunities to boost conversions.
One of the most convenient and effective ways to capture leads through events and conferences is to require session sign-ups. This is a multi-faceted approach that reveals lots of valuable insights into your event and its outcomes.
For instance, you could track the level of marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) you generated, i.e., prospects who interacted with your marketing efforts and signed up for the event. Then, you could also track actual attendance with the registration rate and surveys or feedback polls to determine the success of your events.
Moreover, you can deploy event apps and CRM tools to boost attendee data collection in your events. You can also include lead capture software to make the process more efficient. That way, you can gather, verify, analyze, and segment lead data from the initial touchpoint for smoother operations.
After the event, organize and analyze all the collected lead information. Before using all the contact details in your lead nurturing campaign, you have to verify whether all details are valid and active or not. Take emails for instance, verifying the email is very important before hitting “send” on the email marketing campaign.
One of the best ways to maintain interest and retail leads captured through events and conferences is to send personalized emails. In case an attendee made an error while sharing email contacts, you can use free online email lookup tools to verify the validity, like with BookYourData. That way, you can send tailored messages to guide them through the sales funnel.
Once the event is over, you can continue generating more leads and nurturing the captured ones. You can do that through content marketing to engage leads, post-event. It helps you maintain interest among your target audience after the initial interaction at events. Besides, did you know that content marketing, according to 74% of companies, helps them get more leads?
The most important thing to remember is that events and conferences require careful planning. You have to strategize and use a comprehensive approach to make sure you can maximize lead generation output through such campaigns.
First, you have to set clear goals; what is the event about or for? Second, you have to consider the right target audience for the event; who should attend the event and is most likely to be highly engaged?
Then, you need to have a content strategy in place to engage attendees while setting up data collection to capture leads – like forms, surveys, and so on. Once you have the lead info, you can follow up with potential customers or partners with personalized communication (emails, messaging, texts, etc.)
Yes, lead scoring can be helpful. It will allow you to qualify leads by assigning values based on their behavior, level of engagement, and so on which will help you prioritize them. As a result, you can pursue leads with the most potential to boost conversions.
The future trends for event lead generation will most likely include AI-driven tools. These will ideally help with data collection, organization, lead scoring, and a ton of other processes. Moreover, as we have seen, many virtual and hybrid event formats are possible due to advanced technological solutions.
[CTA1]
[CTA2]