The Data-Driven Marketer s Guide to Interactive Content and Event Data 8 Tips to Attract, Engage, and Convert More Event Leads
Events are about more than just the planning of logistics. Events are about more than just the planning of logistics. They are an opportunity to engage with your prospects face-to-face, truly understand their interests, and pinpoint their position in the buying cycle. What you learn about your prospects at events can give you the insight you need to effectively follow-up (now or later) with exactly the right information to convert your prospects. What s the winning formula? Combine the intelligence from event data with the engagement power of interactive content to deliver the right message and take the appropriate next step, at the right time. Here are 8 tips you can leverage before, during, and after your events:
Pre-Event Engagement
TIP #1 Understand Your Event Attendees Pull existing data from your marketing automation system or use what you learn from your event registration system (better yet, combine the two!) to evaluate and segment your event attendees. Find meaningful ways of separating attendees into targeted segments by job title, industry, interest area, or whatever makes the most sense for you. You can use these segments to tailor and personalize your strategy in the following steps. Segment 1 Welcome VIP Segment 2 Segment 3 Segment 4 Segment 5 Welcome Welcome EXHIBITOR
TIP #2 Use Interactive and Personalized Content to Engage Attendees Use attendee profiles and segmentation from tip #1 to guide individuals to the sessions, activities, and networking opportunities they will find most valuable. Help attendees plan for success while showing them you understand their needs by giving them the tools to build a personalized event agenda. Where has it been done effectively? Oracle used profile information to provide personalized session track recommendations. Source: Certain/SnapApp Webinar, How to Understand, Attract, and Engage Buyers at Events, July 21, 2015
On-Site Interactions
TIP #3 Track Activities and Interests at the Event Capture the data from badge scanning of each session attended, attendee responses to polls during those sessions, social interactions, appointment setting, and more. All of this data will help you understand your prospects and determine the content that will be most relevant to them as a next step. Your job is to provide the most relevant content in order to move your prospects along the buying cycle. (Hint: This can all be automated when your event software is integrated with marketing automation!) Your content should be able to help: Qualify a prospect s engagement and interest Inform your marketing next-steps Create opportunities for sales
TIP #4 Use Real-Time Engagement to Drive the Best Next Step Imagine being able to know the exact moment a prospect at your event is ready for a sales person to approach them. And then being able to send that sales rep to the exact location of that prospect armed with information about their interests and prior activities. This is exactly what today s leading edge companies are doing at events with the help of event data, captured by event software and put to use by marketing automation. Using real-time data capture, prospect activities trigger appropriate, relevant, and effective automated or personal outreach. Where has it been done effectively? At its flagship conference, CA World, CA Technologies used real-time data to: Promote cross-sell and upsell opportunities Move attendees through the sales process in real time ] ] Proactively lead attendees through various offerings
TIP #5 Use Interactive Content at the Event to Drive More Leads Interactive content like quizzes, assessments, surveys, calculators, brackets, and more are content types that allow you to capture valuable information and feed it into your marketing automation system (like Eloqua or Marketo) so you can act in real time. Where has it been done effectively? Cornerstone OnDemand used SnapApp s interactive content to stand out from the crowd at a major HR tech conference with their Generational Workplace personality quiz. The SnapApp collected 327 leads at the event, giving Cornerstone a staggering 90% lead conversion rate on this piece of content. Source: SnapApp Events Use Case
TIP #6 Continue to Collect Data and Increase Your Understanding of Each Attendee Never stop watching and listening for those insightful moments and use what you collect to improve lead scoring and follow up activities. The key? Feed everything into marketing automation and watch your lead profiles get richer and richer by the minute.
Post-Event Follow-Up
TIP #7 Use What You Learn to Nurture Post-Event With your event data in hand, it s time to continue the lead nurturing and sales process after the event. Use what you ve learned to: Identify early stage and late stage leads. Create nurture tracks based on interests and behaviors. Ensure your sales team has insight into all the attendee data from the event to tailor their follow-up and the content they provide. Where has it been done? From CA s Marketing Nation Summit 2015 Presentation Marketo as the Hub: How to Succeed at Personalizing a Major Event After CA World, CA Technologies sales teams were able to harness the event data that was fed into marketing automation to determine the level of interest their customers and prospects had in each product solution and exactly what sessions they attended. This information allowed them to better predict where an individual attendee was in the buying cycle to customize a more meaningful follow-up for each attendee.
TIP #8 Prove ROI by Tying Everything Back to Your Marketing Automation and Analytics Systems! A credible ROI is one that is going to stand up to your CMO, CFO, and CEO. To be credible, it really has to come from your marketing automation or marketing analytics system and provide a tractable measure of performance for the marketing event. Here s what you ll gain when your event data is tied to marketing automation: Tagged event activity data is fed to marketing automation Pipeline is accurately tracked and more easily accelerated Revenue from the event is clearly tracked Credible ROI is documented and delivered!
Your Next Step Make your next event your best ever by converting more event leads to customers. The tips we ve presented here should help you think differently about the role of event data and personalized and interactive content. Use what you learn about each attendee to deliver the right message at the right time, and capture it all in your marketing automation system to produce credible ROI. The future of events is here. And you re on the forefront. Learn more: certain.com (888) 237-8246 Special Thanks Thanks to SnapApp for contributing to this tip sheet. SnapApp is a Certain Success Hub partner and offers a solution to help marketers quickly and easily build interactive content. Visit www.snapapp.com for details.