How to Run a Successful Event for B2B Lead Generation
If you’re looking to generate high-quality leads, you’re going to need to add in-person events to your B2B lead generation strategy.
Hosting a successful event takes time, planning and a solid strategy. The payoffs? Making relationships with quality leads that need your expertise and insight.
Below are the most critical steps to remember when planning a successful lead generation event.
Before the Event
Finding Your Audience
First and foremost, you need to know who you’re targeting for the event. Who’s in need of the content you’ll be sharing? What are the demographics of the target audience you want to close a deal with?
You should always consider the industry, job title and location when creating an audience. It will save you loads of time and money to understand the persona that you’re targeting – once you get that down, you’ll know that the signups are quality leads.
Value Proposition
Before launching any advertising for your event, make sure you understand your value proposition – what problem are you solving for your attendees? After you know the key topics you’re going to cover, create the content you’ll be sharing at the event.
This will guide the rest of your advertising. You’ll be able to create ads, landing pages and posts that are centered around real content that attendees can expect to walk away with.
Budgeting and Goals
Sit down with your sales and marketing team and figure out what budget makes sense – what amount can you spend to produce the most valuable ROI? How much ad spend is enough to bring in quality prospects?
Set up specific goals that you want to shoot for too. Decide how many signups you’re aiming for and how many leads or deals you’re looking to walk away with after the event. Afterwards you’ll be able to compare your spend to your end result to see if the event paid off.
Advertising
Advertising is the most tedious part of event planning. Since you’re in the B2B industry, marketing your event on LinkedIn and Facebook is crucial. In fact, LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of B2B leads from social media.
To read more in-depth about social media best practices for B2B events, read our blog: __________
Your efforts should be strategic from the second someone hears about your event to the second they arrive. Create forms that aren’t invasive and make sure that the landing page leads prospects directly to your form to sign up. It’s a fact that B2B leads need nurtured throughout the sales funnel process, so remember to send out email reminders to those who signed up to keep them interested in attending.
During the Event
Explaining Your Product or Service
Explaining who your company is and what product/service you offer creates a foundation for the rest of the event. This gives your audience context and shows that you have experience in the topics you’re going to cover.
While you don’t want to be too salsey, you still want to let them know that you’re an industry leader.
You’ll also want to sympathize with your guests’ pain points. Explain that you understand their struggle or situation, then outline how you’re going to provide them solutions.
Presenting Relevant Information
If you targeted your audience correctly, your lead generation event will gather a group of individuals that share the same frustrations and struggles.
With that being said, your content is going to have to be helpful and address their specific pain points. Don’t present information that goes over their head and isn’t applicable to their industry. In the same sense, stray away from discussing material that they’re already aware of.
Presenting the right information to the right market is key – your attendees will turn into leads in no time.
Networking
While you’re excited to educate and help your guests, you’re also in a great place to make new relationships or rekindle old ones – so, network! Do your research on key business leaders that you’d love to continue a conversation with.
Being prepared never goes unnoticed. Start a discussion with someone who you know would benefit from your product or service and offer support and insight.
Offering Discounts
Again, while you don’t want to be too salsey, your guests are there to find solutions. Connect with your audience and let them know that you’re able to help them beyond the event.
Offering a discount shows that you truly want to help them overcome their struggles – you aren’t solely in this for the money. Making the discount a limited time offer is a great strategy as well. It’s moving conversations along a little quicker, and with more urgency.
After the Event
Following Up
Your guests are already aware of your services, so let them know that you’re able to answer any questions they didn’t have a chance to ask at the event.
Sharing even more helpful content is always appreciated as well. Continue to nurture these leads by adding one of your informative blog posts to the follow-up email.
Sending a Survey
You should always be looking to make improvements for your next event. Within your follow-up email, attach a survey that your attendees can fill out anonymously.
The responses will give you tons of insight on what your audience actually walked away with and how much they benefited from your topics and content. You’ll have a better understanding of what to continue to do and what you might need to change.
Recording Your Findings
Reviewing your results is crucial. Whether you’re placing guests in different funnel points or you’re going over survey results, write it down. Every piece of information you walked away with is extremely important.
Put together a deck that outlines attendance, spend, survey results and key takeaways from the discussions that took place. Share this deck with your team so they have insight on everything too. The notes will be helpful for everyone to reference back to with future events and conversations.
Reviewing Your Goals
Take a step back and review the goals that you set before the event. How close did you get? What changes can you make to assure that you’ll hit your goal next time? Should you shift your focus to other goals?
Seeing how close or far away you were to your goal allows you and your team to revisit the event strategy that you took.
If you’re looking to accelerate your sales cycle and grow your business, plan a lead generation event that covers the above steps. You’ll be surprised how many high-quality leads enter your sales cycle and become the clients you’ve been waiting to do business with.
Ready to follow up with your inbound leads and reach them at the right time?
Using our expertise in lead generation and sales, we’ve tested several strategies in our own business and on behalf of our clients. Across the board, we found that the ideal inbound lead follow-up strategy requires 2 things:
Urgency in response
Commitment to sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer
In this download, you’ll receive:
A successful sample sales cadence to get in touch with your leads
Details on WHY this works and how it helps your company drive more business.