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14/11/2015

Event Marketing: What Contact Points to Capture?


So you’ve selected your space, organised your exhibition stand design and now you’re ready to go! The next challenge you’re tasked with is ensuring you maximise the amount of leads you capture from your event. What contact points should you be focussing on obtaining from visitors? Well, a lot depends on the type of offering your brand has – fortunately, we’ve written this helpful guide to help you make the most from your event marketing and contact leads in the right way.

Contact Points

Firstly, you need to work out what’s the best way of communicating with visitors after your event. We’ve written a list of potential contact points for you to consider – remember, it’s best to collect as many of these as possible so you can market to your customers via multiple channels:

Email
Probably the most popular method of marketing communication. With email marketing tools such as Mailchimp, email marketing is extremely low-cost and easy to measure ROI. Things to remember is that email marketing has moved on from the days of bulk emailing the same message to customers – nowadays the key is segmentation! Don’t worry, we’ll go over this shortly.

Direct Mail
A lot of people have stopped marketing via direct mail however In a recent survey, direct mail has still be found to be the most effective way of communicating to people. Did you know:

92% of direct mail is opened.
70% of people like receiving vouchers in the post.
83% of people say direct mail is easier to take in than email.

Interesting stuff eh?! Sure direct mail is more costly and more difficult to measure ROI than email, but with the popularity of email marketing, direct mail can be a good way of getting peoples attention via a different medium. Check out more stats on direct mail in this infographic.

Phone numbers
Maybe what your business sells requires more of a conversation and it’s not just as simple as a 1 step transaction? If so, then telephone numbers can still be a good way of marketing to people after the event.

Social
Did you know Universities offer degrees in social media marketing now?! Social media cannot be ignored as it can be an extremely effective way of communicating if done correctly. Firstly, social can be used to attract visitors to your stand (check out our post on attracting new visitors), Twitter is a great tool for this and you should be telling visitors at the event why they should come and see you! Secondly, social can be used for engagement after the event. For example, it’s a great idea to post pictures of the event on Facebook & instagram once it’s over – that way people who visited you are more likely to engage. Or maybe you post a video on Youtube of some footage from the event itself.

69% of B2B companies have no process of responding to customers via social – Make sure you’re not part of this!

Profiling & Segmentation

It’s really important you find ways of profiling and segmenting customers at your event. Tailoring your message to individual customers in really important and easier than ever, especailly with sophisticated email marketing tools available that allow you to dynamically change content based on a customers profile or preferences. This kind of information can be obtained through checkboxes that visitors can select when signing up to your offer (e.g. “I am interested in…”). Here’s some segmentation categories for you to consider at your next event:

  • Contact info: Name, Company, Email, Telephone, Address
  • Preferences: products / services I’m interested in, preferred contact time, preffered contact method
  • Company Information (for B2Bs): No. of employees, Size (SME, Enterprise, etc), Sector

Make the most from your next exhibition stand and get your event marketing right! If you need help with event marketing or exhibition stand design please call us on 01536 265823

 

Exhibition Stand Lead Capture

Article written by:

Admin

Tags: data capture, lead capture

Posted in: Exhibition Tips,

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