10 Strategies to Boost Lead Generation at Your Next Event

Jun 27, 2023 Shruti Shah

In the realm of marketing, lead generation, and events go hand in hand. Events provide an unparalleled opportunity for businesses to connect with potential customers, nurture leads, and drive sales. By implementing effective lead generation strategies, you can maximize your event ROI, achieve goals, and move prospects through the marketing funnel. 

Unlike digital marketing methods, events offer the opportunity for real-time, face-to-face interactions that foster trust, build relationships, and create a memorable experience for attendees. Having meaningful conversations, understanding pain points, and providing personalized solutions are invaluable for generating high-quality leads. 

In this blog, we will explore why events and lead generation are inseparable and provide you with powerful B2B demand and lead generation strategies to implement at your next in-person event. 

Why B2B Event Lead Generation is Crucial 
Today, events bring together a concentrated audience of individuals actively seeking knowledge, solutions, and connections within their industry, which makes events an ideal environment for businesses to showcase their products or services and engage with a highly targeted audience. Attendees are more informed and proactive than ever and usually come to events with a specific agenda, which is a perfect opportunity for businesses to capture their attention and convert them into qualified leads. 

One of the key advantages that events offer is the ability to showcase your brand and offerings through integration with cutting-edge event technology. Incorporating the latest technologies like virtual reality or augmented reality can help create interactive experiences through which businesses can capture the attention of attendees and leave a lasting impact. This not only creates a memorable experience but also generates excitement and engagement, leading to increased lead generation. 

How to Use an In-Person Event to Generate Leads 
Generating leads from your event is not as difficult as it may seem. Keeping your goal of lead generation in mind, you can follow these simple steps to effectively use your in-person event for lead generation and retrieval: 

1. Develop your strategy well in advance of the event and prioritize lead generation throughout your planning process. 
2. Attract the right audience, specifically those genuinely interested in your product or service and prepare targeted marketing campaigns. 
3. Select an event management tool that facilitates lead generation and allows you to collect attendee data using multiple features like well-designed registration forms. 
4. Segment your audience immediately upon registration to tailor your communications effectively. 
5. Keep things simple and user-friendly for attendees to enhance their experience. 

Remember, with careful planning and execution, your in-person event can serve as a fruitful platform for generating valuable leads. 

 How to Boost Lead Generation at Your Next Event 

1. Pre-Event Promotion: It's crucial to start early to set the stage for maximizing lead generation. Develop a comprehensive pre-event promotion strategy that includes targeted drip email campaigns, social media advertising, and personalized outreach. Leverage your existing customer base and prospects to generate buzz about your event. Offer exclusive incentives, such as early-bird discounts and limited VIP seats. For instance, a software company can utilize pre-event promotion for its annual conference by offering a sneak peek into its latest product. This can organically generate a high volume of registrations and quality leads. 
    
2. Tailored Landing Pages: How many times have you landed on a page where the detail fields or questions in the form were irrelevant, forcing you to bounce back? Captivate your audience by creating dedicated and persuasive event pages. These pages should be visually appealing, compelling, and optimized for lead capture, specifically designed for the event and its lead types. With Eventcombo, you can customize the landing page for your next event. For instance, you can highlight event details, speakers, and a simple registration form to effectively capture leads. Based on the input data, nurture them strategically to significantly increase lead conversions. 
    
3. Engaging On-Site Experiences: With in-person events, the floor is all yours! Leave a lasting impression by crafting interactive experiences that engage attendees and capture their interest. Harness event technologies to create memorable and engaging interactions. For example, introduce an augmented reality demo at your booth during a trade show, to help attendees visualize the product in action, which will result in increased engagement and a higher number of directly qualified leads. 
    
4. Lead Scoring and Qualification: With everything said, identifying hot leads, implementing lead scoring and qualification systems to prioritize hot prospects, is a must. In the cut-throat competition, who has the time to organize and analyze the leads manually? Every minute wasted pushes your qualified leads back up the funnel, or worse, puts the ball in your competitor's court!  
   Develop criteria based on demographics, engagement level, and purchasing intent. Assign point values to different actions or behaviors, such as attending specific sessions, participating in demos, or interacting with sales representatives. For instance, a cybersecurity firm can use lead scoring at their conference booth, giving higher priority to attendees who express immediate interest in their advanced threat protection solution. This would allow their sales team to focus on the most promising leads and effectively close more deals. 
    
5. Personalized Multi-Touch Points: Utilize personalization techniques like sending tailored emails or messages to your attendees throughout the event lifecycle using an event management platform and mobile event app. You can reference specific interactions or interests they shared during the event and establish rapport. This approach strengthens your relationship with prospective leads and also increases the chances of converting them into customers. While all the focus remains on pre and during-event phase, a post-event engagement strategy like sending personalized thank-you notes to attendees can change the lead status and redirect towards subsequent sales conversations. 
    
6. Lead Nurturing Campaigns: Event lead nurturing is a vital component of successful event lead generation strategy. You can create automated email campaigns and relevant content such as whitepapers, case studies, or webinars, to nurture leads post-event addressing their pain points and offer solutions. Tailoring the messaging based on their engagement level and position in the sales funnel and consistently following-up will keep your brand on top of their mind, enabling you to convert leads into customers and get a positive return on investment (ROI). 
    
7. Collaborative Partnerships: Inviting everyone to your event is a revenue boosting strategy for most organizers, given the cost escalations. But lead generation is also equally significant. The investment in an in-person event is far too high to regret having poor- or low-quality leads later. So, expanding your reach and leveraging collaborative partnerships with complementary businesses or industry influencers attract a wider audience which is almost the actual target audience. You can collaborate through co-marketing, such as joint webinars, guest blog posts, or shared social media campaigns. Converting leads that are already inside your funnel is far easier, because they are already interested in listening to you. 
    
8. Thought Leadership Sessions: Hosting educational and informative sessions or panels at your event focusing on industry trends, best practices, and actionable insights is perceived as thought-leadership quality. Offering valuable content, acknowledging problems and demonstrating how your brand solves them by adding value, establish your brand's credibility and attract attendees. These leads are usually ready to move to warm and hot leads categories already. For instance, if a financial services company organizes a panel discussion on emerging fintech trends at its annual conference, it is bound to attract industry professionals and interested people, resulting in high-quality leads and potential business partnerships. 
    
9. Interactive Lead Capture: Simplify the lead capture process by utilizing interactive technologies. Replacing traditional paper forms with mobile apps or tablets that allow attendees to enter their information digitally, not only saves time but also minimizes data entry errors. Additionally, for example, API integrations offered between your lead capture system (provided by event management software) and your customer relationship management (CRM) software can seamlessly improve lead accuracy and streamline follow-up processes and data synchronization. 
    
10. Post-Event Analysis: All event professionals acknowledge that measuring event success with the right metrics and working towards optimizing future events are very important. Still, being a prominent part of event analysis, scrutinizing the lead generation journey is much undermined.  
    You can personally collect feedback from your sales team and send post-event surveys to attendees to gain realistic insights and correlate them with number of leads generated, lead quality, conversion rates, and revenue. This data can help you optimize future event strategies and drive leads down the marketing funnel. When it comes to event management, we are sure that continually refining your approach with event analysis using the right tools can 100% maximize event ROI and drive sustainable business growth. 

Embark on a tour of Eventcombo to enhance lead generation for your upcoming event.  Book your demo today - https://bit.ly/3BX2tUO