B2B Marketing Blog

Trade shows, especially petroleum shows, are a great opportunity for your business to network and meet trade show attendees.  Large shows often attract tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world who are looking for opportunities to grow their company.  For your representatives working the show floor or the booth, efficiency is critical for maximizing the number of potential partners they meet with.

The traditional standard is 5 minutes for each engagement.  In that time, your booth staff must engage, qualify, and disengage.  The main goal should be to meet as many prospects as possible and gather their contact information and qualify them as legitimate leads, not to convert a sale.

Waiting until after the show to convert booth visitors maximizes the number of visitors your booth team can meet and allows you to slowly nurture prospects who have longer sales cycles.  How then is the best way to convert them after the show?

Marketing automation is one of the best strategies for energy companies to nurture prospects towards a sale.  Software programs, such as ActiveConversion, generate targeted emails for customers who are interested in your products and services, but are not ready to purchase yet.  For example, a lead interested in instrumentation services would receive an email a week after the show thanking them for visiting the booth and provide a link to an online brochure or a whitepaper discussing the benefits of your services.  Future emails would offer other resources such as webinars or case studies, and eventually would include a direct sales offer.

With the volume of emails that you are likely to be sending with this strategy, tracking who does and does not read the message can be tricky.  Readily available third party programs such as VerticalResponse allow automation programs to track and identify which leads read nurture emails and which recipients downloaded information.

Once leads are sales ready, a sales representative can directly contact them and close the sale.  Involving sales only when the lead is ready to buy reduces the time wasted chasing leads still in the early stages of the sales cycle and improves efficiency.

Lastly, you may be wondering why not just close the sale with the qualified visitor on the trade show floor?  Generally, trade shows convert 1-5% of the total number of visitors to a booth.  If you attempted to close sales during the show, the total visitor number would be very low, and thus so would your conversion number.  If you limit the time spent with each visitor and only acquire contact information and level of interest, you are able to meet many more visitors and increase the total number of conversions.  Converting visitors after the show using marketing automation or direct selling maximizes your booth traffic during the show and maximizes the potential revenue to be earned after the show.

Traditional marketing techniques involving tradeshows, events, direct mail etc. are still very prevalent, and they are heavily used by many companies to market their product and service offerings. While online marketing is gaining a much larger share of the marketers’ budget – it would be imprudent to ignore the traditional marketing techniques that are still a very powerful means of getting marketing messages across to targeted decision makers.

In this recent study of Interactive marketing priorities for SMBs, (Forrester) for 2011, Shar VanBoskirk believes that 54% of marketers will decrease their marketing budget for traditional tactics.  While more than half of the marketing budget is now being spent on interactive/digital/online marketing, it is still hard for some companies to actually understand the true value or ROI gained from this medium. The return on invesment is approximately measured based on the number of click throughs (CTR’s) from email marketing or Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising or from number of page views calculated from certain analytical tools. Online form, used by marketers to gather useful information of their prospects, is also very powerful online lead generation technique. But with stats indicating that only 1-2% actually will ever be willing to share you their information, makes this lead generation technique not that attractive (The ‘Contact Us’ fallacy: The importance of identifying anonymous visitors).

I’d like to share here how companies can still make use of their traditional marketing. Combining both traditional and online marketing techniques (powered by marketing automation and sales intelligence tools) companies get the best possible ROI  from their marketing budget. Integrated marketing will not only augment your marketing efficiency, but will also give your marketing a much needed boost in this digital age.

Use marketing automation tools to nurture leads you already have in your sales funnel

Meet with your prospect at a networking event. Exchange your cards hoping that they might call you or that you will get back to them when the time is right. But, is the time ever right? After the event, your card will either end up in a pile of other similar cards collected over the years or will just be forgotten. You can alternatively choose to nurture those leads on the given email address. Marketing automation tools can nurture leads with pre-written, automated email messages, and help you stay on top of their mind, giving them a chance to learn more about you.

After all, on an average it takes about 7-10 touches to register certain brands and their marketing messages. A series of nurture emails with valuable content such as thought leadership, industry knowledge, and links to marketing collateral can help you reinforce your marketing message in several ways.

Use CRMs funneled by marketing automation to continue building the relationship

Prospect info gathered from these traditional channels can be manually entered into your CRM. Marketing Automation (MA) tools synced with certain CRMs make it possible to send the prospect info from CRM to MA tools to track future visits. You can also track if your prospect show more interest in your offering after your initial meeting. Marketing automation is then used to track, score, and nurture those prospects until they become a qualified lead. Anonymous visitor identification system, can also report visits from different individuals from the same company showing their cumulative interest. Keeping a watch on your prospect/company will help you solidify the next steps within your sales process.

Use of email marketing to inform and persuade your prospects in the funnel before the show

Bulk emails can be used to inform your prospects of the tradeshow booth you are setting up or a seminar you are hosting. The email informs and persuades the prospects in the list to come and visit you at those events, and they are an excellent way to – increase the awareness of your brand, and get a meaningful reason to get in touch with your prospect list to inform your prospects about your events along with your new or existing initiatives.

A set of 2-3 emails before the event is reasonable to stay in touch with your prospects and persuade them to take an action (such as opening the email, looking at the content), and hopefully attending and meeting you at the show.

Use online marketing with traditional techniques to increase brand awareness and get business online

It is never too late or too expensive to start online marketing and improving your website for better conversion. Online marketing will help you get business online and also help you establish your brand’s awareness.  This online presence creates a buzz around your company and products, and definitely gives your company an edge in the digital age. Combining the use of editorials or advertorials in your target market magazine along with an online banner ad will hit multiple audiences, both offline and online.

To learn more about combining traditional and online marketing (powered by marketing automation), read this whitepaper on increasing tradeshow ROI .

Peter Drucker, one of the most beloved management gurus of all time, once famously said ‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Nowhere is that more true than in marketing and sales. Yet decades have gone by since Drucker uttered these words that are used in almost every business school, and marketing being a very expensive part of a business has yet to embrace measurement. Part of the reason is because it is very difficult to do. Unlike other company activities, marketing and sales has always had more intangibles associated with it than any other activity within a business function.

With products like ActiveConversion, this has changed.  Because prospects and customers will no doubt visit your website or landing page, or click on an email or ad before engaging, it is now easier than ever to measure what marketing and advertising is working. ActiveConversion goes one step further than measuring. It actively generates and qualifies interest from those visitors.

We thought it would be interesting to show how a lead management automation product (like ActiveConversion) proves it value, especially to management. We have built a ROI calculator that you can use to ensure that a product like this will benefit your bottom line. Business software should always have a strong ROI, yet it is not always quantified for management. Together with the competitive advantage you will get for your sales team, even the most cynical CFO will approve of a product that will pay for itself in weeks if not days.

The calculation is simple but revealing. By being able to identify more targets (WITHOUT spending more on marketing or advertising), by automatically identifying, nurturing and qualifying your existing prospects, you can produce ROI well in excess of your investment with this kind of technology and automation. ROI can be in days, AND your sales force will never complain about a lack of good leads again.

Try it for yourself.

If trade shows are an important part of your marketing strategy then you understand that they are one of the best ways to do both lead generation and face-to-face networking with a large group of qualified prospects. After a trade show, companies struggle with following up on a long list of inquiries with attendees, most of whom are not sales ready, and get neglected by the sales team who focus on ‘hotter’ leads.

Yves Matson, Senior Account Executive at ActiveConversion, & Nancy Nardin, President at Smart Selling Tools shared some strategies and tactics around increasing trade show ROI.

Attendees learned how equipping their company with simple and easy to use marketing automation software drives several benefits that increase trade show ROI:

Other topics covered were:

• Who is visiting your website right after a trade show
  - if you are “top of mind” enough for them to investigate you after a trade show, they are your best prospects!
• How to automate an email nurture campaign after a trade show
  - instead of having sales follow up with the entire list, have them focus on those that show engagement, even if that engagement is months later
• Track the effectiveness of various trade shows and compare the return on investment against each other

Download the recorded webinar from: http://www.activeconversion.com/webinar/webinar-june-2010-access.html

Download the presentation from: http://www.slideshare.net/activeconv/activeconversion-increasing-trade-show-roi

Both before and after the Global Petroleum Show, companies seriously interested in you will likely visit your website. Knowing who is interested in your product and services (and especially when), is something that you can use to increase your trade show return of investment substantially.

Finding The Needles in the Haystack
Research on trade shows have shown that serious buyers will gravitate to doing their research online and arrive at your website both before and after the trade show. But trade shows like the Global Petroleum Show can have two huge wins for exhibitors; Opt ins, and after show website visits.

Opt Ins
By virtue of the fact they are going to the GPS show, anyone visiting your booth is qualified in so far as they are in the energy industry. When one of them asks to be scanned for more information they are doing what is the holy grail of  marketing; they are “opting in”.

When someone asks for their badge to be scanned for more info, you can email nurture them  while always leading off with “you are receiving this because you visited our booth”. Then use a new breed of software to notify you as to who keeps coming back to your website, or visited the right pages on your website; it will tell you who to call, who you stand the best chance of building a relationship with.

The Bigger They Are, The Less They Call
Every exhibitor at the GPS hopes for booth visits from big, sought after accounts. But ironically the bigger the account, the less likely they are to call you after a trade show for fear of salespeople chasing them months on end. Regardless though, if these big accounts are interested in your company they will likely visit your website after the show to investigate your company further. Again, knowing who is visiting, who is interested in your company, who you should target over the weeks and months following the GPS show can be a significant competitive advantage.

eHow To Guide
Here’s a quick eHow To Guide from ActiveConversion that further explains what I’ve mentioned above. Good luck at the Global Petroleum Show 2010!

This is the sixth in the series of ActiveConversion’s very popular “eHow To” guides. This one deals with applying online marketing best practices to trade show marketing.  From the guide:

Business to business (B2B) trade shows can be a cost-effective means of gaining valuable face-to-face interaction with many qualified prospects. Most B2B companies have a reasonable expectation that sales revenue will result from participation at trade shows. Yet too often, experience has shown that for many leads from trade shows the timing is too early in the sales cycle. This experience may explain why business executives are constantly dismayed that so few leads are actually followed up by their sales departments. Trade show industry research indicates that 80-90 percent of all trade show leads are not followed up.

What the guide advocates is that in addition to using marketing automation in the promoting of attendance pre trade show, a trade show booth is analogous to a website for the large number of “inquiries” that exhibitors come home with:

• Most of these inquires are not ready to buy (95% according to the research)
• They have opted-in to receive more information (so they are ideal for email nurture campaigns)
• They need to be nurtured through a sales cycle so that in 3 or 6 or 9 months when/if they reach sales ready, the exhibitor is still top of mind
• They need sorting (scoring of their behavior) to weed out the ones who are, and who are not, worth inside/outside sales resources.

But also key is the takeaway that companies need to know who is visiting their website (marketing automation platforms like ActiveConversion identify anonymous company visits, as well as labelled individuals).  The traffic that visits a company’s website directly after a trade show is often a key indicator of whom at the trade show they got some level of engagement with, especially if there are multiple visits from different individuals from the same company.

To download this eHow To Guide on why marketing automation can increase your trade show ROI, click here or on the image!