Lena Prickett
In 2014, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs reported that overall, B2B marketers rate in-person events as the most effective tactic they use.
Part of why events work is that they enable us to meet face-to-face with our prospects, having the kind of engaging dialogues that build relationships and trust and drive sales. I know our team at SnapApp finds events to be incredibly powerful for lead generation and opportunity creation – but they’re also expensive.
The key to success with events is ROI. Yes, events are expensive, but if they’re your biggest driver of leads you’ll quickly make that investment back in closed business.
Interactive content is that not-so-secret key to event ROI. Fun, informative experiences like personality assessments, polls, and quizzes can be used throughout the entire event cycle to boost the number of leads you capture and build brand awareness with your target audience.
With click rates averaging over 50% and lead conversion rates in excess of 40%, interactive content works to engage your audience.
1. Connect Before the Event
Rather than sending out yet another “Visit Our Booth!” email before a major human resources conference, PayScale used a funny personality assessment to connect with their audience.
PayScale emailed attendees and asked them to ‘Find Their Inner Purple Squirrel,’ from Hipster Squirrel to Cat Lady Squirrel, and invited them to visit PayScale’s booth at the conference for giveaways and to enter a sweepstakes. In one week prior to the event, this SnapApp generated 1,300 impressions, a 65% engagement rate, and over 600 lead submissions.
That’s 600 leads before the team even stepped on the plane – talk about ROI!
2. Engage Booth Visitors
Larger events naturally breed competition for attendee attention. It can be tough to bring prospects to your booth, and even more difficult to keep their attention once they show up. Cornerstone OnDemand used interactive content to stand out from the crowd at a major HR tech conference with their “Generational Workplace” personality quiz.
Visitors found out if they were Millennials, Traditionalists, Gen X or others – a conversation that’s lately been happening at water coolers (and HR offices) around the world. It was a fun way for Cornerstone to connect with the real challenges and opportunities facing their audience while collecting valuable lead data to build better prospect profiles.
The SnapApp collected 327 leads at the event, giving Cornerstone a staggering 90% lead conversion rate on this piece of content.
3. Educate Attendees
Running large-scale events prevents challenges of its own – how do I educate attendees on all the offerings available at our event? How do I make sure they get the most out of attending?
Oracle used a SnapApp for their upcoming Modern Marketing Experience conference to help attendees choose the track that’s right for them. The assessment asks about your role in your company (decision maker, influencer, end user?), what’s most important to you when it comes to marketing technologies, and more to bucket you into the appropriate track (Imagine, Inspire etc) and suggest sessions.
This type of engagement both provides value to attendees (who can decide which sessions to attend? There are so many!) and gives Oracle a way to collect demographic data about their attendees.
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