Thérèse Mulvey
Event Marketing, Customer Acquisition
April 17, 2023
The value of the B2B trade show market in the United States is expected to be worth $14.2 billion by 2025.[1]
While key trade shows and events are being held in person again, event marketing strategies must evolve to include hybrid elements. Event marketers need access to the latest innovations to nurture leads and continue conversations with prospective customers.
For example, many trade show and event organizers are not including email addresses when they provide attendee lists. Event exhibitors and sponsors must find other ways to follow up with attendees, acquire new customers, and make the most of their investments.
Here are five tips for event marketers to boost customer acquisition:
1. Design captivating booth graphics
Develop clear, compelling booth graphics and signage describing the ways your products and services solve your prospective customers’ problems. Display videos and interactive media spotlighting client stories and success metrics to drive traffic to your booth.
Make certain your sales team is trained to spark the interest of visitors to learn more and continue conversations after the event.
2. Offer a giveaway or contest
Attract booth visitors with a desirable giveaway or the latest tech gadget. Offer a complimentary trial of your service or a free consultation to let prospective customers try before they buy.
Then, scan visitors’ badges to get contact information for follow-up and lead nurturing post-event.
3. Partner with a data consultant
Progressive event marketers are working with data management consultants to optimize their first-party data and current datasets.
Partnering with data consultants opens the door to emerging technologies and the newest techniques in predictive and prescriptive modeling. Audience analytics partners will help you build scalable machine learning pipelines using optimization methods to improve data performance.
4. Consider digital onboarding
Digital onboarding allows you to reach your offline audiences online, creating opportunities to nurture leads and continue communications with contacts made at trade shows and events.
Collaborate with a data solutions provider that offers digital onboarding services. They will analyze your current datasets to match the available name and postal data to digital IDs and push your audiences directly to your digital accounts—including social media and Demand Side Data Platforms (DSPs) for targeting.
Digital Onboarding is a solution for you if…
5. Add email appends
Email marketing is an effective form of communication, but it takes time and consistent communication to encourage recipients to open and interact with email content.
Email append services include a first contact email sent from an independent domain, protecting your domain from any bounces or spam complaints. The right-fit data management provider will deliver only the emails that are verified as deliverable. While there is always risk involved in sending to purchased emails, this additional step substantially minimizes that risk.
An Email Append is for you if…
Partner with a data consultant dedicated to helping you get the most out of your data. For example, Causeway Solutions’ data enhancement services and cross-channel targeting solutions combine offline data with online data, allowing clients to expand their reach with their existing audiences and execute highly targeted marketing campaigns.
By following these tips, event marketers can nurture leads, gain more sales, and increase the return on investment of their trade show and event budgets.
Thérèse Mulvey is VP of Strategy & Insight of Causeway Solutions, a leading provider of Acquisition Analytics and innovative data services. Causeway Solutions empowers clients to make smart, timely, data-driven decisions through real-time consumer insights to better reach target audiences.
[1]: "Value of the B2B trade show marketing in the United States." Statista