by Holland Dotts, Salesforce Certified Pardot Consultant
Conferences, Expos, and Trade Show events are an excellent way for companies to gain visibility and network within a specific industry, but in order to maximize effectiveness (and ROI), it’s important to take a close look at your marketing strategy as it relates to such an event. With a large gathering of professionals with a common focus, your company has the opportunity to capitalize by building relationships with existing customers, generating new leads, creating effective new content, and using that content for post event marketing. These concepts are important to consider for any company, but if you happen to have Pardot in your toolbox, you are especially in luck!
Building Relationships
A great way to let your existing customers know you will have a booth at an upcoming event is to send them a targeted email. You can use Pardot automation rules or dynamic lists to filter your customers so you are only sending this information to those in the general vicinity of the event. This will ensure they will be keeping an eye out for you at the event. You could also incentivize your customers by offering a discount if they stop by and visit your booth.
Lead Generation
This is perhaps the most important opportunity stemming from an Expo. What’s the best way to generate leads out of all those people? Let’s first consider the quality of the leads. If you had the opportunity to get a list of attendants' names and email addresses, that might sound very appealing, but how many of those attendants do you think would truly be interested in your particular products or services? How many of those people do you think provided their actual information?
Consider a different scenario. Instead of trying to market to everybody who attends an event, why not concentrate on those who stopped by your display and actually showed an interest? With Pardot, you could build a Landing Page with a simple form with 3-4 fields, and have that landing page on an iPad/tablet for your visitors to fill out.
Pro Tips:
1) Set up an Autoresponder Email to thank your new prospect for their submission.
2) Mark Always display form after submission in step 4 of the Form Wizard to disable throttling and make sure all prospects receive the Autoresponder Email
3) Don’t forget to enable “Kiosk Mode” on that Landing Page Form to prevent your prospects from being cookied and having activities shared incorrectly
And just in case you’re worried you won’t have enough visitors, I have one word for you: GIVEAWAYS!
Free shwag will generate the foot traffic, and voluntary submissions will generate high quality leads.
Creating Content
You can create content related to events in a number of ways. One easy way is to use Pardot’s Social Posting feature to post to multiple social channels simultaneously (or schedules separately if you prefer). With Pardot, you can quickly and easily share a photo you just snapped at the convention on your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. Any educational components (like workshops) provide a more in depth opportunity for content creation. You could use your brand new knowledge to write an informative blog post or create a whitepaper on the topic.
Post Event Marketing
Now that you have new prospects and new content, it’s time to set up an Engagement Program. For instance, you could send an email out to all your event leads with a link to download your new educational whitepaper. Clicking that link could notify a sales rep to make a follow up call. The possibilities are endless! And since your prospects will all be tied to the original event campaign, you will be able to confidently report on ROI when those prospects become customers.
These are just a few ways you can use Pardot to automate key aspects of your company’s marketing strategy and make sure you are getting the most out of your event investment. Stay tuned for another article about how to prevent duplicates in your database.