B2B Expo & Virtual Events

Introduction

With a cornerstone to B2B marketing being to initiate and grow relationships with prospective customers – the ‘face-to-face’ nature of physical and virtual events provides the direct opportunity to do just that.

1. Expo/In-Person Event

Almost unrivalled in its direct ability to interface your organisation/brand with prospective customers and industry partners – from a marketing perspective, you need to consider multiple elements when formulating your B2B tradeshow strategy.

1.1 – Step 1: Plan

• Objectives: To help guide your entire B2B tradeshow strategy you need to identify your expectations and requirements, as without this, it will be difficult to identify overall ROI. The reason this matters so much with this channel is the potentially high cost that comes with exhibiting – so having a mechanism for measuring success is crucial.
• Event Selection: The event calendar is heavily saturated with every industry and sub-sector of that industry covered by multiple expos and events. The key is using a cost-benefit analysis to align your overall expo objectives with the list of options available. Further to this, you will encounter several trade-offs that include cost, attendees, booth location and projected value/ROI – so act strategically when making your choice.

1.2 – Step 2: Develop

• Exhibition Approach: Depending on the type of tradeshow and likely attendee/persona type it attracts, it may be necessary to selectively choose which products, services and key topics your organisation will focus on when exhibiting at the event and when conversing with prospective customers/booth visitors. You could even take this to the next level and tie in notable company milestones with the tradeshow such as a new product launch or key announcement. Although its completely fine to use a broad-brush approach to tradeshows, you may be able to optimise your effectiveness by aligning your overall approach with the expo’s key characteristics.
• Booth Design: Although it’s important for your booth to stand out, the key is ensuring it provides a positive reflection of your brand utilising both your visual and verbal identity guidelines. Again, related back to the likely attendee/persona type, your booth should feature strong value proposition and messaging statements along with containing relevant marketing collateral assets.
• Leverage Thought Leaders: Your sales team and subject matter experts shouldn’t just be located at your booth – but if possible, you should leverage them at seminars and networking sessions. If not, you can always run mini talks at your own booth.
• Pre-Show Campaign: If your company is relatively young or you are still in the process of brand building, you simply cannot rely on in-show foot traffic to your booth. One of the most crucial steps to ensuring expo success is executing a comprehensive pre-show marketing campaign to drive both awareness of your attendance and interest in your offerings. This means you should plan well in advance of the show and treat the campaign like any other B2B campaign in terms of a complete approach.

1.3 – Step 3: Execute

• Lead Capture: Whether its via business card exchange or using a show-specific device to capture contact information – you absolutely must capture the key data from booth visitors. Like any lead, they need to be carefully nurtured through the buying journey towards hard conversion. Further to this, capturing lead information can help when it comes to success measurement and attribution.
• Post-Show Follow-Up: Usually reserved for contacts who visited your booth during the show (if you managed to capture their key data including email address). The key here is to segment this list, and if possible, use insight from the sales team to action follow-ups and outreach to further any meaningful discussions that have initiated.
• Measurement: How successful was the show? This will be the key question to ask yourself in the weeks following. To answer, you first need to carve out your objectives and the suitable KPI’s. Just remember that it’s not always possible to answer this question immediately after the show, especially if conversations with prospective customers are still in the early stages. With this in mind, use a combination of both soft and hard KPI’s.

2. Virtual/Digital-Only Event

In recent years, we have seen the rapid growth of virtual and digital events as a way of plugging the huge gap left by physical and in-person events. It’s true that communicating and networking through a screen is having teething problems – but even when its physical counterpart returns to the global stage, virtual events are here to stay. That’s not to say that this concept is new as webinars have been a highly effective B2B asset type for a long time. But with the past few years in mind, these events have evolved and grown to cater more for networking and community building that in-person events are so great at enabling. Even if your organisation has run digital events and webinars in the past, the landscape has changed and a new approach to developing your strategy is required to extract maximum value from this channel.

2.1 – Step 1: Setup

• Objectives: Similar to physical events (and every other B2B channel), your starting point is identifying your objectives – not only to enable performance measurement, but to also shape the rest of your virtual event strategy. For example, if you are aiming to gather many attendees, then your pre-event campaign needs serious consideration.
• Event Structure: Similar to ‘exhibition approach’ above, you need to think strategically regarding the core themes of your event and the key ways in which you will deliver value to attendees. There are almost limitless options to how you will shape your event, but it’s always wise to at least touch upon currently trending topics either in your industry or with relation to your organisation/brand.
• Platform Selection: With your objectives and event structure set – now it’s time to select the platform you will use to power the back end of your virtual event. There are multiple options available with varying levels of pricing and features so be sure to align your needs with the optimal option.

2.2 – Step 2: Promote

• Pre-Event Campaign: Even more important for virtual events is the pre-event campaign due to the simple fact that you can’t rely (at all) on random visitors. The success of your event will depend on how well you align it with the optimal target audience (bearing in mind their stage in the buying journey). This strategic approach again takes form of a full-scale B2B marketing campaign using the actual event as the core offering.

2.3 – Step 3: Deliver

• Method/Experience: This is like ‘event structure’ above, but relates more to the agenda and running order of the event – including which individuals will run each segment etc. This also includes the level of two-way communication and mechanisms in place to enable attendee dialogue.
• Networking/Community: Related to the above and depending on which platform you select to run your virtual event – you need to decide how you will cater for networking and community-driven functionality such as break-out ‘rooms’ and direct messaging for attendees to converse amongst themselves (with or without members of your organisation being virtually present).
• Measurement: The digital nature of these events does make measurement for certain KPI’s easier than its physical/in-person counterpart. With personal information such as email being required upon sign-up and most platforms offering basic analytics – you should be able to capture the data you need to identify performance and ROI. Similar to physical expos however, initial conversations with prospective customers could take months or even years to fully mature so be sure to use a mixture of both soft and hard metrics.