Developing your B2B event marketing strategy: Goals, purpose and expectations
At KLIQ, we’re passionate about helping progressive Renewable Energy organisations maximise their digital marketing output to achieve their growth goals faster. With our industry knowledge and agency expertise in providing meaningful and measurable digital marketing services, we have partnered extensively with global leaders such as Lightsource bp, the world's largest solar developer.
In this article, we would like to share our valuable insights on how to maximise your event impact and ROI for a Renewable Energy trade show.
If you’re in the Renewable Energy space in Australia or New Zealand, then it’s safe to say that you would have attended a Renewable Energy trade show such as All-Energy Australia, the largest gathering of renewable energy professionals in Australia. If you haven’t, then you’re missing out! They are usually pretty lively and fun events with plenty of big industry brand names represented, they are well attended and are growing in popularity. If you’ve had an event stand at one of these bigger events, you’ll already know… they don’t come cheap!
So the question is, how do you maximise your brand’s impact and ROI when attending a Renewable Energy trade show.
Key objective
Before creating any communications for a Renewable Energy trade event or show, it is crucial to identify your key objective. This objective will guide all of your efforts and ensure that your messaging is focused and effective. Ask yourself, what do we want to achieve from this event? Is it to establish industry connections, maximise leads, secure a partnership with a larger brand, or something else entirely?
Understanding your key objective will help you tailor your content and communications specifically to your goals, increasing the likelihood of success. Without a clear objective, you run the risk of trying to be all things to all people and diluting the impact of your message.
Identify your target audience
To maximise your impact and ROI for a renewable trade show, it's essential to have a clear understanding of your target market and their attendance at the event. For some events, you may find your target audience is actually a subsection of your main target audience, so you may want to consider tailoring your communications to ensure you’re reaching this audience effectively.
Additionally, understanding the rough number of individuals in attendance who fit your target market will help you allocate resources more efficiently. This approach will not only help you make the most of the event, but it will also increase your chances of generating leads, closing sales, and achieving your overall ROI objectives.
How to increase B2B lead generation for your sales funnel before, during and after event
1) Pre-event
Create an impactful and strategic B2B digital marketing plan
Once you’ve identified the audience you’re talking to, you should create a content plan to inform this audience that you will be attending the event. This plan should include a variety of digital marketing for renewable energy, such as social media posts, email marketing, and targeted advertisements including LinkedIn Ads.
Keep in mind that generally most of your audience won’t be as excited (as you are) that you’re attending. So the best way to create content that’s impactful is to identify the key benefits of your presence at the event for your target audience. This is also a good time to consider any show incentives, offers, or exclusive content that you want individuals to be aware of.
By proactively reaching out to your target market and marketing your renewable energy business in advance to the event, you increase the likelihood that they will seek out your booth or engage with you during the event, ultimately increasing your chances of achieving your ROI objectives.
LinkedIn - How to target your ideal B2B prospect, every time
LinkedIn is a crucial component of any event content plan, and is essential when trying to reach a professional and engaged trade audience. As most trade events are targeted to B2B, you most likely will find that your LinkedIn content will achieve higher reach and engagement over other social platforms.
However, simply relying on organic posts reach may not be enough to maximise the impact of your trade event. Investing time and budget into paid advertising can help amplify your message and ensure it reaches your target audience multiple times. With LinkedIn Advertising, you can improve the granularity and accuracy of your campaign by targeting your ideal customers based on traits like their job title, company name, industry, interests and demographics, generating more qualified leads and ultimately increasing your opportunity to improve your ROI.
B2B email marketing - here's why it is (still) important
Email marketing is a powerful tool to let your audience know you’ll be attending a trade event. However, when you combine it with an organic and paid social media to create a multi-channel marketing strategy, it maximises your offer awareness, reach and engagement with potential customers. Social media can work well to generate awareness around your presence, while email marketing via your CRM can provide more targeted and personalised messages that will generate more quality leads.
2) Showtime
Motivate attendees to visit your booth or book a meeting
Amid the hustle and chatter of a trade show, set a concrete goal for a certain number of prospects to engage and stay focused on meeting it. Of course, you want a lot of traffic to your booth, so here’s where you can spend a little money. You can give away raffle tickets, product offers, product demonstrations, guides, exclusive content such as white papers, and of course, company swag. This incentivises people to stop by your booth but limits your spend. You still want a lot of activity around your booth, even if not everyone is a good-fit prospect.
Make sure that whoever is staffing the booth has a list of your prioritised accounts. When people approach your booth and introduce themselves, check to see if their company is on your list. If it is, you’ve got your lead – or at least a foot in the door!
B2B lead generation - a must for any event!
Most bigger events will have lead capture technology for you to use, but if for some reason the show doesn't, you should have your own system ready to go. We look at Lead Gen tech as a mandatory for any event if you want to measure and improve your event ROI.
We view not having a proper lead gen system in place at events as throwing money down the drain - that’s how important this element is to your event strategy and for achieving a ROI at any event. (Note: by a proper ‘Len Gen tech system’ we don’t mean putting business cards in a bowl).
3) Post-event
Segment your event B2B leads based on their interests, needs, and behaviours
If you've attended a trade show, you know how overwhelming it can be to collect and follow up with hundreds of leads. How do you make sure you don't miss any opportunities or waste your time on unqualified prospects? The answer is segmentation and targeting.
Segmentation and targeting are essential for effective lead nurturing and conversion. By grouping your leads into different categories based on their characteristics and actions, you can better understand their pain points, goals, and preferences, and deliver more relevant and personalised messages and offers. This way, you can increase your response rates, build trust and rapport, and move your leads along the sales funnel faster.
We would recommend that your Marketing and Sales team work together before the show to identify what is the best process for gathering leads, managing leads at the event (via the event lead gen system or your own CRM), and how your business will manage the leads after the event.
B2B lead nurturing strategy + marketing automation = increased ROI
Leads are potential customers who have shown interest in your product or service, and they are a valuable asset to any business. However, without proper follow-up and nurturing, leads can quickly lose interest and move on to competitors.
Marketing automation is a process that uses technology to streamline and automate marketing tasks such as lead nurturing, email marketing, and social media management in a highly personal way.
By using marketing automation to engage and nurture leads, businesses can target leads more effectively and efficiently with personalised messages and offers based on a lead's name, company, industry, role, problem, solution, product, or any other relevant information.
This approach helps increase engagement and conversion rates, ultimately resulting in increased ROI. By leveraging marketing automation to manage leads effectively, businesses can save time and resources while achieving better results too. The ability to track and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions ensures that businesses can continually optimise their strategies and maximise ROI.
Event marketing checklist for your next B2B trade show exhibit
Best way to measure your B2B event success and ROI
Any marketing activity must be measurable in order to understand if it was successful. The best way to measure if a trade event gave you a ROI is via tracking your event leads and understanding your lead to sale conversion rate (which ideally should be understood before investing in an event). If your brand is new to the events space, you might find that shows and events have a different lead to sale conversion rate than other marketing activity, but the more events you do the better will understand how this conversion rate works for your business.
The key to measuring a ROI from an event is making sure your business is set up to track and manage your leads. If your business isn’t set up to monitor this, you may find yourself wondering the day or week after an event - if events are something your business should look at doing again.
Powerful B2B marketing analytics reporting using KLIQmetrics™️
With our product KLIQmetrics™️ - a customisable data analytics dashboard, we specialise in making your digital marketing tracking and performance easy and fast to understand which allows you to better manage stakeholder conversations by showcasing digital marketing spend and return on investments, including event uplifts. We also get to understand what is working (and what is not) in real time, and also spot trends and performance over a longer period. This lets us make more informed decisions around future strategies and achieve improved results faster.
If you’re interested in learning how we can help your business reach its growth potential, book a complimentary consultation with our renewable energy marketing experts at KLIQ to leverage our industry insights and expertise.
