% 2 B2B marketers spend a lot of time talking about inbound marketing, but that doesn t make outbound marketing irrelevant. In fact, outbound marketing is still the most effective way to generate B2B leads according to some recent stats from MarketingProfs. When we group these different methods into categories, outbound marketing proves to be the most effective for generating B2B leads
Within the realm of outbound marketing, B2B marketers have expressed that events like trade shows and webinars bring in 27 percent of their leads. Marketing automation increases that number even more while also increasing customer wins in three ways: Marketing automation enables granular tailoring of pre-show and post-show messaging, making it seem like your solution was made for them. When integrated with CRM, marketing automation provides sales with insight into who attended the event and the type of communications marketing is sending them. Marketing automation provides a 360 degree view of a lead. A prospect that entered your trade show booth may have already engaged on your website or with one of your email campaigns, increasing the value of that lead and helping sales to prioritize leads. 3
In-Person Events Trade shows require their own set of best practices that can be bolstered by marketing automation for greater efficiency and effectiveness. These include: Letting the right people know you ll be there: Sometimes trade shows will send you a list of their registrants email addresses prior to an event, but more often than not you have to rely on your own resources to drive traffic to your booth. With marketing automation, it s easy to slice and dice your database by geographical factors or business interests and target only the people you think would find the event valuable. Always include your booth number and a few bullets on why it will be worth their time to drop by. Whether you re hosting a lunch and learn in Tulsa or Dubai, you can build audience segmentations in a few clicks. Providing additional opportunities to network with you: If you re hosting your own event, then you re already the star of the show. For trade shows, however, you can offer another call-to-action in your pre-show communications inviting attendees to schedule a personal consultative appointment with one of your sales reps. Don t make the offering all about selling - offer them something of value to them and make the benefit clear. Marketing automation can smooth this process by making it easy to set up landing pages that trigger alerts to the right people when the form is completed. Giving subscriber options to booth scans: With communication regulations like the CASL in place, you have to be careful about email permissions. Verbal in-booth agreements are a good place to start, but remember those who don t want to receive communications upon the data scan, so you can be sure to exclude them from follow-up messages. The follow-up message should be sent as soon as possible and include subscription 4
preferences to enable the lead to opt in or opt out of receiving certain types of emails. A lot of lead scanner devices now give the option to write a note when you scan the lead. If your sales reps can be diligent about writing a note in for each lead, it will help you with follow-up communication, such as marking if that person is a lead, current customer, or potential partner. Nurturing trade show contacts: Don t let your booth visitors forget about you after the show! Have a follow-up plan in place for each buyer type, offering a relevant resource or inviting them to learn more through a live webinar. Marketing automation lets you build out a string of communications that can have varying degrees of complexity and conditional logic associated with the recipients actions so you can appeal to specific levels of interest and needs. Reporting on the return: In-person events are a huge investment, so it s important to understand the strength of the leads and compare the event s outcome in terms of conversions with other marketing programs and events. Marketing automation lets you assign lead sources, which populate data about the contact s engagement in their record. Over time, you can pull reports within the platform that show how many opportunities and conversions were created from each lead source and identify the most effective marketing channels. This helps you decide which events are really worth your time and money. Industry Statistic: The Content Marketing Institute estimates that 76 percent of marketers attend in-person events, such as trade shows, lunch and learns, and conferences. While in-person events are a greater strain on resources, there s no substitute for face-to-face contact when it comes to getting leads and closing business. 5
Webinars Marketing automation platforms that integrate with webinar host providers make it easier to execute on the best practices that will make your event a success. These include: Making your branding consistent across all event communications: Webinar platform providers give you the ability to slap your logo on their generic looking emails and landing pages, but typically don t allow for more customization than that. Integrating your webinar platform with a marketing automation tool enables you to build out your own landing pages, registration confirmation emails, reminders, invitations, and follow-ups using the same templates you use to represent your brand everywhere else. Sending communications before and after the webinar: Email isn t the only way to promote a webinar, but it sure is a good way. Webinars require pre-event communications to drive registrants - typically one or two invitations and an email subject swap; to make a copy of the initial email, change the subject line, and send to anyone who didn t open the first one. When you re inviting people to register for a webinar through a marketing automation platform that s integrated to CRM, you have your whole database at your fingertips. This allows you to easily segment off characteristics, activity, level of engagement, previous event attendance, and more. Record your presentations whenever possible to use in follow-up emails: Follow-up emails have great engagement, averaging a 50 percent open rate and 25 percent click-through rate for attendees and slightly lower for non-attendees. This is where the marketing automation integration makes things easier for you - no more list uploads for event follow-ups. Your registrants and attendees are synced right into the platform so you can easily add them to your recipient list when you re ready to send the recording. 6
Industry Statistic: The Content Marketing Institute estimates that 62 percent of all B2B marketers use webinars to prospect or nurture leads. Educational webinars are a great lead generation tool because they can put a voice to your brand without putting sales pressure on your buyers. They also can and should be re-purposed and extended in many different ways, which is where marketing automation is most beneficial. Creating a registration page they want to complete: You only have a few seconds to capture your contacts attention and convince them to sign up. Keep your event description brief, break the main points up into bullets, include an image, and only ask for the information you really need to make that registrant valuable to your sales team. One of the benefits of using marketing automation to create these registration pages is that you can test your data capture limits and identify the breaking point where form abandons spike. Once you ve input the data, it can be easily accessed by sales once the scoring threshold to hand off to sales is reached. Scoring the leads from your event: Webinars can help you attract and strengthen leads, but not everyone is ready for a sales conversation immediately after the presentation ends. Lead scoring is a way to rank leads based on a points system to indicate sales readiness and help marketers avoid passing leads over too quickly. Marketing automation platforms track activity and calculate scores for you, then surface lead data in the CRM once the score passes the threshold you define. Conclusion Not only does marketing automation make events more effective, it also improves marketers ability to measure the outcome of the investment. Marketing automation doesn t just work these wonders for events, however. To learn more about augmenting your marketing strategy using marketing automation, visit www.salesfusion.com. 8
Salesfusion helps small and medium sized B2B organizations drive revenue with smarter marketing. With Salesfusion s smart marketing automation platform, marketing and sales teams are delivering lead-to-revenue results more effectively and efficiently than ever before. Contact Information: 855.238.6522 sales@salesfusion.com www.salesfusion.com facebook.com/salesfusion plus.google.com/+salesfusion linkedin.com/company/salesfusion twitter.com/salesfusion youtube.com/user/salesfusionmarketing pinterest.com/salesfusion 2014 Salesfusion Inc.