E.T.

Hi, everyone. E.T. back here with Expert Marketing Advisors, have my founder and longtime marketer, Courtney Kehl. We have a bunch of live events happening like Microsoft tonight coming up and we’re sitting down thinking maybe it’s best we create a little best tips and tricks to share with everyone as they’re prepping for these events. Why? As we see with our clients, events are expensive. If you don’t get the value, you’re spending thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases. If you don’t do it right, it’s kind of a waste of your marketing budget and it can hamper your marketing efforts in the future as well. So I always like to work backwards Courtney. So what is a standard goals that a company should strive for when it comes to that?

Courtney Kehl

Great question. As you decide to do an event, oftentimes, you’re like, why are we doing this? What’s the strategy here? And should we do this? You gotta think about the budget. Does it fit into the budget. Is it even a good idea to do it? So start there and goals certainly centered around sales. We all work for sales essentially is one of our key notion that you always have to think about. So yes, it’s always a numbers game. You want to think about how many folks are going to be there, are they the right folks? Is it your right audience? Can they convert to actual opportunities? Where are they going to fall into your pipeline? You want to essentially do the math and figure out if they’re going to be worth your dollars and how you can get the most bang for your buck, so to speak.

E.T.

Great. Once you commit to an event, you’re going in, what is the percentage that you want to capture? How does this work?

Courtney Kehl

Great question. Yes. So industry standard is usually 5% capture of the actual attendees show floors is what I call it that. So however many actually show up to the event, typically folks capture about 5%to 6% great leads and you will come home with. I like to aim a bit higher. Let’s consider a stretch goal, so to speak, at seven to 10% captured. It really helps folks push or that extra bit of goodness. And you can absolutely get there. You just have to keep people focused and set those goals from the very beginning with your team before they’ve even stepped foot on site. Have that know before you go meeting and have daily goals. So whether or not you’re trending to hit that and then really push up on that last day as well.

E.T.

Yeah. And it can’t all happen on site, right? It has to happen months before, weeks before the setup leading up to it, the preparation has to be key. What are some recommendations you have?

Courtney Kehl

You want to make sure that you have an onsite plan. You need to stand out. Everybody wants to stand out. So it gets a little noisy when you’re actually on site. We want to make sure your booth is big and bold, but you don’t have to be the biggest fish in the sea. We can be bold with bright colors and your messaging has to be very clear, but do you really want to slow people down when they get, when they’re passing by your booth. So you don’t have to be the biggest boots on the floor, but you have to have a plan for what folks are walking by. That’s really some of our best practices over the years we’ve developed. We aim for a survey, something that they have in their hand that essentially they have to take two to three minutes and then other folks see that. Then they wonder what’s going on here and it draws their attention. They see a crowd and the other people are attracted to crowds. So it’s sort of this collaboration of people that come and then it gives you an opportunity to give them the elevator pitch as well while they’re taking that survey.

E.T.

Surveys are pretty neat. That’s your onsite plan, right? Once they’re there and they’re already ready to go.

Courtney Kehl03:31

Pairing team and having a survey, tell a story too, as they’re going through those questions.

E.T.

Yeah. I’ve seen those before and a number, different booths. I seen it carried out a number different ways though. Either it’s a paper survey to fill out a raffle or some people have their iPad set up all over the place. Like what do you recommend?

Courtney Kehl

So we’ve tried both with just tablets know the iPad and we’ve also done just paper. Good old fashioned paper, clipboard and pen. We have seen iPads walk away, they’d grow feet, they fall asleep and you have to constantly turn them on. Figured out the passcode and session. It’s actually quite quick, very simple. Just have the paper and pen. People pick it up and just fill it out real quick. You can process afterwards quite simply with a Google form, which you just push it through. So I definitely recommend the paper. People aren’t as inclined to walk past you..

E.T.

Yeah, only a couple of questions, right?

Courtney Kehl

Five to seven questions. Keep it really pointed, but give some thought to what those questions are so that you are again, tons of story after the fact when you when you process them. The goal really after is to be able to extend the ROI of your event. To write a blog, have an article, be able to put something in front of the media and say, look, here’s some industry trends that we’re identifying and capture from a saturated audience. Aim for a hundred or more surveys. So statistically you’ve got some real mean, something that stands out.

E.T.

All right. So we got our 7% of the calculator. We did it. We prepped everything perfectly. Teams laser-focus, everyone was onsite bringing everyone to the booth. We’re crowded the whole time. Now we’re about to go home. What’s the plan to actually do something with these leads so we can make revenue?

Courtney Kehl

You absolutely want to have a post event meeting. Before you upload the leads into your marketing operation system and pushing through to your sales ops and your CRM, so to speak. You want to go through those leads and you’re team that was onsite, you want to make sure you put in all the various notes, cause it’s becoming harder and harder to actually put all the notes in. Folks nowadays are using their app on their phone as a lead scanner. Really that phone is primarily tied to the phone owner. We are finding that the notes are not being captured as much as I want to. Definitely have that post event meeting with your onsite team before you push it into your CRM and make sure you’ve got all of the goodness that was taking place on the show floor captured and pump it in here.

E.T.

That’s a great way. I don’t know how many times I had an admin where my teams come back from an event. You look at the lead list and you see a prospect you really want, and all you see is hot. Talk to Todd and Todd’s on our team, but he decided to go on vacation and you’re like, what does this mean? Because you’re like, I need more information. I’m like, this is hot. I don’t want to mess it up. Like, what does Todd know? Right. And then he goes, who’s that guy?

Courtney Kehl

You definitely want a timely follow up as well. So if there’s a situation someone’s going to be on vacation, you can do the handoff and keep the conversation going. Absolutely. So while that helps we just finished up an event actually last week. We have found capturing podcasts with our show for attendees. Is also really exciting for people. They immediately reach out to ask, when do I get my podcast? I’d love to have that. It’s a nice nugget of sort of some content for us to use. Also we’re finding our audiences really loving that as an asset for themselves as well.

E.T.

For you guys watching the story was this: we were on the floor and we’re presenting the sales pitch. And also we have a live podcast going and the best time to get that recorded is in that moment because your prospect that are walking through all the techies, they hear your pitch. So that’s all they know at the moment. So they’re repeating you word for word line by line, and now you have them on camera. So before they go off to the other 5,000 booth, forget you a week later, you can send them a video and be like, I was there. I wasn’t just another blue booth, with all these colors. I was there and I said these exact lines, which is your company sales pitch. It resonates with me in that moment. And that’s way different. That’s super impactful.

Courtney Kehl

We have an example of one of our newer companies that just came out of stealth mode two months ago. We’ve learned about their messaging, we tested it. This was our first show for them and it’s always exciting to be testing the pitch. One of our attendees came by, cruising by and we gave him the pitch. He took the survey and then you saw the podcast and we asked him if he’d like to talk shop and capture some of the industry trends that he’s seen. It was his first time at that particular show. So we were just having a nice conversation, his first ever podcast. And I said, well, what do you think about the specific client? And he repeated back the messaging. Which was absolutely validating for us. We knew we had nailed it. It was really great to hear.

So sure enough, yesterday he reached back out and said, do you have the podcast ready? Which we almost do. We we’d like to put tips and tails on our podcasts, that makes them buttoned up and really clean. So we’ll have that to send them back out tomorrow, which also allows ourselves to have something more to talk to him about and continue the conversation.

E.T.

Last thing, before we go, any additional tips and tricks that people don’t put enough energy into that they could? Add more value.

Courtney Kehl

Events, as you said, are so expensive. It’s really probably the most expensive marketing tactic out there. But you really want to extend the life of the event after the event. This is where I like to elevate it to the digital side of things . To process your surveys and turn them into the articles, turn them into the blogs. You can make an infographic out of it, which oftentimes I do find people are missing infographics and their library of assets and they’re nice and quick. They tell that story really quick and they resonate for your top of funnel and same thing with podcasts. Process those ,even transcribe them. Folks sometimes don’t listen to podcasts, but they’ll read them. Everybody consumes assets differently. You can post those on various channels, syndicated on all different ways. I also found on your website, you can do internal and external linking on the transcription. The internal linking strengthens your website kind of like calcium for your body. Then your keywords, which also gives you SEO value and then externally thinking keywords also increases your digital footprint. It’s like broadening your real estate which is also truly valuable. You’re going to extract specific key quotes which will stand out and validate your market. Which a lot of people are looking for. It helps with investors too. Then you can grab that logo and whoever you spoke with get logo. That also is really valuable for our website and as marketers know, we’re always looking for those logos.

So again, extending the value of getting that extra ROI or justifying your event spend. Those are all great takeaways and we’ve captured this in our Event Best Practices. If you want just a quick way to pull out these tips and tricks, they’re all there for you.

E.T.

So thanks for your time guys. Like Courtney said, there’s a million different ways to consume assets. We will have a visual version of this in our Events Best Practices Playbook coming out right after this webinar. On top of that, if you guys want to hear the story as well, feel free to reach out to Courtney@Expert MarketingAdvisors, or just reach out on our site and we’ll be happy to set up some time to talk. Right. Thanks everyone.

Courtney Kehl

Great. Thanks for talking with me. It’s always fun to talk shop.