You’re organizing a trade show or exhibition and its probably been paid for by you selling exhibition stands to vendors within your event area. In return for this spend, exhibitors will want something back from you. Leads.
The first question is “What is a lead?”
What A Lead Is To An Exhibitor
Put simply, a lead is a person that has shown interest in with a need for an exhibitor’s products and services.
Don’t confuse this with people who are just intrigued in what an exhibitor does.
Without a purpose or reason for being interested, an attendee is not a lead of sufficient quality to the exhibitor.
The best type of lead for an exhibitor is a person who has an immediate need for the product or service the exhibitor offers.
That said, exhibitors won’t discount interested people without a reason to buy. They will just classify them differently.
Exhibitor Lead Classifications
Exhibitors will usually classify leads into 3 main categories (ordered furthest from conversion to ready to purchase):
1. Cold Leads
A cold lead is someone who has shown no interest in an exhibitor’s product up to now but fits your exhibitor’s ideal customer profile. In your event these would be general attendees who haven’t stopped by the exhibitors stand.
2. Warm Leads
These people already know the exhibitor by name and make have some knowledge of what they do and offer. This could be through previous interaction, reading online material etc. They have stopped at your exhibitors stand for a discussion but have no immediate need for their products or solutions.
3. Hot Leads
A hot lead is someone who has shown increased interest in what your exhibitor offers. They may have spent a lot of time on their stand, had a demo, and returned several times during the event for more information.
Cold Leads Are Exhibitor Last Resort
Being honest, exhibitors don’t want cold leads. When you sign up an exhibitor to your event they will want to know key metrics like:
- Where the attendees work
- What their job roles are
- What their purpose for coming to your event is
- How large their organization is
- What technology areas they’re interested in
and lots more depending on your event demographic.
They will usually ask if they will receive the event list. Don’t confuse this with the exhibitor’s real objective from exhibiting.
Exhibitors want a back stop that if all else fails and they don’t attract any leads in your event they will at least get the attendee details.
However, they know that even though they may get this, they will have gone to great expense to obtain it and then taking on all the hard work and risk of trying to find the golden nuggets in a pile of pay dirt.
Exhibitors want to know how your event will guarantee them warm and hot leads.
Here are 5 ways how you can do that.
1. Be Upfront And Open With Your Registration Data
I have been an exhibitor at other events too and I can tell you it is incredibly frustrating when the conference organizers don’t share their registration data with us prior to the event.
Remember, exhibitors and conference organizing is a partnership. You’re there to serve each other. You shouldn’t be coy about withholding information from them.
When a conference organizer refuses to share their registration data with paying exhibitors it tells the exhibitor that you may be hiding something. The most probable thing will be that perhaps the number of registrations is below what you’re proud of and worried this will encourage exhibitors to cancel.
As a conference organizer, I sympathize with you on this conundrum. Most events only peak registrations 2 weeks out from their event and before then, registrations can be quite stagnant.
But your don’t have to share with them your actual numbers or even attendee contact information you may have promised them in contract at this stage.
The main reason exhibitors want to know who is attending is so they can plan their participation. Knowing the audience demographic allows them to:
- Tailor their stand graphics and messaging to the right type of attendee. For example if your event is attracting more senior executives than technical engineers, they stand a better chance of generating leads if their stand messaging focuses on business benefits rather than technical ‘can do’.
- Organize the right type of staff to send to the event to represent them. Again there is no benefit to them if they send sales executives to a technical event or vice versa.
- If they’re speaking at your event, they can tailor their talk to appeal to the right attendee types.
- Plan their pre-event marketing activities to better resonate with your attendees.
When you use Just Attend for your event platform, you have all this demographic data readily available to answer any exhibitor query without having to hand over too much data or intelligence.
In fact, an exhibitor can login to their exhibitor area and view this data themselves and you as a conference organizer can control when they can see this.
This allows you to remain in control of your event and spend less time answering the same questions over and over again.
2. Encourage Exhibitors To Engage Early
It can be quite a challenge to get engagement from your exhibitors before your event. There are some which are busy with other events that don’t have time, others that believe they’ve paid you for a service and attendee lead generation potential is your problem, and others who are really eager to participate early to get the most out of their investment in your event.
Our statistics show that exhibitors who begin to actively promote their participation and what they will be showing at your event 1 month before your show generate on average 64% more leads than those that simply just show up.
Here are some tips to spark their participation in your promotion activities:
- Create digital social and email promotional templates they can use easily with their branding to promote their participation.
- Create email and web banners they can add to their email signatures, websites, and email marketing templates.
- Ask your exhibitors to submit news worthy stories to you about what they are offering attendees at your event that you can use in your own marketing activities.
- Record video interviews with exhibitors to increase awareness throughout yours and also their customer networks.
- Encourage them to update or create an event landing page for their participation on your website or conference platform that you can steer attendees to.
- Offer discounts or other incentives that help them promote and encourage registrations.
- Make available advertising space on your website or event platform that can highlight promotions or incentives exhibitors are bringing to your event e.g. giveaways and competitions.
In Just Attend you’re able to create a landing page for each of your exhibitors, then delegate admin control to their nominated marketing team who are able to add assets like images, videos, and PDFs / Presentations as well as describe who they are and what they do.
This page is visible on the web platform and the mobile app to all attendees. Some assets are protected by ticket so that they’re only available to registered attendees.
You can go further by encouraging your exhibitors to integrate with Calendly so that attendees can book meetings with their team in advance of your event which helps them build a pipeline of guaranteed leads.
You can also offer discount coupons to each exhibitor which they can use to help promote their attendance and encourage registrations.
3. Generate Pre-Conference Interest
Now you’ve grabbed your exhibitors engagement it is time to put that into positive action. The next stage is to tell your attendees and potential attendees who is participating, what they’re showing, and what the attendee could be missing out on.
It’s your job to educate your attendees about who your exhibitors are and why they should have a conversation with them.
Use the material and engagement obtained from your exhibitors by:
- Posting regularly on social media highlighting each exhibitor’s participation
- Additional posts sharing educational material of each exhibitor, what they do and why people should take notice
- Any education material they share, share this through your mailing lists and newsletters with highlight sections
- Promote any giveaways or incentives your exhibitors are going to be offering
- If your exhibitors are making a world-first announcement, be sure to promote this
- Engage on social media with their social accounts, react and comment on their posts
- Use any in-venue digital signage to promote exhibitors adverts and logos
- Highlight any seminars that an exhibitor may be delivering at your event
- Make it easy for attendees to pre-book meetings with exhibitor staff on your event platform.
When you add exhibitors to Just Attend, the staff they register to attend have the opportunity to add their own personal meeting booking link to their profile. When an attendee logs in, they are able to click on that link and book a meeting with that staff member ahead of your event.
You can also highlight seminars on your agenda as being sponsored by a particular exhibitor.
Our system goes further allowing you to increase brand awareness on digital agenda screens. By default, every exhibitors logo will scroll through a carousel on your room or event agenda board. But you can also enable a dedicated exhibitor for each room so you can promote a sponsored exhibitor.
4. Lead Match Potential Customers With Exhibitors
Work with each of your exhibitors to understand what they do, what they offer to the market, and who their ideal customer is.
Once you know this you can interrogate your registration data to find potential attendees who could be interested in what they have to offer.
In order to do this successfully, you need to ensure that your registration sign up form contains the right data and you’re asking the right questions to your attendees.
If you don’t configure your registration form to ask the right questions, then it will be very hard to segment your attendees and provide a matching service.
Once you have done a first pass and loosely matched attendee’s reasons for attending, who they are, and what types of business areas they work in, you can start to target them to gather interest and qualify their needs and plans for the future.
You can do this in a number of ways:
- Send out surveys to your attendees that focus in on different topics
- Invite them to virtual events that offer an insight into the industry and use these to take snap polls
- Reach out to them to find out more about what they are looking for when attending your event
Once you’re able to segment attendees into niche cohorts you can then target them with more interesting and relevant materials. For example, send them a tailored newsletter detailing exhibitors that offer products and services in their interest area, rather than generic advertisement.
You could go a step further and ask your exhibitors to pay for a dedicated meeting room or workshop. Then reach out and promote these workshops to interested attendees to encourage them to engage.
With Just Attend you can add multiple tickets to your event so you’re able to sell tickets to workshops and micro-events within your conference and share these with the appropriate sponsor.
5. Use A Good Lead Scanning Tool
Now you’ve done all you can up to your event, but now it is time for the exhibitor themselves to pick up the mantle of capturing leads.
There will be lots of opportunity within your event for them to spark up a discussion. This doesn’t always happen on their stand. I’ve had million dollar relationship begin in the venue car park just sparked by chance.
Exhibitors will need to be able to capture interest fast. Deals won’t be finalised at your event. Your event is just the start of that journey, so they’ll need a way to connect and follow-up after your event is over.
This is usually done using a badge scanning tool or capture form.
Exhibitors expect this tool to be supplied and included with their package. However, I have seen this capability charged for by other organizers.
So what features of the lead scanning tool do exhibitors expect?
- The ability to scan a badge quickly and obtain critical contact information like name, email, phone.
- The ability to take notes to remind them of the purpose of scanning the badge.
- The ability to export leads on demand so they can begin follow up activities immediately.
Just Attend has an extensive lead generation capability that not only allows exhibitors to scan QR codes on attendee badges, pre-populate their contact card with the important data, add notes, and export leads to email, it gives the exhibitor the ability to qualify their leads further.
Exhibitors can add custom questions to their lead capture scan so their staff can qualify the leads into different categories as decided by their marketing goals.
These can be ordered by importance and be marked as mandatory or optional data points.
Exhibitors can also make live changes to these questions as they adapt to your event in realtime. Questions can be edited, added, or removed without losing any previous data entries.
Exhibitor managers can download all leads generated directly from the event portal.
As an organizer, you can also see in realtime how many leads are being generated at your event, which exhibitors are generating the most leads, who is their best scanner, and which attendees are the most engaged.
If you’re ready to use Just Attend for your next event, why not book a demo below?
