What To Do With All Those Leads?

There are many ways to define a lead. Most definitions fall somewhere between two bookends: the sales definition and the marketing definition. The former is the narrower of the two, and is generally confined to someone who is going to actually purchase a service or product. The marketing definition, by comparison, is traditionally a wider one, encompassing essentially anyone who might be interested in a purchase of some kind or is eligible for a conversion of some kind; you often see these candidates referred to as prospects. In this article, we’ll show you both how to identify a lead, and what to do with one when you’ve got it.

 

Take the Lead on Leads

For our purposes here, we’re interested in the marketing definition, and when it comes to event marketing, the proactive strategy is to consider all attendees and participants as leads. Why? Because they’ve already opted in. They came and they participated. So step one is to take the lead on leads, and treat your lists (attendees, emails, survey participants, social media contributors, etc.) as both your action items and your core inbound marketing resources. The very nature of post-event experiential marketing in fact lends itself fully to the idea of inbound marketing, because when reaching out post-event, you’re essentially as close to preaching to the converted as modern marketing allows. So proceed with confidence!

What to Do With All Those Leads

If step one was establishing that your lists are your leads, then step two is determining what to do with those leads. To begin the process, you need to establish a strategy for three environments within which you’re going to engage with your prospects. These environments can also be understood as tools. They are:

• Social Media
• Email
• Website

Each of these is both a tool and a space, and while you want to approach each with a unique strategy, it is important to also understand the extent to which they inform one another and build on each other.

Sales Degrees

Each of the above allows for a progressively more aggressive conversion strategy.

Your social media outreach should be the least sales-focused, instead hewing primarily to experiential marketing tenets in which your leads are classed as “participants.” Personalize your social media outreach using “@” mentions whenever possible. Encourage the sharing of everything, from feedback and photos, to successes and connections, to memories and tales from the trenches. Include website links in your outreach when relevant, but don’t shine too bright a light on them; instead, offer them as a courtesy in the form of a “for more: (landing page link).”

Your email campaigns should also be personalized, with an emphasis on the experiential. “Greetings Mary, Thank you very much for your attendance at our _____ event. We sincerely hope you enjoyed the experience, and we welcome any thoughts you wish to share.” But follow that with an explicit CTA. “We want to make you aware of a special offer for our event attendees.” Include a link, and if relevant, a promotional code. And remember, you need a subject line that ensures an open, so dangle the CTA in the subject, but then back off into personalization with the salutation and the opening text, before placing the CTA.

Your Website should be fully optimized for sales and conversions. Create a specific post-event landing page, and direct all your outreach there. When visitors arrive, there should be an immediate opportunity to enter information, fill out forms, make purchases, enter codes, take advantage of special offers, etc. The landing page should be all business, all the time.

To succeed with all the methods and approaches outlined above, you need preparation, integration and segmentation. Success at this level is best achieved by utilizing a cloud-based solution whose platform focuses on the whole event cycle and includes a robust post-event suite of data management tools and analytics. Platform providers such as Limelight offer sophisticated and integrated tool suites that not only enable you to exceed expectations for your current event, but for the one after that, and the one after that. And remember, the days and weeks after are also the days and weeks before, so it’s never to early to select your platform and launch your strategy.