Salespeople love trade shows. Trade shows offer a great excuse for leaving the office for a few days, traveling to a cool new city, meeting lots of new people, along with ample networking soirees at swanky restaurants and nightclubs, and the chance to spend valuable face-time with important clients.
Marketers, on the other hand, fear trade shows. Why? Because trade shows mean lots of work… There are brochures to proof and print. There are booths to design and order. There are a million small details like business cards, hotel reservations, plane tickets and such to coordinate… and we haven’t even mentioned pre-show marketing, as visions of empty booths with tumbleweeds blowing by keep marketing managers up at night.
Unfortunately, we can’t help set up your booth or get your brochures to the floor on time. You’ll need to take care of that yourself. What we can offer, however, is the best solution since sliced bread for driving traffic to your booth, and ensuring your salespeople not only leave the show with bucket loads of red hot leads to follow up on, but provide your marketing team with a system for better and more efficient follow-up after the show ends.
TRADE SHOW SUCCESS WITH CROSS-MEDIA MARKETING TOOLS – 3 EASY STEPS WITH EASYPURL.COM:
1. THE OFFER: Create a great offer persuasive enough to get your audience to enter their information and RSVP to meet you at the show. Send the offer to your audience through an email or direct mail piece containing a personalized invitation and a Personalized URL (PURL). Using this approach, you leave for the show with dozens of meetings already set up with the hottest prospects around. You can even include some survey questions on the Landing Page to help data mine and pre-qualify the leads before you meet with them.
As the day of the event approaches, you can send out email or text (SMS) triggers to those who RSVP’d, reminding them of the meeting they scheduled and giving them vital information on how to locate your booth. These reminders will boost your booth traffic substantially. It’s even possible to personalize these messages or make them appear to come directly from a salesperson, as opposed to being part of a mass broadcast. And as we all know, personalization drives results.
At the show’s conclusion, you can then broadcast mass follow-up emails to the show leads, thanking them for stopping by and reminding them of the great offer you were running. This guarantees that all of your valuable leads get followed up on, and keeps your company top of mind.
2. THE EXECUTION:
Personalized URLs: Include Personalized URLs in the email or direct mail that you send to your audience a few weeks before the event. John Smith will find it hard to resist clicking on a link that says johnsmith.easypurl.com. With Easypurl.com you can create, launch and track PURLs with the click of a mouse. If you wish to send out emails, you can use Easypurl.com white-listed email broadcast engine to send out personalized emails containing PURLs.
Custom Landing Pages: Clicking on the PURL directs the visitor to a custom Landing Page. Use Easypurl.com’s revolutionary Template Gallery to create Landing Pages that suit your brand, business and industry in a few minutes flat.
Easypurl.com RSVP Forms and Surveys: On the Landing Pages, include an RSVP Form that visitors must fill out to set up a 1:1 meeting a the show. If you want to gather more information, you have the option to ask the visitors a few questions using a Survey Form.
Email and SMS Triggered Follow-Ups: Now that you have your prospective visitors’ information, use Easypurl.com’s Marketing Automation Tools to send them reminders to visit your booth a few days before the event and the day before the event.
3. THE FOLLOW-UP: Use the Email and SMS Triggers to follow up with your visitors after the event. Easypurl.com Marketing Automation tools let you set-up thank you emails to go out to your trade show visitors the day after the event.
Okay, now get some sleep.
