COVID-19 (coronavirus) is both a healthcare crisis and a catalyst for economic uncertainty — a one-two punch that has taken aim at the trade show sector as major event organizers pull the plug on their in-person conferences in light of a growing number of attendees being unwilling or unable to travel to shows.
While it is certainly a sound decision for event hosts to cancel or postpone their large gatherings — and for sponsors and exhibitors to pump the breaks on their event marketing — the near-term uncertainty is likely to have a long-term negative impact on many companies’ sales pipelines.
After all, the average business-to-business (B2B) brand invests upwards of 20% of their total marketing budget in events and relies heavily on this spend to drive a substantial volume of qualified leads.
So, it’s not surprising that our B2B clients — especially those selling B2B technology solutions — are asking us to help them rethink how they should invest their demand generation dollars as coronavirus takes trade shows off the table. And we thought it would be useful to share some of the advice we’re giving our clients as a way of sparking your thinking about which alternative demand generation tactics might work to keep your sales team’s pipeline flowing in the wake of COVID cancellations.
You might argue that, even in the digital age, there’s no true substitute for in-person interactions. But we do think that there are (at least) eight ways that B2B marketers can replace lost event marketing lead flow by tapping into what we see as the three core components of any exceptional event experience:
- The delivery of high value content
- The fostering of meaningful community interactions
- The foundation for high potential commercial opportunities
Let’s look at these three areas and the eight lead generation options we would recommend to any B2B marketer looking to reallocate 2020 budget away from trade shows and other live events.
Content
Naturally, many trade show attendees come for the presentations — the inspiring ideas and practical how-to delivered by keynote speakers, expert panelists and hands-on breakout facilitators. Since cancelling conferences in no way reduces business people’s desire to learn, B2B marketers now have an outsized opportunity to generate demand for products and services by delivering value through education and information.
- Run Your Own Virtual Events. If you’re like most of our B2B clients, webinars are already part of your marketing mix. And many events pros are already predicting that the current crisis will usher in a new era for virtual gatherings. Think about how your organization can lean into this dynamic by satisfying your prospects’ desire for high quality live presentations (while drawing registrants into the top of your sales funnel). Offer your own online events that showcase your internal subject matter experts, host highly regarded outside experts, and give your prospects and customers the inspiration, insights and practical ideas they seek.
- Double-Down on Quality Content. Obviously, ‘live’ is just one way to deliver valuable information for an audience, and nearly all B2B marketers count on content marketing to feed the pipeline. As cancelled trade shows free-up funds, some of the savviest marketers we’re talking to are already reinvesting those dollars into the production of high impact evergreen content assets that pack a real info-punch — white papers and e-book, reports and resource guides, tools and tip sheets, blog posts and bylined articles, videos and podcasts can all play a key role in educating your audience and attracting opt-in subscribers for demand-driving nurture campaigns. Speaking of which…
- Deliver Content-Rich Nurture Streams. A properly-done email nurture program is the digital conversation that keeps on giving. Analyzing, optimizing and upgrading your nurture email templates, copy and assets can be an efficient and effective way to keep new leads and the prospects you know moving from interest to action.
- Invest in Content Distribution. We’ve said it before: content consumption is far more valuable than content creation. And content marketing doesn’t just mean ‘marketing with content’; you also need to actually market your content. Shift trade show dollars to content promotion and paid distribution. Ensure you have a proper plan for sharing your content on your own digital channels, putting your content into the hands of your sales people for use in prospect conversations, engaging industry influencers in reaching new audiences, and putting dollars toward tactics like PPC, social ads or syndication platforms, like Outbrain or Taboola (to name just two options).
Community
As much as attendees come for the content, they also come for the community: the conversations, sidebars, socializing and sharing that happen when you gather a few hundred or a few thousand peers in close quarters. What was once a key benefit for attending industry events has become a major liability in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, as real-world social distancing becomes more commonplace, online social interactions will become even more valuable than they are today for business professionals. So, not surprisingly, smart, effective social media engagement by the best marketers your organization could ask for — aka your employees — can go a long way toward replacing the handshakes and hallway conversations that so often turn into post-conference sales pipeline.
- Step Up Your Social Selling. For the typical cost of a trade show booth, your company can put the right policies, plan, playbook and platform(s) in place to enable your sales team to engage prospects more effectively on key business networks like LinkedIn and Twitter.
- Enable Employee Advocacy. Already on-board with social selling? Expand your program to involve everyone across the organization. And whether you’re empowering your sellers or unlocking advocates in all areas of the business, you’ll want to consider investing in an amped-up content workflow to ensure that your people know exactly what to say, how to say it and where to share it — with a consistent approach to internal communications to share important content initiatives, useful and usable tools like pre-drafted social post copy, images and templates, and more. In fact, our own clients see stronger understanding, alignment and uptake among their teams when we provide them with employee-sharable content and equip them with the know-how and processes to engage their social connections with precision and purpose.
Commerce
This brings us to the third leg of any successful trade show experience — and frankly, the reason you invested in a presence in the first place: the opportunity it provides for you to tell your company’s story to a targeted community of potential buyers. So, now might be a good time to invest in upgrading how your company tells that story and promotes your products through your key online show spaces.
- Spruce Up Your Site and Social Presences. Clearly, if you had invested in an exhibit at a now-cancelled conference, you planned to showcase your solutions and maybe even introduce some new ones. Now might be a good time to reinvest unspent event marketing money in a professional audit of how well your website conveys the true value of your products or solutions to your customers. Make sure site content about everything you offer is clear, compelling and current. Invest in creating powerful customer success stories. While you’re at it, build new or optimize existing LinkedIn Showcase Pages that can serve as an always-on solution center for anyone who otherwise might have stopped by your booth to learn more about what you offer. In fact, you might find that making better use of your digital real estate is a more effective, more consistent way to attract qualified prospects than your show floor square footage was.
- Enhance Your Employer Branding. Here’s a bonus idea for filling another pipeline that matters to your business: qualified job candidates. Even if sales demand is the main reason you’ve invested in trade shows, these events do double duty by creating more awareness for your business, building your reputation among your peers, and attracting industry pros who are open to new opportunities. So, if in-person events have been an important means of filling your talent pipeline, its smart to reinvest funds in building out content-rich ‘why work here’ pages on your website, slice-of-life employee stories, executive statements (videos, letters, speeches) that convey your leaders’ vision for the business, or even better job descriptions.
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The reason we’re already discussing options like these with our clients is that they (and we!) understand that reallocating marketing money quickly and decisively– even (or maybe especially) in the face of uncertainty — is vital for marketing teams that want to keep leads flowing to sales as one of the key sources for those leads dries up.
We don’t often end our blog posts with a pitch, but if you do want to spend a few minutes discussing how you can reallocate your 2020 marketing budget in the wake of conference cancellations, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
