According to Exhibitor Online less than 70% of trade show exhibitors have a formalised marketing system to follow up with trade show leads and only 32% have a system that can track and report on conversions of those leads.
After each trade show do you have a stack of cards like this to follow up with? And hand on heart how many times will you try to follow up with these leads?
Most companies discard leads after between 2 and 5 attempts to contact. And only 12% are set up with systems to enable them to follow up for the long term.
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Can you guarantee that you will get around to following up consistently with these over the following days, weeks, months and even years?
The answer lies with marketing automation. Not only will marketing automation increase sales by enabling you to follow up automatically and consistently, so that those valuable sales leads do not “fall between the cracks” but it will save you time by reducing repetitive time-consuming tasks for you and your staff. And Keap / Infusionsoft is the perfect tool for trade show follow-up by exhibitors.
To give you an example of a recent trade show that I exhibited at.
On the stand, we had 4 different ways to capture leads.
1/ The standard collect business cards method. We used a goldfish bowl to collect cards. At the end of the day, these were typed into Keap/ Infusionsoft and an automatic marketing campaign was triggered that can follow up on the leads for over a year.
2/ Contacts could enter a competition to win a Chromebook laptop. All they had to do was text in the word “WIN”. Again contact details were automatically captured. The entry was recorded in a spreadsheet and the automated marketing campaign was initiated.
3/ Using a Tripwire offer to get a small purchase from a prospective client (used to weed out freebie seekers and tire kickers) I offered a signed copy of my book for just £5. So the initial step was to take a £5 credit card payment via a mobile phone app. Stripe collected the payment, pushed the contact details into Xero, Xero created an invoice and sent it to the customer, and then Keap / Infusionsoft was triggered to follow up with the book buyer and look to convert them to a paying coaching client.
4/ A website address. And when they visit the website there are many more ways that the visitor’s details can be captured for follow-up. For instance, automatically book and schedule telephone / Zoom Discovery calls.
So I hope you can start to see how marketing automation can make your trade show follow up so much more successful and dramatically improve your Return on Investment in trade show exhibiting.
I have been developing out a series of template campaigns for Keap / Infusiosnoft for clients. More information on trade show follow up marketing.
