5 Lead Generation Tips for Event Managers

Relevant & quality lead generation is the backbone of having a great B2B or B2C marketing strategy and establishing a good foundation for your exponential growth. And event management is no exception. However — it is easier said than done. Not only do you need to make sure you’re generating leads for your right target audience, but you also have to grab their attention, provide value or solve their problems with your service — or in an event manager’s case, attract them to be part of your event, whether as partners or visitors.

In most cases, using a combination of both inbound and outbound tactics allow you to create a better pipeline. Here are 5 proven tips to help your lead generation to ensure a more engaging event. Ofcourse, these tips will help you if you’re in another industry as well.

1. Build Your Email Audience with Clear and Persuasive CTA

It is quite the norm to have a full website (or a landing page) dedicated to your upcoming event. First step is to learn your target group and optimize your website search results. If people can’t find your website first, they can’t really sign up. We’ll be talking about this in the content marketing tip as it highly involves Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Second step is to figure out what makes you different from other events. It is very important to show your potential attendees that you’ll be worth their time and money participating in one simple sentence. Instead of using CTA’s like “Sign up for our event” focus on a single, powerful, persuasive message. For example “Get access to the latest risk management event and news with one click.” This way, with one sentence you establish authority, and show what exactly you offer. Terms such as “one click” also create persuaviness and convenience- which is the most important for many customers.

Pro tip: If you’ve already got a good grasp of other steps and tips and know your target audience well, you could give B2B Lead generation solutions a try. In many occasions, creating contact info lists tailored to your own needs and focus will allow you to allocate a smaller budget than ad campaigns or other pay per click methods while still providing you with a list of relevant contacts without the months of wait to grow it organically. If you’re interested in lead generation for risk management, we offer a convenient and affordable solution for you at Risk Leads for event managers like yourself.

2. Turn Cold Emails to Warm Emails

Cold emailing is not the easiest barrier to break because you have no prior relationship with the company or person you’re sending it to. This means that you should get creative and make a good first impression to get the results you need. Standing out from the rest of the emails your future clients receive is a big crucial step. While staying within your company’s communication style, expand into areas of creativity that can boost your chances. First of all, create an eye-catching but short title. If you cannot create one, this might ruin your chances to make a good first impression. After all, if they don’t open your mail, they cannot know about you. In the body of your email, include animated GIFs, video’s or humor if your company’s communication style allows it. For example, memes are great ways to be memorable. It is also important to get straight to the point and not use cliche marketing terms. Otherwise, people will feel spammed — or advertised too much and simply ignore your mails.

Pro tip: You can turn your emails into warm emails much quicker, if you include a short personal video with call to actions in your emails. Not only that they’ll get to know the voices behind these texts, and establish trust quickler, but your mails will be memorable for them as it is personalised and unique. If you had previous editions of this event, you can also include a heartfelt video from an attendee and what made your event unique.

You should also make sure to send at least 2 followup emails. Usually 3-day, 5-day, or 10-day emails work well. In many cases, your emails will be in a pile of other emails, and may not get seen — or not delivered at all. Sending at least 3 emails increases your visibility. Make sure that your follow up emails are also adding value to your future customers, rather than being boldly salesy emails. Providing a resource or service — something of real value to your target audience for free can also boost your chances of them turning into paid clients by a great margin. In many cases, a compilation of relevant downloadable content (infographics, whitepapers, checklists etc.) or perks from your event partners (discounts, free redeemables) would make good options. In a sense, it should be something that takes relatively little time for you to do, but provides the business with something valuable. If you’re focusing extensively on content creation, this might be that thing for you.

Be aware that this email lead generation strategy is very commonly used, and it may not be very easy to pull off. Most internet users are used to free content and many of those freebies might mean nothing for them. Knowing your audience and their pain point and what they need is a crucial step here once again.

3. Automate your Emails

Automation is one of the biggest buzzwords that you’ll hear pretty much in every industry. Event industry is obviously not left out when it comes to email marketing. Not only that automation will cut out an extensive amount of workload when it comes to managing different groups such as partners, speakers, or different kinds of visitors, analyse target audience behaviours, or redundant tasks such as follow up emails — it will also be a lifesaver when it comes to campaigns. There are many free and paid email marketing tools you can use such as Mailchimp or its alternatives.

While you’re at creating campaigns for new attendees, you can also create re-engagement & customer retention campaigns for the ones that have previously attended one of your events. This will allow you to identify lost subscribers as well as make smarter marketing and sales decisions. While creating creative titles and content for these emails, make sure to restate your value, introduce new benefits and give updates. If you already have an email sequence going out for newcomers, you can slightly change and make it applicable for a re-engagement campaign with similar context with little effort.

Pro tip: You can also create referral campaigns to turn email leads into more leads. Referral campaigns such as “Ambassador Programs” work great if you have people in your community that are in love with your brand or events. Not only can you give extra recognition and support to people this way, but their own network could be a great asset for extra leads for you. If you can automate the entire process, it can do wonders, however make sure to not lose the human touch.

4. Content Marketing

Content Marketing is a great method to combine with your email marketing strategy. First of all, it’s a great method to add value to your following with interesting content such as articles, blogs, videos (especially aftermovies, speaker recordings, testimonials) and so on. Secondly, you can use the same content for enriching your email marketing as well. Content generation is also a great method to boost your website’s SEO. As SEO is all about increasing page views and your visibility, typically for people that don’t know your brand, it is crucial to pay great attention to get more external leads. The better your SEO score is, the higher you’ll be on the search engine results, meaning more clicks and more potential attendees — essentially making this strategy a fast and free method if successful. You can check out this extensive guide on WordPress SEO for further tips and tricks that can boost your events’ success.

Of course, for this strategy to work, it should be adding real value to the people. This means that you should know your target audience very well, and adjust your content accordingly. It is important to know what topics or medium your followers like, and what language they prefer. Once you dive into what your target audience likes, provide them with high-quality content. Exclusive interviews with speakers before or after the event, or deep dive review of something introduced in your event — such as a new product could be a good option for you.

Pro tip: Creating content that is actually valuable for your following is the biggest goal for this strategy to work, but make sure that your team can actually keep this strategy up on a consistent basis — and is scalable. For example, video contents are great however they typically take more time than other kinds of content. You wouldn’t want to let potential leads just watch your hard work and disappear. In this case, it is once again important to know your target, but also the limitations of your team, and whether it is a reasonable content type for you.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social Media marketing is one of those that I’d call make it or break it. In many cases, each platform will have a different target audience, requiring adjustments in your content. On top of that the engagement and visibility of your posts will be also based on different algorithms. On the bright side, if you have a great content marketing strategy, you can re-use these contents on your social media channels to bring leads into your website. Social media channels will also let you refine your lead generation process and take a targeted approach. They also present extra methods for your visitors to contact and engage with you — making it a nice added value for your community and customer service. It is overall an effective strategy as it’s very rare to meet someone who doesn’t have at least one social media account.

As all social media platforms come with their nuances, it is very important to see which platforms your target audience uses in order to not waste extra effort or money on something that may not work the best for you. We won’t be diving deep into any specific platform marketing or advertising strategy here, however, make sure to research them if you decide to be present with your company in either one.

You can determine if you should be focusing on a specific platform by answering a few questions.

• Why should I use this platform?
• Who will I reach on this platform?
• What kind of content works best on this platform?
• Will my posts bring a unique value to this platform?

These questions can help you figure out whether you should be focusing on this platform, as well as help you develop a specific strategy. Once you develop your strategy, make sure to keep consistency, follow the current trends and analyze your views and engagement to increase your visibility and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Pro tip: If you’re just getting started with social media platforms, prioritize the quality of your content over the number of the posts or platforms. The effort you put into creating high quality content that your followers will get value from and engage with will be more worth than creating average content in various platforms that have barely any engagement. If you however already have these platforms at hand, don’t leave them to collect dust, and post content you’ve already been posting on other platforms there as well.

Summary

Initially, — especially if you’re just beginning — lead generation across multiple platforms or methods could look very daunting. The first and most important step you should take is learning your target audience and regardless of the platform, figuring out what would work best for adding value to them. After you figure this out, you can decide on your main lead gen strategy, shape your content accordingly. Make sure to be creative on your strategy and focus on your SEO to increase your chances on visibility and the success of your event.