[This second in a series of articles on the art of event marketing is a guide that focuses on all the main event. Reference post #1 post, Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail, to discover proactive tactics to complete first.] 

Now That You’re Ready, Stay Ready

Now that all of your amazing planning has paid off; your booth is assembled, your team is well-briefed, and it’s five minutes before the doors open, you can take the rest of the day off. Your work is done, right? Mmmmm. Not quite.

It’s showtime! It’s time to engage your audience, build relationships, and capture leads. This takes energy, expertise, and … tons of energy. You can rest in the evening. Wait. No, you can’t. That’s also showtime. In fact, it’s prime time! You’ll see why as you read below.

Check out our all-in-one Conference Marketing 101 guide covering the ins and outs of a successful event, from the planning stage, through the event itself, and post-event follow-up. Download it to your phone for easy access throughout the conference season. Think of it as your personal booth boss assistant!

But first, take a look at these ten key on-site strategies to make your next event a successful one.

1. Turn Heads With a Showstopping Booth

• Visual Appeal: Put some extra thought into how your booth looks and feels. A boring booth is an invisible booth, so it has to be visually striking, branded effectively, and inviting. Search for eye-catching designs, lighting ideas, and dazzling multimedia displays. And jot down the cool booth ideas (and take pics!) you see at your next event to use as future inspiration.
• Engagement Stations: People will remember you if you create memorable experiences. Yes, this is circular reasoning, but the message is valid. You need to draw people in visually, but you also need to offer memorable hands-on experiences. As educators know, these experiences are much more memorable than words on a page or a PowerPoint script. Offer demos, interactive displays, or fun activities that draw attendees in, like spin-to-win wheels, trivia contests, or social media challenges.
• Comfortable Space: Include amazing lounge areas for longer discussions. Everyone needs a place to recharge at events. (Both mentally and technologically!) Create a comfortable area with a co-working vibe. Let people know it is OK to take Zoom calls and check-in back at the office. Event-goers will remember you and your brand. And they’ll probably even take a minute to check out your products between calls.

2. More About Engagement (Yes, it’s that important.)

• Approachability: Let’s face it, not everyone on your team is camera-ready for prime-time schmoozing. Make sure your people want to be there. They have to enjoy meeting new people. And talking, smiling, and talking more. It’s not all natural talent. Train your team to be approachable, proactive, and knowledgeable. Avoid sitting behind tables or looking distracted. And save Tik-Tok for later.
• Personalized Conversations: Tailor your interactions to the attendee’s needs and interests instead of delivering a generic pitch. If your comms or brand team hasn’t provided persona-specific pitches, review them on your own. Call upon your pre-event research. Refresh your memory about what kind of prospect is at the event. And speak directly to them.
• Storytelling: Share compelling success stories or case studies relevant to attendees’ challenges. Experts say that stories with a narrative arc including compelling characters, a challenge, and a resolution, resonate more deeply with audiences than other forms of communication. From cave dwellers to Shakespeare, we have always used stories to understand the world around us.

3. Capture High-Quality Leads

• Digital Tools: Lead capture is one of the main goals for many, if not most, of the events you and your team attend. And digital tools are the best way to grab and keep track of these new prospects. As we mentioned in our pre-event post and in our event planning cheat sheet, there are a host of lead retrieval apps, QR code readers, and other contactless solutions to choose from. Cvent LeadCapture, Expo Logic (LeadPod), iCapture, and Captello to name a few. Most of these apps will integrate directly with your CRM tool to make management that much easier. Nifty, right?
• Qualify Leads: As your team gathers leads, have them categorize each (e.g., lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead) based on their potential value for follow-up. If you’re using a self-service lead capture app, include questions in the signup form that relay to your CRM the quality of each capture.
• Interactive Lead Magnets: But what do leads get out of it? (Other than being up to date on the latest and greatest from your company?) Make lead capture more engaging and memorable, encouraging attendees to provide their details while fostering positive associations with your brand. Gamify the process with contests and challenges that award the winners free trials, upgraded conference swag, or an oversized plush purple unicorn. (Branded, of course.)

4. Host or Attend Key Sessions and Events

• Speaker Opportunities: If possible, have your brand represented on panels or in breakout sessions with your team’s brightest minds to showcase thought leadership. When representatives from your company talk the talk with expertise and walk the walk with (humble) swagger, how can an event-goer ignore you?
• Networking Events: Have we mentioned engagement? After a long day covering the booth and chatting up passersby, it’s time to get the party started. Catch a catnap, drink a Red Bull, and put on your game face. Your work has just begun. Attend mixers, dinners, or after-hours gatherings to build deeper relationships.
• Session Visibility: Attend relevant sessions, shake hands, kiss babies, and genuinely learn what event guests are interested in and what their pain points are. Hear what they thought of the session, build a report, and tap phones to exchange contact info. If you work at Dunder Mifflin, hand out business cards.

5. Fire Up Your Socials in Real Time

• Live Updates: You are now a multi-media covering the conference beat. What’s making news? Who is shaking things up? Prominent speakers? Though it is valuable to share the vibe from the event in a non-partisan way, don’t be shy about promoting your products and content.
• Engage Online: Respond to comments, share attendee content, and create polls or questions to drive engagement. Post photos, videos, and updates on your well-performing platforms, whether LinkedIn, Instagram or any others. Some conferences even use event-specific platforms. Tag relevant people in your field and use event hashtags.
• User-Generated Content: Encourage attendees to share photos or testimonials from your booth or event activities. Set up a photo booth or a “confessional” where event attendees can create fun visual content. It doesn’t take an extraordinary amount of know-how to splice these pics and vids into punchy content for your website (both customer-facing and employee-facing pages), social, presentation decks,

6. Focus on Networking and Relationship Building

• VIP Meetings: Arrange one-on-one meetings with key prospects, partners, or influencers during the event. Even if you don’t see immediate results, the long-term payoff can make it well worth your while. This is a reminder of the importance of your long game.
• Make Alliances: It’s a lot easier not to get thrown off the island if you make alliances. Make friends. Build partnerships with complementary businesses for cross-promotion, sharing post-event activities, and generally exchanging advice and tips while creating an attractive vibe.
• Be a Connector: Remember that the ultimate value your brand can embody is being helpful – even if there is nothing in it for you. If your product or service isn’t a right fit introduce attendees to others who can help them. It creates trust, goodwill, positive associations, and stronger relationships. Next time you do have what they need, you’ll be top on their list.

7. Provide Exceptional Value

• Knowledge Sharing: Sharing is caring. Host mini-sessions, Q&A discussions, or product demos at your booth.
• Exclusive Offers: Make guests feel special. Provide event-only discounts, early access, or other limited-time deals to attendees.
• High-Quality Conference Giveaways: Forgo the stress balls. Offer useful and memorable branded items that attendees will value. This means understanding your audience, and getting in their heads. What you value may be different from what they value. In fact, who am I to imply that stress balls aren’t inordinately relevant to a key segment of your addressable market.

8. Optimize Performance in Real Time

• Track Metrics (or, at least, anecdotal evidence): Monitor booth traffic, social media mentions, and lead volume to adjust strategies in real-time. These metrics may not prove causality, but they may give you the nudge to shake things up at the booth and try something different.
• Adapt Quickly: If something isn’t working, pivot. This could include reconfiguring your booth, changing messaging, or redirecting staff efforts. When practical, try preparing a plan A and a plan B. If the stress balls aren’t working, bring on the Gucci down vests. The point is to be flexible. Read the room. And adapt.

9. Keep the Energy High

• Engaged Team: Rotate staff to keep energy levels up and ensure all interactions are fresh and enthusiastic. And did we mention Red Bull?
• Interactive Activities: Include fun elements like games, photo booths, or VR experiences to energize attendees. Bonus: These same engaging activities will give staff the boost they need to keep winning the conference.

10. Document the Event and for Heaven’s Sake, Follow Up

• Photos and Videos: No one likes to be ghosted. Be sure to send that appropriately timed proverbial text after the first date. In this case, it’s probably an email. So make that email sing! Capture high-quality pics, videos, interview snippets, and evening fun. Take the opportunity to highlight current customers you bump into. Package these up and broadcast via post-event emails, social media, and other relevant channels.
• Testimonials and Feedback: Collect attendee feedback or on-the-spot testimonials about your products or services. Interview a customer for a case study. These work great for the reasons listed above. Pro tip: edit out the folks with crumbs on their shirts. They will definitely thank you for your consideration. As with all content that includes people’s image and/or voice, check with your legal team before publishing.
• Event Recap Content: Make sure to record key takeaways from sessions and interactions for your post-event content. Key takeaways make excellent sound bites on their own or spliced together in rapid-fire cuts.

Be a Champion. And a Realist.

So … how was the event, your CMO will ask when you run into her on the elevator. And you will have a confident answer because you’ve organized your thoughts and are prepared to share them.

Be ready to champion your successes with a concise summary of your team’s performance, including booth traffic, anecdotal engagement impressions, and key relationships made. But have the exact number of leads captured always top of mind. That’s the metric everyone will want to know.

You’ll have a chance to break down all of the metrics in more detail later, elaborate on what worked well and what didn’t, and present your recommendations based on your data. This is where you’ll want to be a realist. Don’t sugarcoat the areas you and your team didn’t meet goals. Present challenges as opportunities to improve on next time.

Ultimately, brands invest in events because each event promises to bring in new business. But before a single deal is closed, you and your event team have been laying the groundwork. You’ve taken the show on the road to engage potential customers and build deeper relationships. You’ve given the company a human face and put the best foot forward. The next time a conference-goer hears your company’s name, she’ll be ready to talk business.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What are Qualified Leads? 

The purpose of qualifying leads is to identify the most promising leads based on their level of interest, buying intent, budget, and fit with the business’s ideal customer profile. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) are two such designations.

• An MQL is a potential customer who has shown interest in a company’s products or services through marketing efforts. They are more likely to become customers than other leads and are ready to receive more contact.

• An SQL is a prospective customer who has moved through the pipeline to a point where they have shown a readiness to become an active customer. At this stage, they are typically handed off from the marketing team to the sales team. It doesn’t guarantee a sale, but an SQL is nearing the end of the sales funnel.

What are Case Studies?

In the context of marketing, case studies are profiles of customer success. They provide powerful social proof of how a product or service helped a customer achieve their goals, and the benefits they experienced. They provide a detailed account of the customer’s experience, including the steps they took, the results they achieved, and the support they received.

What are Metrics?

Marketing metrics help us determine whether or not an marketing activity is effective. Typical event marketing metrics include: Booth traffic (How many people stopped at your booth.) Booth engagement: (How many people actively engaged in a product demo, for example.) Social media engagement (The number of likes, comments, shares, mentions, impressions, clicks, etc.) And lead generation (The number and quality of leads generated by the event.)

What are Personas?

A marketing persona is a fictional representation of a target customer segment that’s used to create effective marketing strategies. Personas help marketers understand their audience and tailor their marketing to meet their needs.