Isn’t spending more time selling and less time searching for potential customers the goal of every B2B marketing strategy? It is also precisely what B2B event marketing lets you do. So let’s explore the list of B2B marketing ideas to make the most out of your event marketing efforts.
As 68% of B2B marketers agree that virtual events help them create quality leads, we can confidently conclude that events solve conversion blocks for them at every stage of the funnel.
Events are an integral part of the buyer journey, especially in the B2B world. They can be a powerful tool in accelerating the lead generation process and minimizing the steps leading to a sale.
Events can help generate awareness, educate and forge relationships that turn prospects into loyal customers.
So let’s start with the list of B2B event marketing ideas.
What is event marketing?
Event marketing is a strategy to invite prospects to themed events or webinars and offer them excellent customer experiences while carrying out activities like audience education, establishing thought leadership, and lead nurturing.
This involves establishing face-to-face contact and meaningful conversations with the prospects.
For example, trade shows, seminars, summits, virtual conferences, and business conferences, to name a few.
How do events help in B2B lead generation?
Did you know that a person can encounter over 10,000 ads per day in today’s world?
That’s a shockingly significant number, right? It’s hard to have a recollection of going through so many ads on an average day.
Surprisingly, We have developed subconscious reflexes to mute and skip the ads so seamlessly that we only remember a handful out of hundreds of ads we see in a day.
That’s why, to stand out, having a B2B event marketing strategy is a must for today’s time.
A nicely planned B2C & B2B event marketing strategy lets you build personal relationships with prospects and leverage the association to achieve sales success.
Companies host themed events for the following reasons:
- Establishing thought leadership
- Exhibiting services to prospects
- Nurturing relationships with current clients and prospects
- Pitching new products and services.
With the added personal touch, marketers can leverage events to gain high-quality leads that convert quickly.
Events allow potential consumers to have a one-of-a-kind, direct experience with the company and understand its purpose, viewpoint, and personality.
Thus, including B2B event marketing into your marketing plan may pay off in terms of meaningfully interacting with customers.
8 Powerful B2B event marketing ideas to generate qualified leads at virtual events
1. Map out an event plan around pain points of your target audience
To start generating quality B2C and B2B leads through events, you would first need to map out a virtual event plan that can encourage participation and boost attendance at your virtual event.
Set a vision for the event and find answers to the defining questions like
- What kind of Audience do you want at the event?
- What can you offer to the people?
- Where are the attendees located?
- Why do you want to go live, for how long, and what topics do you want to discuss?
- How can you set up a differentiated virtual experience for your virtual audience?
- How can you best educate the audience about your offerings?
- How can you incentivize people to take immediate action?
Developing answers to these defining questions can help you host a great event.
2. Approach great speakers and invite them to establish thought leadership
Thought leadership is a strategy that brands leverage to develop a credible position in a particular domain by sharing valuable and insightful knowledge.
Inviting experts and leaders in the field can help establish your brand as an authority figure.
For example, Intel, a market leader in the semiconductor industry, hosts frequent stream-only virtual events like “Architecture Day” to discuss the innovation, development, and ongoing research in the field of semiconductors at Intel. This is a great way to establish thought leadership.
As a bonus, attracting industry leaders and experts would help you rope in more participation and organic reach. A healthy discussion amongst expert speakers would also allow you to generate on-demand streaming content post events, which would further help you rope in more ROI.
Here are some tips for choosing the right speaker and theme for your event:
- Find speakers who can speak on relevant topics for your target audience
- Find speakers with established credibility and name in the industry to attract event registrations and attendance.
- Invite speakers that you think would help you rope in relevant sponsors to your event.
Now let’s move on to our second point: Shorten your sales cycle at the event!
3. Choose the best virtual event platform for B2B event marketing
A virtual event platform should be looked at like other marketing tools. Choosing the right virtual event platform is crucial to generating maximum leads with your virtual event marketing strategy. You may ask the following questions to evaluate a virtual event platform.
- Can you create seamless customer journeys with the help of the platform?
- How engaged and immersed would the audience be till the end?
- What type of content can be shown to the audience with the platform’s help.
- How would the attendees network or indulge in meaningful conversation at the virtual event?
- What value does the event platform allow you to offer to sponsors?
- Can you create an immersive experience with the platform?
- Do you get 360-degree insights and live event analytics to run targeted campaigns?
- Would you get features like hosting customized and branded events?
- Would you get features like gamification, Q&A, live polls, and chats to keep your audience engaged till the end?
- Is the platform simple enough to be understood by your potential attendees?
4. Simplify customer journey and cut down the sales cycle at your event
Simplifying the path to access marketing collateral, browsing through FAQs, and interacting with a representative would allow your attendees to educate themselves about the product better.
You can close deals with live demonstrations, pitches, and leveraging face-to-face communication, which accelerates your B2B lead qualification or sales process.
When attendees register for your event, they might register with investigative intent to know more about the product or the company. Thus, following up with the prospects post-event can rope in conversions and amplify your B2B event ROI.
5. Host virtual or hybrid events that educate attendees with interactive sessions and content
Educating audiences at your virtual event is a coveted output from your event marketing efforts.
People prefer real-time communication in all aspects of their lives, including professional contacts.
32% of users who have ever connected with a company on social media anticipate a response within 30 minutes or less, according to a report by JaeBaers. As a result, live videos, tweets, and webcasts are gaining popularity.
Instant chat, social sharing, on-demand webinars, and live Q&A sessions are all used in virtual events to facilitate such interactions.
Furthermore, you can offer attendees some takeaway knowledge resources like E-books and video content to boost brand recall and offer further lead nurturing or engagement opportunities.
As a bonus, these free resources will incentivize audiences to attend the events and allow people to stay in touch with your brand.
6. Enable data-driven tracking to increase B2B lead generation at events
Data is crucial for any B2C or B2B lead generation strategy. Robust frameworks to gather event analytics can help you achieve better results.
Event analytics can offer actionable insights to execute essential marketing functions like identifying hot leads and making live engagements with prospects. Moreover, they can also find answers to the questions like what works and what does not.
Event analytics might also be necessary to calculate your event’s value provided to the sponsors. Airmeet offers comprehensive event analytics that shows you what you need.
All in all, your advanced event analytics by Airmeet can help you with the following motives:
- Identifying attendance rate
- Tracking content views
- Tracking the volume of transactions performed during the event
- Who engaged with what?
- Identifying warm leads that can be nurtured with further outreach and email marketing
- Analyzing both quality and quantity of leads generated
- Value your event provided to the sponsors
You also get a list of email addresses via the registration forms for the event and booth entry.
These reports would help you gauge the quality and quantity of leads you generate. Moreover, the data would let you tweak your B2B event marketing strategy. It will give tremendous results and eventually maximize virtual event ROI.
7. Increase reach by reducing the cost of entry and generating more B2B leads at events
To generate more B2B leads at virtual events, you should consider reducing entry barriers for people. This may include the cost of entry, event entry experience, and more.
For example, with Airmeet, an attendee can join the event almost instantly with minimal effort. However, even when an attendee might need help with onboarding, Airmeet’s customer support team is available 24*7 to help.
Moreover, with custom ticketing features at Airmeet, you can sell tickets at a tiered pricing range, which allows you to balance ROI and reach by reducing entry costs.
If the primary goal of your virtual event is to generate B2B leads and increase the reach, then consider offering free downloadable content and recordings of the event so more people can access the event.
The more the attendance, the more the opportunities to generate B2B leads with virtual events.
8. Set up systems for perpetual engagement — Your events are not a one-time opportunity
Virtual events allow you to rope-in engagement for extended periods, even after the event is over.
Technically, your virtual event is not over until everyone is tired of talking about it. Thus, when it comes to generating B2B leads with event marketing, you can keep getting leads with a virtual event for extended periods.
How? Just keep the doors open for people to view the recording or the contents even after the event.
If there is something valuable shared in the content and a discussion during the event, people would love to share, revisit, and search for it.
Moreover, as people register to access the information, you gather data that your sales representatives or marketing team can leverage to nurture leads.
It’s good to contact them via emails and even calls if they provide the phone number while registering for the event.
Other essential stages for B2B sales pipelines generation
Should hybrid or virtual events be a part of a B2B event marketing strategy?
Audience engagement and event experience are vital factors influencing lead generation quality at an event.
During in-person events, people can participate in engaging, and trust-building activities like networking, Q&A sessions, product demos, and more. Thus, marketers leverage trust and relationships to rope in qualified leads.
Today, virtual event platforms like Airmeet can offer superior features to replicate in-person-like networking opportunities to get the maximum ROI from virtual events.
Moreover, a virtual system makes it easier to gather in-depth and actionable insights like attendee behavior, engagement rates, and other data to launch targeted lead-nurturing campaigns post-event.
Virtual events are highly scalable as they are not limited by the physical capacity of a venue. Furthermore, the cost of scaling to a larger audience is significantly less in comparison to a physical event.
In a nutshell, virtual or hybrid events make it a good part of any B2B event marketing strategy for these reasons:
- They offer superior engagement and networking opportunities like dedicated networking spaces, Q&A, product demos, and more.
- They can gather in-depth attendee analytics, making it easier to identify hot leads and retarget them through custom approaches.
- They are highly scalable and do not promote environmental factors like the pandemic, lockdowns, or travel bans.
With virtual and hybrid events, one can easily offer the benefits of an in-person trade show, summit, corporate conference, or thought leadership events for B2B lead generation purposes.
Let’s explore the step-by-step B2C and B2B event marketing ideas to generate more qualified leads with event marketing and virtual events.
To conclude this list of B2B event marketing ideas
B2B event marketing is a powerful tool for generating more leads and bringing in more business for your company. Trends suggest that Virtual and hybrid events are becoming mainstream in B2B event marketing.
To generate more B2B leads during an in-person, hybrid, or virtual event, you may follow event marketing ideas like:
- Setting up events with superior engagement rates. Hosting virtual events on platforms like Airmeet offers you features to boost engagement of your event.
- Reduce the cost of entry to the event. This would result in increased attendance, which could translate into more leads.
- Leverage live data analytics and post-event analytics to retarget hot leads.
- Educate the audience at your event about your product or organization’s vision.
- Simplify the customer journey at your event.
- Choose the best virtual event platform for your events. PS, Airmeet is a g2 leader and is trusted by over 6500+ institutes, organizations, and companies when it comes to virtual events.
- Establish thought leadership at your events.
That’s all for today. Hope you enjoyed reading these powerful event marketing tips and ideas. Try out Airmeet for your next B2B lead generation event. Book a demo with us now.
