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Route and schedule prospects from bizdev to sales to implementation
Did you know that 67.3% of B2B marketers are unwilling to invest in field marketing because they think they can’t measure its success?
This feeds into two often-repeated myths about B2B field marketing:
1) It’s expensive
2) It’s impossible to track
I think this is the wrong mindset.
Field marketing can be done on a budget, and it can be tied to pipeline and revenue. You can make the most out of trade shows. I know this because we’ve done it at Dreamdata.
We’re all about attribution (obviously), but quite often, we run with ideas that we know aren’t directly attributable. It doesn’t matter because they’re so absolutely damn fun to work on and everyone remembers them.
Last year, we bought the smallest billboard in Times Square during a conference and made an enormous social media blast out of it ending with:
🔥 Over 1M organic views by our target audience on LinkedIn
🔥 Around 10,000 hours of videos watched on LinkedIn
🔥 Over 100 people saw the billboard during a conference keynote
The campaign is still bringing in customers long after the billboard has been down.
Remember how people buy? Even software: Through memories about you as a brand. Technology and features often come second.
So memorable moments convert, especially if done with intent and precision.
When planning conference attendance, you have two ways to go:
Or try to go for a balance of both.
Each company plans conference attendance in one way or another. Some invest heavy budgets into partnerships with the event organizers, build booths, run giveaways, and present speaker engagements. At Dreamdata, we do not have that experience yet, but we’ve been able to pull off significant ROI from our presence during conferences.
I’ll walk you through our thought process for arranging unforgettable, unscalable experiences and leave you with a list that you can use to stimulate your creative mind.
Besides the standard checklist of pre-/during, and after-event planning, we always do something fun to make events more effective:
Most of the time, it’s a YES!
Why?
All that comes back tenfold in impressions, memories, and willingness to collaborate with us.
Conference season is upon us. Let’s see what you can do to make your event strategy out of the ordinary.
Gather a couple of people with creative minds or pick up a chat topic when catching up (tap people beyond your marketing team!) People love to help, especially when they’re asked for ideas. You don’t know where it might take you.
Tell them where you’re going. Ask if they were to pull off something fun, what would they do? Share some of your ideas first — it’s easier to build on top of ideas versus start from a blank page!
Investigate the area where the event is happening. Are you in the city? Outside of the city? Are all the people going to enter through a specific place? Where do they all live, or are they dropped off by a taxi?
Knowing the area will help you plan those moments and be prepared to capture them. We usually pull up Google Maps to see how the area looks and what the weather will be.
To start with, don’t think about the budget and execution.
Define a budget and plan how many people you’ll need. Events take a lot of energy from attendance alone.
Your team goes to conferences with an already-set agenda, so asking them to do something else has to be well-defined, booked, and easy to execute.
You will get busy, and things will go wrong, but as long as people have an event plan, you’ll be alright.
Plan the initiatives with an attitude that you can’t fail. No matter how poorly the initiative is executed, nobody will know what good looks like as it is different than anything else they have seen before.
It’s raining? A vendor didn’t deliver? You’re late? Make the most of it.
This type of attitude will motivate your team to do their best with creativity in mind. We want this to be fun, creative, and engaging, but also a great experience for everyone.
The people who will see your experience in person are just a fraction of your potential audience. An event has limited attendees, so think about how to impress them and people back home.
Taking pictures and interviewing people is key to sharing the experience with everyone who’s not at the event. Make sure to post while you’re executing because the planned initiative is nothing without it being present on social media. It does not need to be polished.
Unpolished experiences and pictures make the activity even more real. After the event, you can polish the pictures or messaging to share the creative angles of what you did and how people reacted. This is specifically relevant for videos or interviews.
The process of giving and receiving a gift is magical and special. If you are planning to do giveaways, make them special. Plan giveaways as gifts you’d be giving to a friend. It does not have to be expensive, but it definitely needs to be special and memorable.
The act of giving and receiving a gift is special in itself. Don’t leave your giveaways standing in the corner for people to pick, make sure that people know that there is a gift to get, and give it to people from hand to hand.
The end of the event does not mean the end of the effort. After the event, no matter the size, thank people for attending. If you’re short on time, make sure to plan at least an automated email thanking people for attendance.
Add pictures or memories from the event. A personalized thank you message goes even further. There are always a couple of people you really want to thank and leave an impression. Thank them personally, call, or send a personalized message.
The final and the most boring part: Get everyone you met into a campaign in your CRM. That way your marketing team can calculate ROI even years after the event has happened.
Even if the immediate ROI impact of an event is low, stay positive. B2B customer journeys are long and complex—and most people are not in-market for your solution (right now).
But the next time a huge enterprise client is closed, you’ll have evidence they were part of your event.
I’ll leave you with a list where you’ll have to guess which ones have come to life and which ones we chose not to execute. (The answers are at the end of this blog.)
We did every second one of those! The rest are still in the planning phase.
Go host memorable events, and your buyers will remember them forever. Oh, yeah, and they’ll book meetings, too. Chili Piper booked 97 meetings at a single event by doing things differently.
Did you know that 67.3% of B2B marketers are unwilling to invest in field marketing because they think they can’t measure its success?
This feeds into two often-repeated myths about B2B field marketing:
1) It’s expensive
2) It’s impossible to track
I think this is the wrong mindset.
Field marketing can be done on a budget, and it can be tied to pipeline and revenue. You can make the most out of trade shows. I know this because we’ve done it at Dreamdata.
We’re all about attribution (obviously), but quite often, we run with ideas that we know aren’t directly attributable. It doesn’t matter because they’re so absolutely damn fun to work on and everyone remembers them.
Last year, we bought the smallest billboard in Times Square during a conference and made an enormous social media blast out of it ending with:
🔥 Over 1M organic views by our target audience on LinkedIn
🔥 Around 10,000 hours of videos watched on LinkedIn
🔥 Over 100 people saw the billboard during a conference keynote
The campaign is still bringing in customers long after the billboard has been down.
Remember how people buy? Even software: Through memories about you as a brand. Technology and features often come second.
So memorable moments convert, especially if done with intent and precision.
When planning conference attendance, you have two ways to go:
Or try to go for a balance of both.
Each company plans conference attendance in one way or another. Some invest heavy budgets into partnerships with the event organizers, build booths, run giveaways, and present speaker engagements. At Dreamdata, we do not have that experience yet, but we’ve been able to pull off significant ROI from our presence during conferences.
I’ll walk you through our thought process for arranging unforgettable, unscalable experiences and leave you with a list that you can use to stimulate your creative mind.
Besides the standard checklist of pre-/during, and after-event planning, we always do something fun to make events more effective:
Most of the time, it’s a YES!
Why?
All that comes back tenfold in impressions, memories, and willingness to collaborate with us.
Conference season is upon us. Let’s see what you can do to make your event strategy out of the ordinary.
Gather a couple of people with creative minds or pick up a chat topic when catching up (tap people beyond your marketing team!) People love to help, especially when they’re asked for ideas. You don’t know where it might take you.
Tell them where you’re going. Ask if they were to pull off something fun, what would they do? Share some of your ideas first — it’s easier to build on top of ideas versus start from a blank page!
Investigate the area where the event is happening. Are you in the city? Outside of the city? Are all the people going to enter through a specific place? Where do they all live, or are they dropped off by a taxi?
Knowing the area will help you plan those moments and be prepared to capture them. We usually pull up Google Maps to see how the area looks and what the weather will be.
To start with, don’t think about the budget and execution.
Define a budget and plan how many people you’ll need. Events take a lot of energy from attendance alone.
Your team goes to conferences with an already-set agenda, so asking them to do something else has to be well-defined, booked, and easy to execute.
You will get busy, and things will go wrong, but as long as people have an event plan, you’ll be alright.
Plan the initiatives with an attitude that you can’t fail. No matter how poorly the initiative is executed, nobody will know what good looks like as it is different than anything else they have seen before.
It’s raining? A vendor didn’t deliver? You’re late? Make the most of it.
This type of attitude will motivate your team to do their best with creativity in mind. We want this to be fun, creative, and engaging, but also a great experience for everyone.
The people who will see your experience in person are just a fraction of your potential audience. An event has limited attendees, so think about how to impress them and people back home.
Taking pictures and interviewing people is key to sharing the experience with everyone who’s not at the event. Make sure to post while you’re executing because the planned initiative is nothing without it being present on social media. It does not need to be polished.
Unpolished experiences and pictures make the activity even more real. After the event, you can polish the pictures or messaging to share the creative angles of what you did and how people reacted. This is specifically relevant for videos or interviews.
The process of giving and receiving a gift is magical and special. If you are planning to do giveaways, make them special. Plan giveaways as gifts you’d be giving to a friend. It does not have to be expensive, but it definitely needs to be special and memorable.
The act of giving and receiving a gift is special in itself. Don’t leave your giveaways standing in the corner for people to pick, make sure that people know that there is a gift to get, and give it to people from hand to hand.
The end of the event does not mean the end of the effort. After the event, no matter the size, thank people for attending. If you’re short on time, make sure to plan at least an automated email thanking people for attendance.
Add pictures or memories from the event. A personalized thank you message goes even further. There are always a couple of people you really want to thank and leave an impression. Thank them personally, call, or send a personalized message.
The final and the most boring part: Get everyone you met into a campaign in your CRM. That way your marketing team can calculate ROI even years after the event has happened.
Even if the immediate ROI impact of an event is low, stay positive. B2B customer journeys are long and complex—and most people are not in-market for your solution (right now).
But the next time a huge enterprise client is closed, you’ll have evidence they were part of your event.
I’ll leave you with a list where you’ll have to guess which ones have come to life and which ones we chose not to execute. (The answers are at the end of this blog.)
We did every second one of those! The rest are still in the planning phase.
Go host memorable events, and your buyers will remember them forever. Oh, yeah, and they’ll book meetings, too. Chili Piper booked 97 meetings at a single event by doing things differently.
Laura Erdem is a sales leader with a crush on marketing. She works at Dreamdata and serves as an advisor for several companies, including Commsor and Sendspark.
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