You Can’t Afford to Get Post Event Engagement and Follow-Up Wrong
If you’re like most B2B marketers, how you generate value from the data you capture at events is likely a place where a change could do you good.
Here’s What’s Wrong with Your Post Event Engagement
Prior to an event, you may only engage with a few people from a target account’s buying group. Then, at the event, you talk to buyers, but they’re not necessarily ready to buy. In many cases, they aren’t the influencers or the decision makers within the accounts you worked so hard to identify.
Despite this, many marketers still take the early stage ICP information from events and immediately put it in an email nurture, or worse, send the information directly to a SDR team for follow-up. In an era when we measure ROI in terms of lead quality, account engagement, and post-event engagement, the follow-up with these potential buyers needs to focus instead on accounts, buying groups, and demand tactics.
Think of that moment of contact at your booth as a beginning. It’s just one of many interactions you need to manage with the entire buying group at each account.
Each marketing channel, and the data it generates, must become part of the digital buyer’s journey, rather than a disconnected, standalone activity. In this model, post-event engagement spans and engages the larger buying group, not just the people you talked to at the event.
This is about reaching the right buyers with the right messages right when they’re ready to buy. At Integrate, we call this Precision Demand Marketing (PDM).
The Solution: Engage the Right People Via Third-Party Channels in Post-Event Follow-Up
Consider the simplest version of a buyer’s journey. It has three stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion
To precisely target the larger buying group at your ideal accounts, group the ICP accounts from your event into the three stages, aligning demand tactics for each stage, and engaging each account accordingly.
A post event follow-up example:
- Get a list of all accounts that attended an event
- Cross-reference that list with your leads from the event
- See which accounts had buyers who engaged with you
- Segment all of the ICP accounts from the event based on their levels of engagement
- Those who attended the event—awareness stage
- Those who stopped by your booth—consideration stage
- Those who stayed for a full demo—conversion stage
After you’ve pulled together that information, you can activate the accounts with the appropriate demand tactics for each stage of the buyer’s journey:
- Awareness—digital display ads
- Consideration—precision content syndication
- Conversion—LinkedIn paid social ads
Unlike the one-size-fits-all approach of a simple email nurture after the event, this process sorts accounts based on how they interacted with you at the event. It then uses the most-effective demand tactics to activate each group. This is a demand strategy and ABM, combined. It’s powerful, practical PDM.
Learn more. Get our eBook: Post-Event Follow-Up: Why Email Isn’t Enough
Precision. You can’t afford anything less.
