3 Ways Your Team Can Follow-Up with Trade Show Leads To Drive Conversion

Events are one of the best ways to create awareness for your organization and product. Within a few days you’re able to meet hundreds of new prospects and to them, your brand now has a name and face.  To you though, they are just a name in your database.

Following a trade show, it’s hard to prioritize broad prospect follow-up. You likely were able to get into a few great conversations and once you get back to the office your mind is focused on following-up and converting those hot leads.

But all of the other conversations you had and business cards you collected are worth the follow-up too. It’s a sad fact that the average number of times a lead is followed up with is 1.3 times.  Not only are we not prioritizing these conversations, but we're giving up after just one touch.

Here are 3 ways your team can effectively follow-up with trade show leads to drive conversion and stand out amongst the competition.

1) Email automation series

The quickest way to re-engage your trade show leads is by enrolling them in an email automation series. By creating a series of strategic follow-up emails, you can continue the trade show conversation, warm the lead, and increase conversions by simply uploading a list to your email marketing software.

The most effective trade show follow-up email series is one that delivers content that helps to nurture the relationship between your company and the lead. This could include the following emails:

• Nice to meet you at <trade show>

• Learn more about our product

• Special promotional offer

There are more email workflow ideas here.

2) Re-marketing with custom audiences

Engaging your B2B prospects on social media, especially on Facebook, is essential in today’s business atmosphere. Ninety percent of all marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses and that’s likely due to the increase in content consumption in the past two years.

Facebook allows you to upload a list of your prospects to create a custom audience so that you can serve ads to a very specific group. The more information you’re able to upload, the better match rate you’ll have.

By targeting a Facebook campaign at your trade show leads, you’ll be able to serve ads to them in order to re-engage them after the event. Offer product descriptions, promotions, and other helpful content to nurture your leads and drive them to your website. By re-marketing directly following the trade show, you’re getting your company’s name and product in front of your leads while still top of mind, giving you a leg up on your competition.

3) Phone based follow-up

If your team has the capacity to do so or you have an inside sales partner, one-on-one follow-up via the phone can be a great way to re-engage leads following a trade show. The ideal lead follow-up strategy combines both an urgency in response as well as a committed sales cadence if the prospect does not immediately answer.

The most successful cadence we've used was developed by Hubspot:

DAY 1

• Immediate action - follow-up with a phone call, voicemail, email, and LinkedIn request

• If there is no response in 3 hours, call 1-2 additional times without leaving a voicemail

DAY 2

• Call in the morning of day two. If there is no answer, leave a voicemail and send an email.

• If you have not heard from the lead, call around lunch time and again in the afternoon.

DAY 3

• Repeat day two's activities. Make sure you are recording all activity in a CRM.

• After day 3, place 1-2 calls and send 1-2 emails per week. 

We’ve used each of these strategies to follow-up with our own trade show leads as well as our clients’ leads so we can tell you from experience - these strategies work! The most important factor in your trade show follow-up is simply reaching out to re-engage your new leads and not giving up after one ‘failed’ touch.