User group conferences are expensive and time consuming but are the best way to have your customers network with each other and for you to get real face time with them to update them on new products and features and gather input on where you should be headed next. I was speaking with a colleague about her user group conference. She has managed them in the past but wanted a better way to stay connected with customers after the conference. Her boss wanted her to create an online community because social media is so hot right now. However, an online community didn’t seem like a right fit because her customers wanted real answers for executives not just responses from whoever in client services happened to be monitoring the discussion boards that day.

I recommended that she continues to hold events throughout the year but to instead make them virtual. As part of the goody bags at the user group conference she could give everyone a web cam. Then, once a quarter, she could organize a live virtual conference on Skype (if Oprah can get housewives to use it, you can get executives to). Users may not be able to interact with each other as much, but an executive could be on hand to make announcements and answer questions. Now I am a firm believer in pushing your message through as many media as possible because everyone’s preferences are different. After the live web conference, she could turn the highlights into a webcast for those who couldn’t make it and send a newsletter with updates as well. That way people can digest the information in their own way.

The point here is that no matter what you do to stay in touch with your customers, do something. We learn in school the importance of keeping our current customers, “It is easier to keep a current customer than to gain a new one.” Somewhere along the way acquiring new business became the focus and we forgot that our current customers are our gold.

As a footnote, I have not executed a campaign such as this one. This was truly an idea I had in the moment when my colleague told me about her dilemma. I would love to hear from anyone out there who has done something similar!

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If you are a regular reader of The B2B Lead, you have probably noticed us all talking more about events and tradeshows than usual. This subject has been on our minds because we are today announcing a new data service offering for events called ReachForce Capture.

Our mission at ReachForce is to reduce the amount of waste in B2B marketing. Current marketing tactics, including direct mail, email, trade shows and search engine marketing, have conversion rates of 10% or less. We introduced ReachForce Discover and ReachForce Refresh to increase response rates for direct mail and email from the industry average of less than 3%. ReachForce Capture will enable marketers to convert more trade show contacts and increase trade show ROI.

ReachForce Capture enables you to turn your trade show scans/attendees into actionable leads. At a targeted trade show, most of the companies will be a right fit but the attendees may not be the right decision makers. By identifying the right person or decision making unit by their role within an organization, not just their title, ReachForce’s approach to contact discovery is unlike any other data provider. Targeting prospects based on their role in an organization increases marketing results and sales conversions, ultimately driving revenue.

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Attention Conservation Notice: The following post provides a few tips on how to turn your tradeshow experience into a word of mouth marketing success.

When most B2B Marketers think of Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing, they think of online/viral campaigns or customer referral programs. But, tradeshows can be the perfect setting for some of the best WOM marketing campaigns. Where else can you get so many people of like mind together in one place, short of Internet forums.

There’s nothing like a good stunt to get everyone at an event talking about your organization which contributes to both brand awareness and demand generation if you handle the lead capture and nurturing process appropriately. The guys over at GamePlan Marketing have been praised for their stroke of genius, “Operation Blueshock¸ a guerilla stunt that involved sending 150 male and 150 female models dressed to the nines onto the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show floor to talk up the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. For video of the stunt, visit http://www.gpexperience.com/work.php.

The results were staggering: on the day the models showed up at CES, the Bluetooth website had 18,500 hits– a 42-percent spike. In the post-show survey, 60 percent of respondents said they knew more about Bluetooth than just two days before.

So called “guerilla stunts” need not be one-hit wonders, however. A successful WOM event orchestrated by NetQoS has now become an increasingly successful yearly tradition. In an effort to catch the eye of Cisco and get a very target-rich environment to talk about the company, NetQoS marketers executed a WOM “stunt” at Cisco Networkers a couple of years ago. The company sent out invitations to an exclusive party at The MIX lounge in Vegas for an after-hours party starting at 11:00 pm. This generated a great deal of buzz on the show floor with attendees clamoring for an invite. Those lucky enough to attend were given shirts to wear the next day. This resulted in more than 200 NetQoS-clad advocates in sessions and on the show floor which helped to increase lead generation by 120% from the previous year. The next year, we expanded our presence further, booked the House of Blues and increased lead capture by more than 300%. We also gave out Flipcams to encourage attendees to spread the word via YouTube and the blogosphere.

How have you used WOM to improve your trade show experience?

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Tradeshows – Conferences – Users Group Events – May the religious wars begin. Sales loves them, marketing thinks they are cool as they make for a lot of creative fodder – CEO’s like the fact that their company is a player in the industry – businesses, at least high tech ones spend 25% or more of their marketing budget on events; to give away t-shirts and build “brand”. My view is that if you are a mid-sized business, the only branding you want to hear about is the one used to mark and track cattle.

Here’s another 90% WASTE statistic I heard about from Sirius Decisions – less than 10% of trade show leads are followed up by Sales. So what happens to the rest?

What are the best practices for reducing the 90% waste without all the rhetoric about branding – “was worth it because of the branding?” I get it, awareness on the business is important but why throw out the baby with the bathwater?

My view, as always, is to step back take a deep breath and think about this:

Why did sales only follow-up on 10% of the “leads”?
What was the makeup of the “good leads” or Glengarry leads?
Were the attendees (the companies) they came from a good fit?
Did you come back with the right company but wrong contact names (the IT Admin was at the event but our economic buyer is someone else that we want to target)?
How do we define the right company and filter them against those criteria?
Who is the right person/people at the company you want to reach out to?

Now that you have the answers to the question above, it’s time to turn the 90% waste into HIGH octane leads for marketing and selling. The yield will not be 100% but even if you end up yielding 1/3 of the 90%, you will be at 300% of where you are today with event leads.

Don’t let the data you collect from a tradeshow sit around – mobilize it to create actionable leads in your business. Take it from sludge to high-octane data!

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With travel costs continuing to go up and events getting more and more expensive to put on I’m wondering if all events will soon move into the virtual world. We, here at ReachForce, have signed up to sponsor and exhibit at MarketingProf’s B2B 2.0 EXPO, a virtual trade show this year. I’m REALLY interested to see what kinds of people attend these events and are they possible leads for us. We’re building our booth this week – any ideas or recommendations? If you’ve attended or participated in an event like this I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback on the event. I must admit, as a marketer scarred by the live trade show circuits, I’m really hoping this event delivers and that more and more continue to pop up.

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As a marketer with limited resources, I am always tweaking my programs and trimming the fat or trashing completely anything that isn’t helping to generate revenue. For a small company, impressions and brand awareness mean basically nothing to me. My job is lead gen, period. For me, events and trade shows have been one of those areas where I do get some good leads but the ROI often does not justify the expense. One of my favorite blogs, The Lonely Marketer, was discussing this topic in the post Are Trade Shows a Waste of Time and Resources.

At ReachForce, we are on a mission to increase the effectiveness of all lead generation activities including email, direct mail, search engine marketing and trade shows. Stay tuned to ReachForce in the coming weeks for a new product that will help you turn trade show contacts into actionable leads.

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This week we, at ReachForce, are announcing a new data solution to help event marketers turn event booth visitors into real high-octane marketing data for lead generation. As we talk about events and the uncertainty around them being able to deliver real leads that actually convert into the sales pipeline, I’m reminded of a few of my past trade show nightmares, so I thought I’d share for a quick giggle. These will definitely be filed under Marketing WTF??

In my early days as a marketer, I was thrust into managing all trade show events for my company with absolutely no experience. My first trade show was made quite memorable by my product marketing guy. He said he knew a guy who did promo items. My first time CEO was convinced that branded coffee mugs were the hot giveaway. This being my first trade show, I didn’t know what to expect so I went with it. The only thing they asked me was how many attendees will be at the show – 6,000. This was the last of the mug talk until I got a call the day before I was to leave for the show in NYC.

Product marketing guy ordered the mugs and instead of having them sent to the show he had them sent to the hotel we were staying in. The day before I leave for the show the hotel clerk calls to tell me that the mugs have been delivered. My immediate response - Great! No, he says, “You don’t understand Miss. There is a semi outside blocking traffic trying to deliver 6,000 coffee mugs to you here at the hotel.” At that time I still don’t think I understood the magnitude of the problem. We agreed that I would just pay for that night at the hotel and they would move the mugs into my room. When I arrived the next day, it was like I was a celebrity. When I got there and announced my name at the check in counter, people started coming out of the woodwork. Everyone wanted to see the girl that stopped traffic in Manhattan over some coffee mugs. I just smiled and apologized, still not having a clue what I was in for. Finally, I was greeted with the floor to ceiling boxes covering my room. There was little to no room to walk around. This was going to be fun – NOT! The show was okay and we tried to give everyone we saw a mug but we didn’t get through even half of the boxes. Now what? I hate these mugs…Could I leave them in NYC (still in my hotel room)? I couldn’t possibly pay FedEx to ship them all back to Austin… so instead I decided to call a freight moving company to come pick them up and take them back to Austin, in no hurry I might add. Thinking I was all set, I scheduled the freightliner to come the next morning. You see what’s coming next – once again I shut down traffic in Manhattan for these silly mugs. Needless to say the hotel was glad to see me go.

Lessons learned –

1. Never let product marketing make decisions alone when it comes to event give aways.
2. You never need as many giveaways as there are people expected to attend.
3. Logistics, logistics, logistics.

Since there were so many mugs left they went to the next show as well. But this time we lucked out and the booth across from us had a keg and was giving away beer. It was like we had planned to be next to them with mugs in hand.

Maybe the more important takeaway I have learned from the giveaway fiasco is that obviously not everyone will want your cool giveaway but does the cooler the giveaway translate into even more “leads” that have NO interest in buying my product?

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