1. Prioritize leads and add to your CRM: You’ll come away from the event with hot and cold leads. Each should receive a specific type of follow-up, depending on their stage in your sales funnel. Be sure to put all leads into your CRM for tracking to ensure that sales and marketing aren’t doubling efforts and potentially hindering your relationship with the prospect as a result of too much outreach.
2. Social media wrap-up: Hopefully, you’ve been promoting your presence at the trade show via your social media channels. Don’t just end your social media campaign without posting a wrap-up, including images and video from the show, and thanks to all your booth visitors for their time. You don’t need to fit it all in one post though. Break up your thanks and recaps into several posts to keep engagement high!
3. Sales follow-up with hot leads: Your hottest leads should be passed to your sales team for immediate follow-up, because, as the saying goes, time kills all deals. Don’t let time work against you. Have the sales team follow up with emails and phone calls to the most interested prospects before your competitor does!
4. Lead nurturing campaign for cooler leads: For your cooler leads, it’s time to put the pedal to the metal with a lead nurturing drip campaign to warm them up for sales outreach. Using your favorite marketing automation platform, develop a series of emails to educate leads about your company, its offerings, and how you can help solve their biggest problems. Your first email should thank prospects for visiting your booth and share more information about what was on display. Each additional email can provide more in-depth information on your product offerings with a clear call to action. Be sure to include links to relevant pages on your website and implement lead scoring, so you can qualify leads for sales outreach.
5. Engage the media: Hopefully, before the show you reached out to registered media and scheduled meetings with top editors in your industry to discuss your latest news, innovations, and contributed content ideas. Now it’s time to touch base with those editors to get your contributed content published and in front of the thousands of readers who weren’t able to attend the trade show. To do this, follow up with every single editor you met with. Thank them for their time and ask how you can contribute to their publication, whether providing prewritten articles and graphics or making one of your subject matter experts available for an interview.
6. Review your results and plan for next year: Once you’ve run your nurturing campaign, published a few articles in leading trade magazines, and engaged with prospects via social media, it’s a good time to review the overall performance of your efforts. What could you do differently next year for even greater success?

Do you need help from an outside agency to carry out media outreach or create a more impactful lead nurturing campaign? Learn from your efforts to grow for the next show.

With these six follow-up efforts, you’re sure to see successful conversions of leads, extend your reach to even more prospects, and learn how to improve year over year.

If you have questions or need assistance, TECH B2B Marketing’s account executives can provide all the guidance you need or even execute these steps for you. Contact us today to discuss your post-show needs.

Whatever your marketing goals may be, TECH B2B Marketing can help with them all. To learn more about how we can help with your next integrated marketing campaign, contact us today.