This is the first blog post in a 5-part series.
Have you ever found yourself wondering how to best engage with leads you are inviting or have gathered from events? Or have you found yourself stumped thinking of ways to convert these leads into loyal customers? My guess is that at some point, these thoughts have crossed your mind.
Events, both online and in-person, are among the top ways for marketers to engage and convert leads throughout the entire sales and marketing process – from driving awareness and lead generation, through to lead nurturing and upselling/cross-selling. Recently, Oracle, On24 and Certain hosted a webinar to help educate marketers on how to better engage and qualify event leads. The webinar features experts from each company illustrating how using event technology for both online and in-person events, combined with a marketing automation system, can be used to convert leads throughout the entire sales and marketing funnel.
Combining the power of your event management and webinar technology, along with your marketing automation system, gives marketers the ability to better target, nurture, and convert leads. Throughout this blog series, I will be using the 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing framework to provide you with suggestions and best practices to leverage your event marketing data with marketing automation. The topics I will cover in this series include: Targeting, Engaging, Conversion, Analysis and Marketing Technology.
Listen to the full webinar to hear even more best practices from Certain and On24.
The 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing
Tenet 1: Targeting
Targeting is all about knowing who’s involved in the buying process and clearly profiling the target audience for your marketing campaigns. By unifying your registration and event engagement data inside your marketing automation system, you have the ability to narrowly identify targeted segments to create highly personalized communications. Here are some ideas on how to segment the audience for event based targeting:
- Registrants & Non-Registrants: Since you can bring in registration data into your marketing automation system, you should remove people who have already registered for your event from your invite list so they don’t get re-invited. This is an opportunity to send those who have registered more event-specific information, especially as the event gets closer. You might think this seems basic, but I still receive invitations for events that I have already signed up for and wonder why I’m still being invited!
- Attendees & No-Shows: I think all companies are already doing this today (you better be!) – thanking people for attending their events and sending the standard “sorry we missed you” emails to those that didn’t.
- Active vs. Non-Active: You should also think about targeting your attendees by their level of participation in the event. Take the opportunity to create a unique experience. Go a step further – you can do it! Look at who was the most engaged during an event using an engagement/interest score – whether that is the duration of time spent on a webinar or the number of sessions attended at a conference. You can target and communicate with these people differently than your more passive attendees.
- Breakout Session Attendees– For in-person events, and even multi-session online events, you can capture which breakout sessions attendees are joining. By pulling this data into your marketing automation system, you can send them targeted information based on their interests. This is also a good time to identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Look at the sessions people are attending and compare that with products/services that they may not already have.
- Digital Body Language – You can also target based on Digital Body Language – a contact’s engagement with your online, digital marketing channels and assets. One successful tactic that I have seen is to create a segment in the database of contacts that have visited an event website, but haven’t registered yet. You can use this information to retarget that group with more specific messaging and incentivize them to take the plunge.
Essentially, by capturing many types of data in your marketing automation system from your event management platform, you can create tightly targeted segments. This enables you to personalize your communications and engages your contacts on a more personal level.
If you are just getting started with targeting or event marketing, or want to further develop your knowledge, request to have the Personalizing Campaigns or Enhancing Your Event Communications Facilitated Discussions with a marketing advisor today! Have a look at our complete listing of Facilitated Discussions that are available at no cost to Oracle Marketing Cloud customers.
Stay tuned for part 2 of the 5-part series: Engagement: How Marketing Automation + Event Technology = Highly Engaged Audiences and Better Lead Qualification to find out how to increase engagement with the leads you are targeting.