Speaker 1: Historically, trade shows, events, and exhibitions have made up the bulk of B2B marketing budgets. And while they can still have a place in your marketing budget, they shouldn't be done in isolation. Instead, they should be done as part of the wider digital marketing strategy. To help you get the most out of your next trade show, in this video, I'm gonna run through a real-world example of the activities that we did before, during, and after attending the B2B Marketing Expo last year to ensure we got the most value from ultimately is a very expensive table and chair in a warehouse. And I'm not gonna go into this video about how you should make your stand look and the things you should give away because that's not really what we're about. Instead, what I wanna talk about is bridging the gap between the online and offline world. Instead of just assuming that we were gonna turn up at the event and there'll be some perfect prospects for us there, we wanted to drive up awareness for the fact that we were gonna be there through digital marketing. So what we did was create a LinkedIn ad and we found an audience of people who had liked the B2B Marketing Expo page. We created a video to target these people which showed them exactly which stand we were at, exactly what they would get if they came to the stand in way of a consultation, and ultimately just gave them a bit more information around who we are and why they should come and visit us. We don't go into London a lot, so if we're in London and potential prospects who have heard of us before are in London, it's a really nice way to bridge that gap from the online to offline world and start building that relationship outside of just digital marketing. If you've got a list of companies or people that are attending, and whether you use email, online ads, or any other method in order to start getting in contact with them, start working out incentives outside of stress balls and branded pens. Not that I've got anything against stress balls and branded pens. But what other things can you offer them in order to come to your stand and start that conversation which is a bit more deep in value? There's some really cool and advanced digital marketing tactics you can do to drum up more attendees at your stand before the event. So for example, you're at the Excel Centre in London. You probably know a lot of the people that are coming to the event may be staying overnight the night before. So what you can do is create a Facebook ad which targets a very close vicinity of the Excel Centre and start targeting the ads about your offering at your stand. You may be wasting some of your spend, but if these people are in the vicinity and they're getting your ad, it's a really creative way of actually cutting through the noise and serving them something highly relevant in their feed that they're going to anyway. So it's definitely something that's worth playing around with. Okay, so the first step is you've used digital marketing or other creative methods in making sure that you've made people aware that you're going to be at the event and they know exactly what you're offering at your stand, which is going to be a great start for you. And for any of you that have actually gone to events and spoken to people that have walked past your stand, then you know nine times out of 10, this person isn't quite aligned with your ICP or ideal customer profile. They're typically competitors, suppliers, or people that just don't fall within your wheelhouse of business. So the issue is when you're doing a lot of one-to-one is it can be a very tiring few days. You don't actually get very much off the back of it because you haven't had very many qualified conversations. So my biggest tip at people looking to do trade shows is try and spend the money on doing the talk. In my mind, doing a talk which people come to is much more valuable than even a two-day stand. So if they offer a talk and they offer it to you as part of a package or you can pay a bit more, I'd say ultimately that is the bit that becomes really, really worth it because rather than doing a one-to-one, you're doing a one-to-many. There's lots of benefits around doing talks on very specific topics, which allow you to showcase your expertise. Okay, so you have people set up to come and speak to you before the event. You can position yourself as a thought leader by doing a talk and doing one-to-many rather than just one-to-ones. And what I'd also say is if you're doing a talk, make sure you can film that talk, but also make sure you film general footage throughout the day so you have it for your archive, which is gonna lead us into the next step, which is post-event. And this is really where the power of digital marketing associated with event marketing comes into play. And all the content that you've created from this event can now start to be syndicated. So what do I mean by this? Let's just take a little look at the photo that I took of our talk at the BT Marketing Expo. First things first, I just put that up on LinkedIn and I got 50 likes and over 2,000 impressions. Already, I've got an amplification of the fact that I've done a talk at an event and on what topic it's on. But that's really only very superficial and it doesn't really matter too much. It's more just subtle brand building than anything else. The real magic comes in a few different areas. As you can see here, we created a video podcast out of the talk that we did at the event. We put it up on our podcast, which syndicated to all the feeds so people had really good, deep content to listen to. We also turned that video podcast into four sub-snippets, which we could post out on social and use for ads. So all the content that had been created through the event, we took that away and syndicated it and we reached our whole target audience market with that content. One of the main reasons B2B companies go to events is to give themselves credibility and position themselves within the market as a player in that space. So normally you're only limited to the people that actually turn up to the events and see your stand. The beauty of creating this content during the event and then amplifying after the event is you can amplify it to your whole target audience market. They can then also get the exposure, which otherwise they wouldn't have got if they hadn't turned up to the event and start consuming your messages. It's a very valuable touch point in what is otherwise typically a long B2B buying journey. Ultimately, you want your exposure to be as big as possible. This is why we think trade shows should be part of your digital marketing strategy, not the fact that digital marketing should just be a small part of your trade show strategy, which is something we've seen very, very often in the past. So how did it work out for us? And I think it's very safe to say if we had just shown up on the day without any of the three activities which I'd outlined, we would have got absolutely zero from the day. And ultimately it would have been a very expensive few square foot of flooring. Looking back into our CRM 11 months down the line, we can see that three opportunities came from this event. One opportunity came from someone that we had drummed up and created interest who then came to the event and made a conversation with. The other two leads which we had had come from people that had seen the syndicated content which had been amplified out through paid promotion and requested a bit more information around the topic that we were talking on within these posts. So rather than just implementing a standard e-shop before the event, speaking to every single person who possibly can and then sending out cold emails after the event, I really think it's worth sitting down and trying to be a bit more strategic of how you can use events to bridge the gap between the offline, online world, using the actual event to create content and then post event syndicating that content and amplifying it to a whole target audience market in order to start creating a buzz that was much bigger than the people that just attended the event. Right, that's everything for today. Thanks for watching guys. And if you are interested in more B2B marketing strategies, there's a video here that I think could be perfect for you. So have a great day and see you very, very soon.