Event Marketing & Experience

How to Convert Your Attendees into Prospects

Victoria Rudi
January 23, 2020

Table of Contents

Event marketing is results-driven 📈 and truly efficient, but only when done correctly. 👆

Running events and expecting new prospects or clients to drop into the pipeline is merely wishful thinking. 🤷‍♀

To make event marketing work for your company or brand, you need a clear strategy and specific business OKRs (objectives and key results). 📊

Plus, you’ll only want to define one goal per event.

👉 For example, you may want to run an event for your clients to guarantee a higher up-sell or cross-selling rate.

👉 Maybe you’ll want to plan an event to transform your paying customers into brand ambassadors.

👉 Or maybe you’re going to run an event to evangelize your methods and increase your brand awareness, hopefully gathering a strong audience in return.

All these goals are totally legit, and event marketing can help you with that.

But to increase your sales, you’ll also need to increase the conversion rate at events by transforming your attendees into prospects. 💪

To help you with that, we’ve created a series of recommendations you’ll want to follow:

📌 Step 1. Attract the RIGHT people

If you want to get high-quailed prospects at your events, focus on gathering the right attendees. 👩‍💼👨‍💼

How can you do that?

First, you need to define your attendee persona characteristics.

An attendee persona is the semi-fictional representation of your ideal event guest, which should be aligned with your main target groups and buyer personas.

When defining this profile, you’ll want to know exactly who your ideal guest is, where they are in terms of their buyer’s journey stages, their challenges, and how can you add more value to their professionals or personal lives.

Identifying your attendee persona allows you to create event messaging and content that will speak directly to them.

Next, to qualify the right people for your event, design a good registration form, and include questions that will help you determine who best fits your profile. 

You can veto anyone who doesn’t fit the profile (politely, of course).

You need to be sure you only have your ideal guests at your event, because those are the people you’re most likely to transform into prospects, and later, into clients.

📌 Step 2. Present actionable content

One powerful way of proving your value to your guests is by offering extremely valuable and highly actionable content. 📙 This means inviting the right speakers, 🎤 finding the right moderators, and giving your attendees special content they wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else except at your event.

Run multiple knowledge sessions and plan micro-events such as workshops inside your events, where professional facilitators can help your guests solve a problem they have using specific frameworks or disclosing significant industry insights and statistics.

📌 Step 3. Focus on serving instead of selling and on giving instead of asking

Yes, your goal is to get more leads and prospects, and close more deals. That’s definitely an important goal, but it’s important to keep in mind that people hate when they are sold to.

So instead of running an advertisement-like event, come from a genuine place and show your interest in helping your attendees, instead of just promoting your products.

This is the best way to truly gain people’s trust and not only grab their attention, but also maintain it for further interactions and engagement.

📌 Step 4. Invite a successful client as a speaker to share his or her story

Another good way of proving your product’s value is by inviting a paying client who can share his or her struggles, along with what he or she took to overcome them. 🥇

Note, however, that the speech shouldn’t revolve around your product, but around the challenges your client had, the steps he or she took (which may not always involve your software or tool), and how they accomplished their goals.

📌 Step 5. Provide a call to action people can take immediately while at the event

A big mistake you may make is not providing an in-situ call to action. After all, you have all these leads in one room. It would be a waste not to motivate them into taking action. 🚀

For example, you can ask them to use their phones to try out a new feature, or subscribe to a newsletter and get more worthwhile content.

Or, if you’re launching a new product, you can ask your guests to leave their contacts in case they want to be notified about the release. Always include one or two action items during the event.

🙌 Get your attendees excited about your brand

Events aren’t the place where you want to aggressively sell your products. They are, however, a great environment to state your value proposition, position your brand as an industry leader, and assemble a strong audience.

So even if you didn’t get the number of prospects you were hoping for, by being consistent in your event marketing efforts, you’ll gradually build your authority and attract the right people.

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Victoria Rudi
Senior Content Specialist
With a Master’s degree in Event Management and a keen follower of SaaS technologies, Victoria is an event content master, producing insightful and valuable for Eventtia’s blog and beyond

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