The crisis has killed events. It’s time to plan like you won't be at another physical event for 2020 and part of 2021.
Even when events are back - they're not going to be the same.
Marketing teams are in panic, but here's the reality.
You're building a large temporary structure and flying down your Sales team so you can scan a bunch of badges and generate leads.
Sure your cost per lead metric is fantastic. But your customer acquisition costs are terrible.
And that's the metric that actually matters.
We've helped SaaS & B2B companies transition from an event focused go-to-market strategy to demand focused with an average lift of 80% in inbound leads.
If you want to know what we did - book a discovery call and we'll share our growth formula.
The reality is booths and trade shows are the largest line item in a Marketing budget with the worst ROI.
Satellite events? Those are great. Speaking engagements? Do it. Round tables and interviews to create content? Awesome.
Building a big booth so that large companies can shake down small SaaS / B2B companies?
Nope. It's a scam.
The next 12 months can completely change your Marketing.
Take your trade show budget and do this:
Capture Existing Demand
Run ads through intent channels and capture any buyers looking for your product or solution.
- Paid search buyers actively looking for a product or solution - Here's our Google Ads for SaaS Playbook.
- Competitive campaigns to take out buyers showing intent to buy a competing solution. Here's a run down of our SaaS competitor marketing campaigns.
This will capture any demand happening right now, but it's not enough to feed and grow. We need to go out and actively create interest and demand.
Create Demand
Now create demand by running audience focused content distribution campaigns to your target market building brand affinity and creating sub conscious product consideration
- Create customer success stories, add additional content, and invest in video production
- Run ads to your target market and let them consume your content with no sales intent, no gated whitepapers, and no asks.
Now watch as you create new demand from your awareness campaigns to your target market.
When you run content distribution without sales intent here's what happens:
Watch as your customer acquisition costs drop.
Your inbound rates will increase substantially.
You'll create crazy amounts of pipeline and new revenue.
Now is the Time to Adjust
You can wait for this to all be over so you can go back to scanning badges and measuring on cost per lead.
Or you can adjust your strategy to the way people actually want to buy.
When you adjust your strategy to be buyer-centric the results are phenomenal.
This is how you do it. I've done this for SaaS companies from startup to $100MM and the results have been the same. Every. Single. Time.
Let's me show you how it's done.