I currently run B2B events for a SaaS company where the average deal is between 50k - 200k. Promoting these events has gotten attendees from C level executives from companies like NASA, Batteries Plus, Viacom, ServiceNow, and more.
Not only have I gotten high level executives to attend these events, but they often times fill up past capacity and 30% of attendees take the next steps into sales appointments. (That’s A LOT of cash on the table).
But will they be effective for you? Well here are a few statistics:
33% of giveaway participants are open to receiving information about the brand and partners.
Contests and giveaways have a conversion rate of almost 34%, which is higher than other content types.
94.46% of the time users share the promotion immediately after they register.
Of the total participants, 62.13% share the promotion with a friend in order to suggest that they take part too.
An average of over 34% of new customers are acquired through contests and giveaways.
Brands gain an average of 17500 fans through organizing these campaigns on their fan page.
Those statistics can be eye opening for any sized business, as long as you can get people to show up. Here is my secret that I use consistently to guarantee attendees.
We leverage the event as a discussion/learning experience over a hot topic in our space rather than a sales overview of our product.
We leverage the event as a great chance for attendees to meet other key players in the industry.
We provide gifts that are in limited capacity to install FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).
We make the gifts we provide related to an additional part of the discussion that is unrelated to the key topic.
So What do I mean by this?
Here is an example related to our industry that deals with data backup cyber-security:
We leverage the event as a discussion/learning experience over a hot topic in our space rather than a sales overview of our product.
The big topic right now with backup is Ransomware protection. An advantage we provide is our infrastructure has built-in ransomware protection that detects attacks WHILE they are happening, not afterwards.
Our infrastructure is so good we even had an enterprise level customer get notified and neutralized the attack within MINUTES of it happening.
And when you’re dealing with multiple petabytes of data for multiple locations, this kind of protection is virtually unheard of.
So because of our unique position, we host discussions based on best practices for data protection and backup. This lets people know that it won’t be a hard pitch, but instead an overview of the backup landscape as a whole.
We leverage the event as a great chance for attendees to meet other key players in the industry.
Because we have had high level attendees from well known companies and organizations, we use this as a selling point to get prospects to attend.
Because while you may not 100% know who WE are, chances are you will have heard of NASA, Viacom, Batteries Plus, etc. and would want to meet executives from these companies, even if it’s just casually over zoom.
That being said, even if you don’t have big name companies right now using events as an opportunity to meet other professionals is a great selling point for executive level prospects. Because, realistically, getting to know other companies is a great way to network and advance your career and they know this.
We provide gifts that are in limited capacity to install FOMO.
All the time on webinars you see things like “seating is limited.” This is to install fear of loss/fear of missing out and a sense of urgency.
While that may work on entry level business professionals, higher tier executives are smart enough to realize that, if something is digital, there should be no reason that capacity is limited.
Because of this, we leverage physical gifts that actually WOULD be limited to make sure that FOMO is an actual possibility, not something “made up” like you see so many course sellers doing.
We make the gifts we provide related to an additional part of the discussion that is unrelated to the key topic.
While giving gifts is great for attendance, there has to be a REASON that the prospects you target are receiving these gifts. Otherwise you will run into 2 problems.
They will take the gifts and not show up.
If you require them to attend to receive the gifts you might give away a spot to someone that won’t attend instead of someone that actually will.
To solve this, in addition to the discussion and presentation around our industry, we provide and additional discussion afterwards related to the gift we sent that allows the potential customer to learn more about the gift we sent them.
An example:
You work in the healthcare industry and decide to give out free gift cards for attendees to use at Whole Foods.
To get them to show up and stay for the entire presentation, you have a nutritionist present directly after your presentation about the best ways to make a healthy meal, juice, and snack using common ingredients you would find at whole foods.
The Results.
Using this strategy, we have effectively TRIPLED our number of qualified sales appointments while simultaneously positioning ourselves as a key company to work with for SaaS based backup for companies looking to protect themselves from cyber attacks to their backup environment.
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