The winter months in the seed industry are filled with industry events, meetings and trade shows. All of these in-person events are a hotbed for lead generation – you have a highly specific audience viewing your brand and messaging in a captive setting. Pair this with an effective content marketing strategy and you can drive even more booth traffic and event engagement. Here’s how.
Blog Frequency: The primary purpose of energizing your blogging effort prior to an event is to demonstrate thought leadership. Make readers want to know more about you and provide a clear call to action that your company will be at such-and-such an event in January (or whenever the show is held) to help create engagement.
Email Campaign: Once you’ve posted a few blogs and have more in the pipeline, you’ll want to craft several emails to current contacts for your campaign. The goal of these emails is to 1) let your audience know the events you’re attending, and 2) drive them to the blog to read your content. Follow-up emails can be more specific and target individuals to set up meetings or demonstrations.
Strategic Landing Pages: These action-specific mini pages are not connected to your website. They can be focused on a specific audience segment, used to book appointments, run contests or launch new products. Landing page traffic is highly trackable, and allows you to see the ROI of your efforts.
Social Media Strategy: In order to reach beyond your existing email list, publish your blog posts on social media and let others in the industry know you’ll be at upcoming events. At the event, get into live tweeting — post photos and info from the floor and give some reasons why people should stop by your booth.
And while you’re at the show don’t forget that events are a great place to collect new content. Some content ideas you can collect from the floor include:
- Written Word: Create articles on the content from the best presentations from the event and key outcomes of meetings.
- Whitepapers/Industry Trend Reports: Further positioning yourself as a thought leader by using a combination of industry info and speaker/vendor insights to create an actionable piece of content for your audience.
- Video: Create a video of the event highlights to share online or interview some of your top customers or suppliers.
- Curated Content: Network and find other experts in your related field who might act as guest bloggers for your company.
Content is KING and will be the key to positioning you and/or your organization in a leadership position.