Generating Event and Seminar Attendees
How to boost attendance and ROI
If you are currently thinking about hosting an event or seminar as part of your sales and marketing strategy, then you will not be surprised to find you are not alone. An ever increasing amount of organisations are looking at hosting an event, as a very effective way to provide their business with an effective marketing opportunity from which to connect and build relationships with current and prospective customers face-to-face. Yet the planning and organisation required in getting people to attend and then follow-up afterwards entails a lot of hard work and man hours – both before and after the event has happened. This is where a well planned telemarketing campaign will make your well organised event into a success.
Whether it’s a new product or service launch, seminar, exhibition or training workshop, the success will be measured by not only the number of seminar attendees but also the quality.
VSL has many years experience of helping companies coordinate their events, to enable us to execute the all important task of generating attendees.
Telemarketing is Key to the success of your Event
Most companies know what constitutes a successful event by vary greatly in their abilities to organise one. A good telemarketing agency will work with your team to ensure that the groundwork is in place to ensure that the event will reach and get the attention of the intended audience. The two most important collaborative objectives are:
1. Helping to set your company’s objectives and define what results will constitute a success.
2. Help in effectively signposting the event via website and digital marketing.
Now that just leaves the small matter of filling those seats with the right audience. This is where many companies fail. Bombarding inboxes with inducements or pleas to attend will only get a limited response. You could get all your sales team on the phone to call prospective attendees, which might be viable for a small focused event where all the attendees are known to you. But in most cases the goal of the event is to reach out to new marketplaces/clients. This is where a telemarketing company like VSL will make the difference between success and failure.
Use Telemarketing to generate event attendees
After all the successful event telemarketing campaigns VSL have done, we feel very confident in our approach and methods. We know that an effective event marketing needs to be supported by an effective and well planned telemarketing campaign. We will ensure the following:
1. Priority call back listing, by tracking email invites. This will give a priority list of contacts for our callers to invite to the event – if they can’t make it, would they like to meet another time? or offer them an alternative such as a webcast if applicable.
2. Confirmation calling attendees just before the event.
3. Follow up calling the majority of attendees that your sales team won’t get round to calling immediately after the event. Did they find the event useful? Would they come to another similar event? Would they recommend it to others? Would they like to meet, or receive further information, or call back in 4 months?
We tailor our approach to your audience
If your event is attracting a broad range of attendees of seniority and/or occupations, we will try different approaches and tactics to attract the interest of your audience. Senior managers and business owners are likely to be harder to get hold of, so try another way of communicating with them; either via telemarketing, social media or a personalised marketing campaign to get their attention.
Use telemarketing to ensure your delegates are properly briefed
Our callers are extensively briefed to ensure that the delegates are provided with enough information about the event, including speaker bios, timings, location maps and directions to ensure everyone has the information necessary to attend the event.
Plan your follow-up before the event
The event is over, everyone had a great time and things seemed to run smoothly. Your job is done, right? Wrong! The most critical part of the event is the follow-up. All the attendees need to be followed up within 3 – 4 days following the event, and being quick off the mark will keep your company front of mind and help improve conversion rates.
An increasing number of companies are turning to telemarketing companies to help promote their events and act as their event support partner. This will ensure maximum delegate attendance, and effective post event follow up to achieve optimum conversion rates.
For more information about how VSL can support your event contact us either by email sales@virtual-sales.com or call us on 01403-788481
Tags: Seminar Attendees, Telemarketing
Andy Dickens
Andy Dickens is a veteran of IT Sales, used to leading by example. He is the CEO of Virtual Sales Limited (VSL) who offer telesales, telemarketing, lead generation and appointment setting services to B2b businesses. He previously was Sales Director EMEA for Red Hat and before that ran sales at Visio before it was acquired by Microsoft.