Creating an unbeatable event experience for both guests and sponsors is what drives event management. Creating loyal, returning guests and sponsors is essential for funding future events and building your brand.
However, discovering all the nuances of leaving sponsors and guests feeling gratified and ready to work with you again can sometimes feel like chasing your own shadow—it’s always just out of reach. Keeping up can be quite a challenge, especially in our age of instant gratification and ever-evolving trends.
While there’s no magic way to capture the formula for a successful event, you can start with one thing worth capturing: leads.
Focusing on lead capture is an excellent method for ensuring your guests and sponsors want to return. However, you’ll need to do this in the most efficient, up-to-date ways so both sponsors and guests feel that your event (and future events) is worth attending.
What Is Lead Capture?
First, you may need a refresher on lead capture. It refers to the initial phase of gathering potential leads’ contact information. Once you’ve captured your leads, you can move on to the next phase, lead retrieval. Lead retrieval involves accessing leads’ information, segmenting them into groups based on demographics or interests, and nurturing them through marketing.
By the time your event begins, you’ve already been through the process of capturing leads in your own marketing efforts. This differs from the type of lead capture meant for your guests and sponsors. However, you’ll still need to develop your plan for sponsor and guest lead capture far before your event.
Lead capture is essential for sponsors because it incentivizes them to fund your event. While they need to increase brand awareness, leads are what they’re really after to gain a solid following of subscribers from their ideal client pool.
For guests, promoting lead capture is also an indispensable part of your event. Lead capture allows attendees to connect with brands and groups they identify with, expand their networking circle, and enhance their overall event experience.
In most cases, lead capture is a quid pro quo arrangement—both parties receive something in the exchange. For example, a sponsor might offer a free product in exchange for a guest’s contact information.
While the purposes and advantages of lead capture remain the same, the methods have changed and improved over the years.
Methods for Lead Capture
The Old Techniques
In the past, most sponsors captured leads by asking attendees to put their business cards in a large fishbowl or sign a clipboard. While these methods are straightforward, they’re inefficient for both sponsors and guests.
Writing down information slows down lines, discouraging others from sharing their information. Leaving a business card is faster, but it feels impersonal and reminds guests that they’re one person in a sea of faceless leads.
For sponsors, manually entering information from business cards and clipboards into their CRM software is both extremely slow and highly subject to error.
A Modern Approach
As technology advances, lead capture methods have, too. Using more advanced techniques will benefit your guests and sponsors, impress them, and associate your brand with a more positive experience.
Using custom event badges to your advantage can be one highly effective method for modern lead capture. You can incorporate custom QR codes on each badge so guests only need to scan their badge at a sponsor’s booth. Your event lead capture software will then add each guest’s information to the sponsor’s database. It’s a lightning-fast, reliable method that allows for more personal interactions between sponsors and attendees.
Lead Capture from Your Perspective
As the event manager, embracing a modern approach to lead capture is crucial. You need to prove to your sponsors that your software is up to the task of collecting and sorting leads. For that, you need hard, quantifiable data.
With powerful live event data tracking software, you can give sponsors detailed analytics that provide insights into leads’ behavior and preferences. Additionally, you can give sponsors an easy way to track and measure their success, proving that your brand’s events are worth sponsoring again.
Smart Lead Capture for Every Event
Guests come to your event hoping for a worthwhile experience that will facilitate connections with relevant brands, products, and services. Sponsors fund your event in the hopes that they’ll receive a hefty return on their investment.
You can exceed both guests’ and sponsors’ expectations by providing an outstanding, modern method for lead capture. Sponsors will see that trusting your brand is imperative for their success, and attendees will associate your brand with an enjoyable, rewarding experience.