B2B trade fair & business meetings – Business Case: Relaunching the B2B meeting trade fair after the Covid period.

Customer context: The client is a public organization that is responsible for organizing a B2B trade fair enabling local businesses to meet.

Each year, our client (public organization) organizes industrial meetings in Auxerre. 2021 is a special year as it will be the first post-Covid show in the region. 

The context was therefore uncertain, difficult to understand and our time limited, since we only had 4 months to fulfill the objectives set with the client team as much as possible.

The first objective was to acquire new exhibitors and validate their registration for the show.

The second objective was to attract as many qualified visitors as possible to the show.

The client team was already carrying out emailing actions internally coupled with phoning on existing files and on cold prospect files. 

On your marks, get set, prospect!

OBJECTIVES of the support

• Registration of new exhibitors
• Registration of a qualified volume of visitors

STRATEGY for attracting B2B exhibitors and qualified visitors

1-Implementation of prerequisites and clarification of the entire prospecting and commercial activation process

From the moment our client confirms his desire for support and our commercial proposal, the first meeting aims to directly tackle the prerequisites and modeling of the prospecting process and post-prospecting commercial activation, in order to prepare all the resources and be ready to sign the business acquired by prospecting.

We have therefore defined the role of each actor: 

-Prospecting team: AKIDEL -> We strategically and operationally set up prospecting campaigns and the distribution of emailing in order to create a positive interaction with target prospects (positive response, redirection, visit to the website, click on the registration file?)

- Client contact: Client project manager -> It gives the overall direction of the collaboration. It validates and co-finalizes with the AKIDEL team the campaign elements before distribution. She is responsible for transmitting the results to the ?follow-up phoning? team. She is responsible for monitoring objectives, reframing, bringing new ideas and validating all AKIDEL deliverables (prospect files, analysis and restitution of the campaign, main body of emails and reminders?)

-Commercial follow-up team : Customer team -> She is responsible for calling on the phone (or answering by email) all the interesting prospects who have interacted with the emailing phase in order to sign them and finalize the last action of the sales process.

Then, we put in place the necessary prerequisites to prospect and optimize the conversion results:

-Installation of tracking on the website of the B2B trade fair in order to track the exact path of prospects and use this data to improve emailing and sales follow-up;

- SMTP prospecting messaging and warmup: creation of several SMTP prospecting messaging services in order to optimize the deliverability of the campaign while having interesting daily sending volumes.

- Recovery of exclusion lists to be used as a foil when distributing emailings (former exhibitors, exhibitors already registered, client employees?)

This phase ends with the creation of a customer space on the AKIDEL platform as well as the training of the customer team on the commercial aspect of the platform: PRM (Prospect Relationship Management) – Monitoring of prospecting results.

The foundations are ready, we can go to step 2.

2-Collecting information and setting up the necessary arguments

After the first step, various appointments were made with the client team to collect the information needed to set up the campaign.

Other appointments to validate and co-finalize all the emailing resources will follow.

The elements validated with the client are:

-Emailing prospecting files: sending samples, making lists available so that they can be carefully filtered by the client team;

- The main and follow-up email bodies of all prospecting scenarios;

- The distribution methods: date, time, reminder frequency, campaign stop date;

- Checking the foil bases (point 1);

- Checking the prerequisites (point 1).

3-Broadcast of the first campaign, July 2021

The first campaign was broadcast in July 2021. 

It was very rewarding since we carried out a lot of tests on this first campaign in order to ensure that future campaigns would have:

- The right target;

- The right targeting;

- The right arguments;

- The right formulations: concise, impactful and which lead to action or interaction;

- The right email subjects;

-The right calls to action.

We did not have many registrations during this first campaign, but we knew exactly what to do or not to do next.

4-Analysis, learning, conclusion, iteration

The second campaign was broadcast from the third week of August.

We have capitalized on all the lessons learned from the first campaign.

The results were very satisfactory.

But we already realized that we were limited in terms of all the work to be done during the commercial activation phase, since in addition to having positive responders, we had a lot of very qualified clickers, which is ie prospects who received our emailing, following which they clicked on the registration page to download the exhibitor file.

From there, we had no more follow-up, and the client team could not absorb all this aspect of marketing and commercial activation since they were also busy responding to registered exhibitors, organizing the first meetings , etc.

Which brings us to the bonus point below.

5-Bonus – Phoning

From the second campaign in August, we managed to amplify all the results achieved previously:

July 2021 -> 225 active leads

August 2021 -> 435 active leads

September 2021 -> 518 active leads

October 2021 -> 884 active leads

*An active lead is a prospect who has interacted with an email or a message on LinkedIn. An active lead can be an opener, clicker, or responder.

What prompted our client to make an ?emergency call? to our additional brick ?Phoning post prospecting? from September, in order to support the client team in monitoring exhibitor and visitor registrations.

We therefore called on our specialist partner on the subject, who was able to carry out this second part effectively, since the follow-up was done on the customer area of our AKIDEL platform, the phoning was started very quickly in stride, without any friction, by connecting our partner directly to the customer area.

6-Salon b2b 2023?

We took advantage of the 4 months of collaboration to anchor very important marketing elements for us and for the client team:

*All the work done upstream on the targeting component has been saved and consolidated: the files generated, the cleaning of the databases following the prospecting, the targeting criteria defined?

*We now know which emailing approach is the most relevant for btob shows: the number and frequency of reminders, the arguments to include, the writing style. 

*The work carried out during the qualification phase and post-prospecting commercial follow-up has already enabled us, in 2021, to rule on more than ten prospects on their interest in the btob 2023 show. 

All this allows us, the client team as well as us, to have a consolidated performance over time and one step ahead of the next editions and the various players in this field.

Conclusion ?

As we saw in this b2b trade show business case, you always have to roll out your strategy and iterate regardless of the objective and the urgency.

By doing this, we manage to control the situation over time, and above all to change it (we achieved a factor of 4 between the results of the July campaign and that of October).

It is also important to know when to temporize your prospecting: from July 14 to August 15, you can prospect, but you have to keep in mind that this is the slowest time of the year in France, and therefore know how to adapt your objectives. and its approach.

PERFORMANCE & Results

• Acquisition of +30 exhibitors over 4 months;

• Acquisition of +900 visitors over the total duration of the show;

• Radiation of the show via digital on all targeted companies in the region (+3000 prospects reached).

Final customer testimonial

Industry Advisor – BtoB Show Manager

What "talent" this team is! I recommend 200 %! ? An ergonomic, easy-to-use monitoring tool, ? A responsive and efficient team, ? A tailor-made service that generates leads and allows you to develop your business! Cheer !!! Thank you all for being with us for the organization of the XXX?

If this article was of value to you, please mention the point or points that were useful to you.

The objective is to make it visible to a greater number of people.

If you have questions or you want to deepen a point, we can discuss via LinkedIn or by email at contact@akidel.io

AKIDEL | Digital agency btob Lille – France

Data. Automation. Tracking.

B2B Fair

#prospecting #automated prospecting #digital agency

#commercialeb2b #acqusiitionb2b #prospectionpersonalisée