The following is a guest post from Craig Rosenberg.
On the 29th of June from 8AM to 4PM Pacific, I’ll be running my first virtual trade show: Mastering Lead Management. At Focus, the company I work for, we’ve been doing webinars for our clients for years. But this virtual event is our first day-long comprehensive show. To differentiate and make it as successful as possible, there were a few critical decisions we made during the show’s development:
We called it an interactive summit — To us, a virtual trade show or trades hows in general give the impression of a vendor bazaar where everyone’s main goal of the event is to get buyers introduced to vendors. Buyers expect more.
We leveraged all unbiased, third party content (no vendor pitches) — We have sponsors, but our approach to any content we create is all about making it “buyer-helpful,” that is, information that helps buyers do their jobs better or make more informed purchasing decisions.
We gave all sponsors full booth functionality — Instead of worrying about creating different pricing schemes for different features in the booth, we gave everyone everything we could.
We think these decisions are at least in part the reason why we’ve garnered thousands of registrants to the event so far. Based on what I’ve learned and past experience with all kinds of trade shows, here are my 5 tips for successful virtual trade shows:
- It’s all about the content, it’s always about the content – All the blog posts and marketing we find today about virtual events is about minimizing environmental impact, shrinking travel budgets, etc. While I think these points are interesting, we believe that if the content is compelling, they will come. Think about it, despite all the marketing we are producing about people avoiding live events, they go and they go because they see value. White papers, webinars, you name it, they all still work. But it’s about the content. Why would virtual events be different? The answer is they are not.
- It’s all about the variety and volume of content – A virtual summit gives you multiple opportunities to peak a buyers interest with all kinds of content. In a white paper or a webinar, it’s a one-shot deal.
- Content drives the types of leads you get – The biggest factor for the future of the virtual trade show market is ROI. I can tell you that if you try to be something for everyone, then that’s what you’ll get. Guess what, that is the problem with the traditional trade show market. For successful lead generation, I’d suggest creating more targeted content and be prepared for less numbers.
- Virtual events are scoring machines – From a lead management perspective, virtual shows provide amazing activity data on attendees. There is a lot of content available to participants and a lot of opportunities for interactivity. All of this should be collected and sent to whomever cares, such as sponsors.
- Understand why trade shows don’t work – This is a bit of a “reset” of the points above, but trade show attendance isn’t only down because of shrinking travel budgets. Trade shows are down because buyers have A LOT of choices for content to do their job better. 15 years ago, trade shows had a pretty solid hold on information. Now with the internet, information is everywhere without the time and resource commitments that make it harder for live trade shows to compete. What can you learn? Well, people aren’t going to come to your event just because your show is virtual (and you don’t want them to), they are going to come because they see value.
Craig Rosenberg is Author of The Funnelholic, his very popular B2B sales and marketing blog. He is also Vice President of Products and Services at Focus where he oversees product creation, management, and delivery. Prior to Focus, Craig spent years as a consultant for SalesRamp where he designed, built and managed lead-generation and inside sales strategies and processes for high-tech startups.
During that time, Craig built lead generation machines at over 25 different companies in a variety of different high-tech verticals ranging from business applications to IT infrastructure. Because of his extensive experience, Craig acts as an advisor to Focus‘s clients, helping them solve a variety of different marketing and demand-generation challenges You can visit Craig’s B2B Demand Generation Blog at www.funnelholic.com.
It's All Virtual 
Dennis: thanks for allowing me the honor of posting my opinions on your blog. I’d love to hear more from your reader-base, I started a Q and A on focus.com on virtual events, please join the conversation: http://www.focus.com/questions/marketing/virtual-trade-shows-what-works-and-doesnt-work-virtual-trade/
These are great tips. Since virtual trade shows are becoming more popular it is always good to read ways on how to make them more successful. Do you find that you get the same amount of sales and leads with virtual trade shows as you do with actually attending a trade show?
Hi Kayla:
With virtual trade shows, you will likely get MORE actual leads. It depends on how the event producer is structuring the sponsor packages. But from what I have seen is the gross numbers are larger than live.
As far as “sales”, in general, trade show (live and virtual) are “top of the funnel”, i.e., they typically take longer to convert to sales. Marketing organizations that successful convert trade shows leads almost always have a solid lead nurturing program and/or lead qualification (phone-qualifying) team.