6 tips to have an efficient on-site lead capture for your event success

Attending events and trade shows to showcase your products and services, chat with potential customers, and expand your business is a great step — but it’s only half the battle. The other half is piquing the attendees’ interest in your brand and capturing valuable insights about your audience. 

89% of B2B marketers said that capturing and leveraging event data has made a positive impact on their marketing strategy, with their top metric being the number of leads generated. 

Yet, when you are one of the numerous booths in a well-visited event, it is so easy to get lost in the crowd. This is where a well-thought-out on-site lead capture strategy comes in. 

But first, let’s clarify what lead capture means.

What does an event lead capture process entail?

Say your company is showcasing a new pet food product at a pet expo. Your booth setup looks snazzy, an LED monitor is demonstrating how your product was made, and a few new furry friends are enjoying samples of this tasty treat. 

Pet owners who are walking by cannot help but stop and take a look. Then you give their pets samples, start a friendly conversation about their needs and maybe even offer a great deal. You do all that you can to make them think “I would love to have this product”. That right there is the first step: lead generation. 

The second, yet unfortunately most overlooked step is lead retrieval. Once you hear the potential customers saying that they are interested in knowing more about the product, you use a device (i.e. a lead scanner) to scan their ticket (usually via a QR code) and collect their contact details so you can reach out to them after the show with more information.

If you don’t have the technology to easily retrieve leads, you can opt for other lead-capturing methods. The most conventional method is asking each attendee to jot down their contact information. Other methods include directing them to your website, convincing them to sign up for your mailing list, or engaging with them on social media. 

Before the event

1. Clarify your goal(s)

“What’s our main goal for participating at the event?” should always be your starting point. Are you looking to build a database, increase brand awareness, position your brand as a thought leader or launch a new product? Clarifying what exactly you want to achieve at this event will help you hit your targets. 

Over the years, we have worked with businesses that signed up for an event without a set goal in mind. They showed up, started a conversation with any attendees who stopped by their booth hoping to get something out of it and ended up with little to no leads. Without any set goal in place, they could not track return on investment (ROI) (a study by Bizzabo in 2023 found that 71.2% of organisers struggled to prove ROI to key stakeholders), wasted their resources and missed the chance to optimise their future approach. So we highly recommend that you should not make the same mistake. 

2. Identify a core offering

After your goals have been set, the next thing you need to decide is what your core offering is. Will you be bringing a certain product or service to the event? Or will it be a call-to-action (CTA) that encourages the attendees to sign up to your mailing list in exchange for a free market report or book a free consultation session? 

Since the attendees that you meet throughout the day are also going to be talking to dozens of other exhibitors, they will be hit with numerous sales and advertising messages. It will be so overwhelming that they’ll forget the entire thing as they leave the venue. So the key is to go to attendees with a very simple and clear key message that’s easy to understand and will stick with them after the show. 

3. Announce your attendance  

It’s a good idea to have a plan to announce your attendance at the event via email and social media in the days and weeks leading up to the event. Not only does this get on the radar of people that maybe you’ve been talking to who might want to come and meet you at the event but also the event organisers who might want to push this to their audience on your behalf. This can get you free exposure to people outside of your current audience. This also means when they see you at the event it’s not the first time they’ve seen you.

However, you should be cautious of how frequently you post about your event attendance, especially if you are showing up at more than one event. There has to be a balance between hyping up your upcoming event and not bombarding your audience with only event content. If you are sending out emails and publishing posts about your event attendance ahead of time, you might want to include a link where people can book a time to come and talk to your on-site team. You might also want to provide them with a map that directs them to your stand. If you’re giving any talks at the event, give them a little sneak peek of what those are going to be to give the audience more incentives to go. 

At the event 

1. Make your booth unskippable 

Think of your booth as your home base. As a mini representation of your business or shop, it should be welcoming, inviting, fun and on-brand. Make sure to have clear branding so there’s no confusion about what you do. Consider adding interactive elements to your booth like touchscreens, mini-games or demos/samples to draw people in and engage with them from the get-go. 

2. Prep your on-site staff

Having a snazzy booth does not guarantee your event success if your leads cannot talk to you. Imagine if the leads are there ready to have a chat and your team is either on their phone or looking bored out of their mind. That does not seem approachable. 

So how you prep your staff for the event is extremely crucial. Everyone on your stand needs to know your products or services inside and out and be ready to give a demo or explain the background of the products if requested. They also should be clear about the goal and the CTA that you’re trying to funnel visitors to. In case your lead is not quite open to your primary CTA, consider a secondary CTA which requires less commitment on their part but still gets you closer to your goal. Of course, your onsite staff need to know exactly what this is and how to have those conversations with prospects.

3. Make lead capturing as easy and seamless as possible

Digitalisation is the key to your challenges. Lead generation does not have to start right at your booth. Entry short message service (SMS) is an automated system that sends personalised text messages to visitors as soon as they check in. A friendly SMS welcomes attendees, introduces your offers and shares your booth location so your brand is exposed to them as they enter the venue. 

Then, once your booth sees more visitors, modern tools like lead scanners will let you capture contact details in seconds. All you need to do is scan the attendees’ QR code on their tickets and you immediately have their details in your database. This will leave you more time to chat with potential customers and listen to their needs so you have more clues about where you can come in and solve their problems. These are especially handy for following up quickly after the event.