The thorny issue of lead generation and conversion rates is at the heart of every exhibitions business. So EN editor Emily Wallin sat down with strategic marketing adviser Karin Hausmann who has helped countless companies track, analyse and improve their conversion rates – and most importantly boost revenues.
Karin Hausmann helps businesses deliver millions of pounds of extra value each year by improving their lead-to-sale conversion rates.
For the expert strategic marketing leader conversion rate is king when it comes to exhibitions success – but the road to glory comes from careful tracking and measuring.
Hausmann started in publishing, before moving into exhibitions as head of marketing at Ascential Plc then becoming group marketing director at Hyve Group.
Now a freelance strategic adviser and also working with Collingwood Advisory supporting founders and CEOs of early stage and smaller media businesses with scaling-up and creating value, she has fine-tuned the process of helping companies lead the way in boosting businesses’ success.
For that marketing must be an integral strategic part of the business, with incentivised teams generating quality leads for sales teams to convert she says.
“Conversion rates, for me, are the top combined sales and marketing metric,” says Hausmann.
“I often see that marketing is given a lead target without aligning this with the revenue target. This then results in marketing chasing a utopian number and wasting marketing budget.” Hausmann says generating meaningless leads is pointless- and that sales and marketing need to work together improve the quality and save wasted effort.
Demand generation and capture
She advocates basing lead targets on revenue targets, and for sales and marketing to set up revenue engines where marketing generates demand, captures it in the form of leads and sales closes the deals.
“Marketing’s job needs to be to generate demand which turns into leads. Many exhibition businesses continue to fish in the same pond every year by making email their main (sometimes sole) marketing channel. Or they wait for people looking for them and then try to capture demand (meaning leads) via SEO, SEM or retargeting. This works for a while, but the email database will fatigue pretty quickly,” she says.
“Who hasn’t been in the feared ‘lead meeting’ where you discuss additional campaigns you can run to increase leads. And how often have these meetings and new campaigns resulted in anything?”
“Marketing’s job needs be to create awareness and demand from people that are not currently looking for you – through year-round campaigns. Exhibitions businesses still tend to run their campaigns in twelve months show cycles that abruptly come to an end. We need to change this and talk to our potential customers all year round. Not about the product but showcasing our expertise in the field through content. That’s demand generation which will lead to leads and revenue, although not overnight.”
“Any business no matter the size can do this – the framework is always the same”
Understanding your audience
Careful segmentation and targeting is key when generating demand and leads.
“Everything you do needs to be fully tailored to your audience. Build marketing personas – these will inform your channels and messaging and will deliver you a higher engagement rate. A good customer profile needs to include the kind of jobs they need to get done, their pain points and what delights them.”
“Many promotional emails to potential sponsors and exhibitors I see list general benefits of taking part in the event – from raising brand awareness, to meeting their clients and prospects all in one place. We need to switch to focus on unique messaging, highlighting the unique benefits of attending. If ‘what’s in it for me’ is clear, inbound leads will come.”
Improving conversion rates
Once demand and leads are generated, where should exhibition organisers start to improve their conversion rates?
First of all, with tracking, says Hausmann. But tracking needs to be done regularly and repeatedly and analysed thoroughly she adds.
“Step one, find out what your current conversion rate is. Step two, review the end-to-end journey from the lead coming in to it being converted. What channels do you use? How do you capture leads, how do you pass them on to sales? How do they follow the lead up? What happens after it is disqualified? Look at the entire picture and then set some goals and start to test and tweak the approach.
“A few years ago, the business I was working with improved their conversion rate within two years from 8% to 15%. This meant millions of pounds more business and this was done jointly by sales and marketing as teamwork, because it doesn’t work in a silo.”
Once the entire journey is mapped, you will know which levers to pull should conversion rates decline. This could be driven through your campaigns, targeting, copy, sales follow-up or also product demand. “It could be so many different reasons. If it was down, it doesn’t mean you have a bad lead, it could be the hand-over and follow up between marketing and sales.”
She gives an example of how studying the whole process can lead to insights that can make a significant difference.
“We have done lots of analysis on conversion rate over time and discovered that the conversion rate drops from 18% to 4% if the lead hasn’t been followed up within four days. This information then empowered the sales leadership to set KPIs to follow up on leads within 24 hours.”
Setting lead targets
“Marketing lead targets and sales targets shouldn’t be unrelated. Apply an average conversion rate to your new business revenue target to get to your lead target. From my experience, the lead-to-sale conversion rate for stand and sponsorship leads should be between 8% to 20% – but this is very much dependent on in the industry and product.
“I highly recommend setting your own benchmarks here and then work on improving it every year.”
