Did you know that utilizing event surveys is a successful technique for B2B lead generation? When used correctly, surveys can make your event a success by enabling marketers and event planners to capture attendee insights on the event. This data can be used to measure event success and leveraged for future events, helping keep attendees happy and leads generating.
Knowing this, you are probably wondering how you can implement event surveys for successful B2B lead generation, right?
Pre-Event Surveys
Sending out pre-event surveys enables you to start driving lead generation before the event. A good idea is to ask for the opinions of your attendees. By asking them questions geared towards event satisfaction, you can create a successful event that incorporates what the attendees actually want or expect. Asking questions like:
- What time of day would you prefer most for an event? Morning, afternoon, or evening?
- How many sessions are you wanting to attend?
- Please provide a list of speakers that you would like to see at the event
- Please provide your name, email, and job title
Questions tailored towards the expectations and wants of your soon-to-be attendees will benefit you, your event, and your company.
Surveys and Polls During the Event
During the event is a prime time for launching your event surveys. During sessions or keynotes, when your attendees are all in one place, you can host a survey or poll. By doing so, you increase attendee engagement, making your event all the more fun.
Getting your attendees engaged with what is going on with your event creates a medium for dialogue between individuals. Surveys and polls are great ways to show your attendees you care about their feedback, to create a fun and engaging event environment that makes people want to come back for more and to collect rich data that can be leveraged for future events.
Post-Event Surveys
After your event is over and your attendees have gone home in awe of how awesome the event was, send out another survey. This is a great time to ask questions geared more towards the event’s strengths and weaknesses. Ask questions about the content, the venue, the speakers, what they enjoyed, what they didn’t enjoy. Your questions can sound something like:
- Did you enjoy the location of the event?
- Was the location of the event easy to get to?
- In your opinion, what was the best part of your event experience?
- In your opinion, what was the worst part of your event experience?
- From 1-10 how good was the quality of the speaker’s performance?
- Please leave any other comments or concerns.
Questions like these, along with a comments section, leave a lot of room for attendees to expand on positives and negatives of their event experience. Attendees will want to learn more about your company and come back for another event if their comments and concerns are being addressed. Caring about your attendees is a great way to generate leads.
So now that you know the benefits of surveys for lead generation and the types of questions to ask, what comes next is how to get attendees to actually fill them out.
Incentivize Them
Whether that be a gift for filling it out or a spot in a random raffle to win a big prize, by providing an incentive to complete your survey, you can guarantee people will do it.
Gift ideas can be $10-$20 gift cards to Amazon, Starbucks, Peet’s Coffee, you know anything that can get attendees excited (coffee can do that). Or give them a chance to win something big, like an Xbox, GoPro, flat screen TV, a new computer, etc, etc. You can definitely come up with some cool prizes to win that get people to want to complete your surveys. Don’t forget, when doing that, remember to add the cost of that into your budget!
Create a Seamless User Experience
The first step to creating successful event surveys is to make them as user-friendly as possible. Tips include:
- Using a custom, branded form that is cohesive and professional
- Utilizing top-of-the-line event and marketing automation, which helps create an optimal user experience
- Asking questions that are simple and straightforward
Creating an intuitive survey decreases abandonment rates and encourages attendees to actually fill them out. So, spend some time creating user-friendly and professional surveys so that you can collect the data you need and increase your B2B lead generation. The more attendees that fill out the forms, the more leads you can generate.
Leverage Survey Data
Once you have collected all the rich data from the surveys, you can utilize it to aid segmentation of your attendees. To explain, you can take the attendee data from the events and organize it based on job title, such as CMO, coordinators, specialists, etc. From there, all the data collected from CMOs is in one place and you can see what they have in common. Like whether the majority liked a certain session or aspect of the event.
That way, you can set all of those CMOs on targeted, relevant nurture campaigns. Rinse and repeat this step with each unique job title for countless relevant nurture campaigns.
Not only that, you can also have targeted suggestions in real-time for your attendees to see. After collecting data from your pre-event surveys, or post-session surveys, it enables you to notify attendees, based on their survey answers, of other great sessions that will be happening during the event’s life. This way, you can provide your attendees with exactly what they want.
Leveraging survey data can also help qualify leads. For example, if the CMO of a company answers your survey questions, and based on his/her answers, seems like a good candidate for your product, you can send an invite for lunch or dinner. This way your sales team can sit down and further discuss doing business together. See what happened there? You increase lead generation and qualified leads just from your event survey data!
Overall, leveraging event surveys is a great way to increase lead generation. They provide marketers with rich attendee data that not only helps begin targeted nurture campaigns but also provide attendees with relevant real-time event information and suggestions, showing them you want to make their experience exceptional. By having a great event and relevant follow-up, you can keep the leads generating.