Businesses that perfected the art of capturing leads at trade shows may have had their entire world flipped upside down when COVID-19 hit. Without the opportunities provided by trade shows, all of the techniques and tactics for generating qualified leads—which took years of practice to develop—are useless, right?Not entirely, these same principles and techniques can be extrapolated into other avenues to generate the leads you need. There are many parallels between obtaining leads through content marketing and trade shows that may not seem obvious at first. However, by reallocating your trade show budget to craft high-quality content, the results are highly effective. Here is how you can apply the same techniques you already know—maximizing your time, asking the right questions, and closing the deal—to your content marketing efforts.

Maximizing Your Time

At a trade show, as a general rule, the only useful lead is a qualified lead. The same holds true whenever leveraging content marketing. The trick to capturing qualified leads online is making an offer that requires a small amount of effort on the lead part to move forward.

An example of this would be to create a lead magnet that requires the lead to give you a bit of information about themself, to access the material. This works because if a lead is not genuinely interested in what you’re offering, they’re not going to be willing to perform any extra steps to get to the material—even if it’s something as simple as supplying an email address. 

Creating an ad where users only have to click on it to get what they want, only results in useless leaves and wasted funds. If you want to maximize the funding you reallocate to this task, it must be done to generate useful leads and maximize your time.

Asking the Right Questions

An interesting complexity of content marketing that differs from trade shows is you cannot have a direct verbal conversation to get the information you need. However, this is not entirely true. A tool that you can use with your content marketing is a quiz or a survey.

In fact, the best way to utilize a quiz or survey is to prompt users to complete it before gaining access to material like a lead magnet. The effects of this are twofold. The first is, in general, only a qualified lead is going to take the time to actually fill out a survey. The next is you will not only have a qualified lead, but you will have already collected the information you need to move into the next step of the process.

Closing the Deal

One of the most important criteria in determining if a lead is qualified is if they close on a deal. If they’ve come this far then, it’s time to employ some of the same sales methods from your trade show experience to prove that the lead is, in fact, qualified.

This is where diverting your trade show budget into creating meaningful content is vital. Your content must work as a digital salesman and trigger an event that has a high probability of turning into a sale. Using your excess funds to hire a marketing partner who can create this content lies at the core of your content marketing strategy.

Gateway Is Your Marketing Partner

By diverting your trade show budget to Gateway’s marketing services, you can begin to develop a highly effective content marketing strategy that will deliver high-quality leads. Their familiarity with trade show strategies are instrumental in developing the required tweaks to your strategy. In turn this enables you to develop a powerful new channel to capture qualified leads for your business.