When was the last time you went to a tradeshow or convention and were breaking down your booth at the end of the show and thought to yourself, “What a waste”?
At my last business, the previous sales team had produced literally zero leads that closed from multiple tradeshows, so we figured it was going to be a waste here too if we didn’t have a different approach. So initially, just the Director of Marketing, Peter Lewis (he’s now running a fractional CMO company), and I just went as attendees to scope out a couple of shows.
After an extended brainstorming session, we came up with what I think is probably the most effective lead gen and cost savings system for trade shows for an enterprise B2B SaaS business that I’ve seen.
What were the results?
- Because so many of our trade show booths were at no cost from this strategy, we saved tens or thousands of dollars per year in trade show booth costs. We hit 16 tradeshows the final year I was managing the company and for most of them, we didn’t have to pay for the exhibition booth.
- The company became an industry thought leader over the course of a few quarters.
- This was a part of our reputation turnaround for the business. We went from dead last in the industry to tied for first place.
- Our lead generation from shows increased dramatically. From 0 leads to a max of about 15 sales-qualified leads per week and hundreds of marketing-qualified leads per week.
- We started getting keynote speaking invitations on a regular basis.
- Possibly the most important thing was that this set up the company to start making waves in the industry and looked much bigger than it was, which increased our sale price (we sold the company to a large industry player).
TL;DR 🤔
We set up a podcast that was sponsored by the business and acted like and appeared to be an independent organization but was wholly staffed by our marketing team. We then began reaching out to industry leaders to be on our podcast. Since there was no podcast leader in the industry, we were able to get great interviews and rise to the top quickly.
As our notoriety grew, we reached out to trade shows to do live interviews at their conferences in exchange for costs covered for our podcast host and for a free tradeshow booth for our sponsor (us). We then used this to interview people and figure out their top issues and did live courses on how to solve those issues, which led us to be invited to be keynote speakers at conferences, thus vastly increasing our reputation, authority, and notoriety.
Finally, after people left the podcast booth at the tradeshows if they were a good fit for our business, they were sent to the booth right next to them to talk to our sales team.
We did all of this while helping the most vulnerable people in the country, providing great information to people who needed it, and simultaneously raising the value of the business.
Here’s the step-by-step on how we did it:
Trade Show Leads and Podcast Leads Generation –
Charting The Comeback 🧭
First, it’s important to understand the situation; I was brought on to resurrect a company that had been forgotten. It used to be one of the largest players in the niche, and supposedly at one point had over 50% of the market share. At its height, the company employed hundreds of people.
But by the time I was brought on as the CEO, it had less than 2% of the market and the industry had seemingly moved past this business.
The company had, for the most part, been forgotten. 😔
During our brainstorming sessions, Peter and I realized that there was no industry player with an effective podcast that was reaching the tradeshows.
Additionally, this was an industry where change costs were very high relative to the size of the client businesses, often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So trust, reputation, and salience were critically important to being able to close sales.
We realized that if people in the industry would listen to a podcast and we could create something interesting, fun, and industry-oriented, we could become the major player for an industry podcast quickly.
This strategy worked better than we could have imagined. Not just for the growth of the business, but also for the growth of the industry. One of our goals was to become a beacon of information and hope within long-term care and to get the stories from people at the very top to the very bottom of organizations.
From that, LTCHeros.com was born.
Tuning In To Success 🎙️
What did we need to bring this podcast to life?
- A larger-than-life personality to do the interviews
- Finding top industry personalities willing to be interviewed
- A team to produce the podcast
- A method for distributing the podcast that would reach our customers and their peers
✅The larger-than-life personality
I have to admit, this part can be largely attributed to luck. Peter Lewis is himself an entrepreneur and CEO from Kansas who had lived in Chile since attending university. But when the political situation in Chile disintegrated, he and his family left his home of 16 years and his many businesses and came back to the US.
I just happened to post that I was looking for a Director of Marketing on a private network and people on the network directed me to Peter, who ended up turning down a very lucrative Silicon Valley offer to join me at this turnaround (I was honored and very happy about this).
In addition to being a successful entrepreneur, Peter is also a television personality and possibly the most well-known gringo in Chile.
It was immediately obvious to both of us that Peter was going to be the frontman on the podcast.
Industry Knowledge 🩺
At first glance, you may think that you need a person with extensive knowledge in the industry to make this kind of project work. We found that by having someone with minimal (non-existent) industry knowledge we were able to excel by not being able to add our own comments and only asking the right questions. It did take a smart person to know what questions to ask though.
But it was clear early on that it would be helpful to have a little bit more than basic knowledge, so Peter signed himself up to become a Certified Nurse Assistant, do the coursework, work in the industry, and of course document the whole thing in a series of videos (no patient data or videos were shown) which were distributed to the industry.
This raised a lot of eyebrows with the people he was interviewing as well as it showed a lot of persistence and resolution.
✅Finding top industry personalities willing to be interviewed
A friend of mine, Jake Jorgavan, owned what was then a small startup podcasting agency, Content Allies, and he agreed to give us a fantastic deal to get us going in return for giving him feedback on how to improve his processes and grow his company.
These days Content Allies is the premiere podcasting agency for some of the largest companies in the world, and I like to think that some of that success was from our input.
Content Allies did outreach, booked interviews, and then did post-production and distribution of the podcast. It was a great way to get started.
But as time went by and we realized that we needed to do more episodes, and as our internal abilities grew, we took some portions of what they were doing in-house.
In-housing work
Specifically, we took the outreach to potential interviewees in-house after a while. It wasn’t that Content Allies wasn’t doing a good job, it was just that our network had expanded so much that it was easier and easier for us to get interviewees.
So we reassigned one of our marketers to call potential interviewees part-time. It brought our costs down and increased our conversation rates. Eventually, we also took over doing pre-interview questionnaires and prepping interviewees with a 20-minute pre-interview with another team member to ensure the interviewee’s microphone worked, they knew what they were going to talk about, and more. This was critical since Peter was very busy at this point and didn’t have time for the prep work on interviews.
✅Production & Distribution
Production the easy way… get someone else to do it
Content Allies, once again came to the rescue on the production piece. We used them throughout the entire time we were running the podcast to do post-production.
Distribution methods (This is important)
While Content Allies also continued to do the basic distribution throughout the podcast, their distribution methods were primarily to post it to the usual places you might download a podcast such as Spotify, Apple Play, etc.
But we knew we needed more than that if we were going to quickly win over an industry.
Here are some of the things we did to get the podcast out there:
- QUANTITY WAS KEY: We were running upwards of 3 podcast episodes per week and even started entire other segments to drive up quantity. For example, our ‘Stories From The Front Line’ segment was a heartening series about the people who are the real heroes in long-term care. Not the CEOs, but the CNAs, food prep, and even janitors in facilities across the country. Quantity was important because we were generating so much rank and so much notoriety so quickly, so we just pressed the gas as hard as we could.
- BACKLINKS: Every interviewee was required to post about the podcast on their blog and give us a ‘do-follow’ link. So our site rankings went up dramatically and quickly. The more podcasts we did, the higher the rank at our main website. We were also writing long-form, well-written, and highly shareable articles about each interview, which then drove up rankings even further.
- POST DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS: We used tools like Quuupromote.co to gain additional backlinks to the system. Quuupromote publishes the articles onto recommendation systems in tools such as Buffer.com where people will then use the links in their articles and emails.
- INFORMING OUR CUSTOMERS: We were running 3 user group meetings per month which were well-attended (look forward to an upcoming email on how we did these) and at each user group meeting, we would tell our customers about who we interviewed and why they should watch the interviews and share them. We pushed the value to the listeners heavily in these user-group calls.
- INFORMING OUR TEAM: Each week, I ran a team-optional meeting called ‘This Week At Experience Care’ where I talked to the team about what was happening at the company and what we were working on. At each meeting, our marketing team would publish what interviews had been published and why it was important that our team share these with our customers.
- ADVERTISING: We used our well-written articles from top interviews as lead magnets which we advertised through Google and other pay-per-click systems.
- ON-SITE LEAD MAGNETS: Some of our interviews were so good that we used them to get people to give us their email addresses using on-site lead magnets.
- OUTBOUND EMAILS: We were so confident in the quality of the interviews that we started using content from these interviews to entice potential new customers to listen by sending outbound emails to them about the content. In some situations, this worked very well.
- TRADESHOWS: See the next section (below).
The Breakaway Moment – Trade Show Lead Generation Idea
It all changed when one day Peter said “we should do these live at the conferences.” Our first attempt was at a small regional tradeshow, I think it was in my home state of Georgia.
We sent the organizers a link to the work we had done so far, which by this point was robust and after some consideration, they agreed to let LTC Heros do a live production at their conference.
To say the least, it was a huge hit ⚾
Parlaying Success 📈
The conference got to promote its sponsors and leaders and we got a ton of great interviews and promoted the industry well. For our growth though, now we had an event organizer who would recommend us and refer us.
We used this reference to get into multiple other events doing the same thing.
Having the podcast maintain separation from the business was the key to making the project work.
We didn’t sell ANYTHING with or on the podcast. We only promoted the events and distributed great information to and from the industry. This was stuff that people wanted to hear and needed to know. That’s how we kept getting invited to events and how we built up the value of the podcast.
It’s so tempting to want to use huge influence to directly sell your products and services, so if you do this kind of thing, you need to have senior leadership bought in that you’ll never use it directly for sales, otherwise you’ll undermine the entire system.
The Ball Was Rolling! ⚽
The more shows we did, the more people wanted us to come to their shows. It took us at least 4 or 5 conferences before we started getting requests, so we had an upfront cost for travel and freight to get this portion going.
But after about 6 months, we started getting requests to come out to shows. Show managers started calling us, and by this time we also had CEO’s assistants reaching out to us to get onto our show.
We were finally coming down the other side of the mountain! ⛰️
Soon after we started getting requests, we started making our own requests:
- Travel and lodging costs for Peter and his podcasting team to be covered, usually just one or two people including Peter.
- A free booth for our sponsor – us.
Keynote Power 🎤
We quickly realized that the top issue in the industry was staffing. But often the issue wasn’t that the staff didn’t exist, but that companies in the industry didn’t know how to reach potential employees.
So we built a course and lecture on how to fix this problem using pay-per-click advertising and a series of steps on Linkedin to drive recruits to potential employers. This was a massive hit with companies dying for labor and thus bumped us up the authority and thought leadership rungs a few notches.
Now we were getting invited to do keynote speeches, not just show up to do live podcasts.
Notoriety + Reputation + Sales Team
= 💵💵💵💵💵
Now we had our man on the main stage giving out valuable, needed, and very entertaining information, a great reputation for value, and notoriety, and beside each podcast booth was our sales team in a free booth.
Peter could and would never have sold anything or recommended anything to be sold, it was against the LTC Heros brand and would have sunk the entire initiative had groups felt like they were inviting him and he was selling. It had to and always was, about giving great information to an industry and helping people in need.
But, having him talk to potential buyers about the problems they are facing and then recommend that they go talk to the people right next to him if they wanted that problem fixed, was powerful and at least 10X’ed our trade show lead generation.
It probably did more like 100X it given that our trade shows previous to this initiative, and previous to my arrival at the company hadn’t produced any leads at all.
On top of that, the podcast initiative drove our content marketing and we were producing between 4 and 8 top-quality articles PER WEEK at the end of my tenure there. This was driving as many as 15 leads per week through our content marketing systems.
Creating Audible Impact 🙌
We didn’t just create an impact, we created a bit of a legacy. When we sold the business, Peter and I both left to pursue new ventures, but I’ve heard that Peter is still getting requests to come back to long-term care, and the legacy we left continues to drive leads to the great business that bought the business, and more importantly, house great interviews that the industry continues to utilize.
I believe it’s important to do things that matter in life, and this was a great thing to do. We added value to an industry, helped some of the most in-need people in the US, and simultaneously built a powerful trade show and podcast lead generation system and grew a business.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.
