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Explaining of Promotion Activities and Best Practices
Always On Campaign
“Always On” refers to lead generation campaigns published on Solvay websites and are available 365 days per year to generate prospect conversions. Each Market has its own strategy based on business objectives, market trends, growth opportunities and customer demands. Each strategy has its own communication plan that defines the specific campaigns that will be used to help reach the strategy goals.
Always On Campaigns can be organized into two main categories: Lead Generation and Brand Awareness. Lead Generation campaigns use a lead magnet to motivate a lead to provide us with their personal information. Common lead magnets include webinars, e-guides and events.
Brand Awareness campaigns use paid media channels to push a strategic message to the target audience. These campaigns help to keep Solvay top of mind and increase credibility, which helps to motivate leads to connect with Solvay. Common Brand Awareness channels are paid social media ads, website banner ads and events.
Events fit into both categories because they amplify the Solvay brand within the industry and they provide an opportunity for our audience to connect with us in person.
Many campaigns will use Paid Promotional channels to increase visibility and conversions. Typically, paid promotion runs for three months or longer, depending on the budget. The budget is divided by the number of days the campaign will run. When the budget maximum is reached, the ad will no longer display and visibility and conversions will stop.
One way to optimize the effectiveness of an event is to increase the ad spend for one month leading up to the event. In this way, event participants are more likely to have seen the Solvay brand and be somewhat aware of our offering, which can motivate them to visit our booth.
Similarly, the ad spend can be increased for one month after the event to capture the attention of those who may have visited our booth and to reinforce the Solvay brand in their minds.
To summarize, Always On campaigns are not part of the event promotion strategy, but increasing investment in them before and after events is an effective way to make an event a powerful part of the marketing strategy.
Lead Conversion
Converting leads means collecting their personal information so we can follow up with them for business development. This is the primary purpose of events and it is important to manage this process properly.
There are two categories of lead conversions depending on the level of interest demonstrated by the visitor:
Visitors who visit our booth without any clear interest in our solutions who have their show badge or business card scanned should follow this process:
- Event coordinator prepares the matrix of visitors for upload by manually checking the email addresses and other information for profiles that might match our products and adapting it to the Mass Upload Template
- Share the completed list with iBoost Admin for mass upload, which will
- Add leads to iBoost
- Add to the Event’s Campaign
- Assign leads to the B2B Marcom Queue as Unqualified Leads
- Invite leads to opt in to receive marketing communications
- Start the iBoost Lead Scoring process
This means general traffic is not assigned to the marketing team until they reach a Lead Score of 80 points in Pardot.
Market Managers may choose to review the list of leads to find high priority contacts. If they identify leads which should receive immediate follow up, it is their responsibility to share the information with a lead owner who will create new contacts manually in Salesforce and follow up with them directly.
This approach is used to compensate for the limitations of the iBoost mass upload in managing quick follow up of event leads. In this scenario, the mass upload process will add the contact of the lead to the event campaign for ROI tracking and will sync the lead with any existing contacts.
Any visitor who has a specific interest, request or question about our solutions should be followed-up on with a fast track. This means their question and personal information should be immediately assigned to a lead owner for quick response.
The Fast Track Process is as follows:
- Identify one user who will be responsible for receiving the fast track request and assign them to the correct lead manager. This can be the GBU queue owner for the region or a Marketing Manager in charge of the event.
- Submit the fast track form request to iBoost admin one month prior to the event.
- iBoost admin will:
- Prepare the fast track form
- Configure the assignment to the lead owner
- Coordinate webpage creation with a form
- In case internet connection is not available during the event, the personal data can be collected in a paper form, to be entered into the online form by the event admin immediately after the event
- The iBoost process will then:
- Create a new lead in Salesforce
- Assign the lead to the specified lead owner for follow-up
Notifications vary depending on the lead queue. Therefore, it is best to instruct the lead owner to review leads daily during the show for fastest follow-up.
Brand Awareness
Group Social Media channels should be used to promote our presence at the event and the solutions that are highlighted at the event. Here is a general guideline:
- Teasing post before the event
- Some posts during the event, featuring specific presentations, announcements or activities taking place at the booth
- Some posts after the event, featuring highlights from the show
- Good practice is:
- To investigate if the tradeshow has some official hashtags and use them
If we have someone in the booth who can take good pictures, these can be used as a visual asset to give a sense of what it is like at the show. Group social media posts are managed by B2B Marcom specialists using the Sprinklr platform. Group Critical events may also involve support from the Group Communications team, so make sure media calendars are coordinated.
The focus is not on promoting our presence at the show, but on promoting the messages of the main marcom campaign related to the event.
Business Critical events are not eligible for posts on Group social media channels.
Live Coverage at Event
Group Critical Events and high budget Market Critical Events may consider live coverage from the event floor. This should only be considered for big events that will have a large audience and a lot of energy, otherwise the coverage has no appeal.
Live coverage requires:
- A stable internet reception;
- A high quality video camera with a good microphone and a skilled operator;
- A video editor;
- A Solvay host ready to speak to the camera and engage with the audience -hese can be very challenging to identify.
There are two ways to promote an event on Solvay websites:
- Event webpage
- Spotlight components
Creation of an event page
The crucial aspect of a successful event webpage is rich content that is updated and promoted. If the page is not promoted, it will get very little traffic and will not be worth the effort to create. If a page it is not updated, it will not provide a good user experience for our audience.
Here are the steps to publish an event page:
- Prepare content
- Deliver content to Alice Albini six to eight weeks in advance
- Add regular updates via Alice
- Update the page after the event(s)
- Archive the page after nine months (or three if not designed to generate leads).
Creation of a Spotlight component
Below is an example of a spotlight component. These can be used on Market pages to promote content, including presence at an event.
Steps to publish a spotlight component
- Prepare the content
- Deliver content to Alice Albini six to eight weeks in advance
- Archive the component one week after the event
Employee Advocacy (EA) is when Solvay employees use their individual professional channels to promote Solvay. These channels include the Solvay email address and personal social media accounts.
EA is a great way for marketing professionals to build digital relationships with their audience, develop their influencer presence and to help Solvay increase brand trust among our customers.
The three EA tools we encourage are:
- Email signature banner: for Group and Market Critical events, B2B Marcom will prepare a graphic banner to be added below the Solvay email signature.
- Direct email communication: a 1-to-1 message from a personal solvay email to leads and contacts in SFDC who already showed interest in the topic.
- Personal Social Media: Marketing teams should be encouraged to like and share Solvay Group Social Media posts, as well as to create their own announcements about attending a show, to develop relationships with their professional contacts. This method works best on LinkedIn, Twitter and WeChat. However, Solvay cannot force employees to use their social media channels for Solvay interests. These channels are personal property and it is up to each individual to choose whether to use it for employee advocacy or not.