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If you're a start-up (or first timer) and you've decided to exhibit at Legalweek 2020, congratulations, you're exhibiting at the biggest legal tech conference of the year with the highest number of attendees and media. Now for my condolences because, well, you're exhibiting at the biggest legal tech conference of the year with the highest number of attendees and media—how can you get to the right targets and gain media attention with so much noise and competition?

80% of conference success is not just 'showing up'—it requires marketing. With 160+ other exhibiting companies to compete against, the stakes are high to achieve ROI. But just to make things a little more like Gladiator, as a start-up, your marketing efforts come with a blindfold and hands-tied: no email addresses shared on attendees lists, no budget for additional sponsorships or fancy cocktail parties, and no time to power through LinkedIn prospect by prospect.

Last year at Legalweek, the average exhibitor received 149 leads. That's less than 2% of attendees. No one is going buy your product because of the logos on a pen at your booth, or even puppies to hug (which one vendor did a couple years back), but good pre-marketing can help drive a more valuable 2% of attendees to your booth so your sales reps can get them in your full sales cycle. Here are some successful pre-marketing strategies—basic and advanced—that are low cost and achievable, even for the blindfolded and hand-tied:

1. Basic: Make yourself easy to find. Sometimes it's the basic, low hanging fruit folks forget. Do this right now: Create a trackable event landing page on your website that includes all your exhibiting information at Legalweek—your booth number, the Exhibit Hall, and if possible, include related content such as relevant articles or blog posts. You can include a contact us form, but no one is going to fill it out. Use this link in every social media post and email you write.

2. Advanced: Retarget web visitors. Use your landing page link for retargeting ads. Some retargeting tools like Choozle are very user-friendly and more cost-effective than Google AdWords (which can be a very crowded space and expensive), and you can leverage geographic targeting and even industry targeting such as 'law firms.' Every ad clicked goes to your conference landing page—and it will bring back data to you on which firms are reading your materials.

3. Advanced: Website visitor tracking. If you don't want to push ads to visitors, a tool like Lead Forensics instantly identifies anonymous website visitors' contact details and has instant notifications without involving visitors.

4. Basic: LinkedIn Marketing. LinkedIn marketing is a no-brainer. It has robust marketing tools that are relatively inexpensive or organizations looking to widen the net. Companies can target industries and job titles with quality content sent directly into LinkedIn user inboxes. Add a call to action regarding Legalweek to this, and InMail can be an effective tool. This can be even more targeted and effective if you leverage data from retargeting campaigns or website analytics.

Also, every event creates social media handles and hashtags. Tag @Legalweek on LinkedIn, on Twitter, tag @LegalWeekShow, and use #Legalweek20 on everything.

5. Basic: Email. We love to hate email because it rules personal and professional lives, email reins the contested king of ROI as the most likely tool to convert.

When you do use email, keep it brief. State your value in line 1 and use the link to your landing page to provide more enriched information for those who are interested—and always have a call to action to meet up at the show. Here are a couple of different tools to consider that will help you gain visibility into your recipients' interest in meeting up (such as showing you how long they look at your meeting request form!)

Marketing automation platforms can—if done right—do enough work for you that it's almost as good as an additional sales support staff on the team. In this category, the top dogs are Marketo and Pardot, and come with top dog pricing. Net Results is the bargain version we've worked with successfully. It automatically synchs with Salesforce and shows highly detailed contact activity on your website, creates beautiful, trackable landing pages, has automated alerts for predefined activities (such as clicking a case study), and plugins to make the outbound emails look like Outlook. Price depends on the size of your contact base.

For novelty, try BombBomb. BombBomb embeds videos into the platform so your recipient doesn't have to do the work of reading a bunch of marketing text.

6. Nothing beats earned content. One of the top advantages of Legalweek is the preponderance of media: all the top editors, journalists and bloggers from ALM and other outfits attend (or intend to do so) and are looking for great new stories to tell, either onsite or from afar.

Go to them early with an industry story that you can write. The law firm attendees at Legalweek or any other conference are looking for your technological thought leadership—preparing this content for them is one of the most assured ways to stand out from the crowd.

Do also write a press release and send it to media well-in-advance. You can get a list of registered media from Legalweek by request—and you can also send your press release to comp news wire services at Legal IT Insider and Legal IT Professionals. Don't waste your money on wire services—no one cares if the local website in Elmira, NY picked up your PR.

7. At every conference, use every free available tool the organizers create for you. This includes the social hours, internal social feeds, hashtags and specific competitions. At Legalweek, enter the product innovation competition and leverage the many free marketing benefits ALM provides finalists.

 

Patricia Ann Nagy is the founder and director of Proxy PR, a marketing and public relations firm specializing in integrated content, digital and social media marketing strategies for legal technology companies.  She can be reached at [email protected] or LinkedIn.