Ideas for Tradeshow Booth Attendance Tracking

[Anonymous]

I am looking for some advice/best practices on tracking visits to our booth at tradeshows.  

What I would like to do is have an easy way for our Sales Reps to indicate that a lead or contact has visited our booth at a specific tradeshow without populating an excel spreadsheet and uploading this into Marketo or Salesforce.com.

We attend 100+ tradeshows per year and our challenge is getting booth attendance info from the sales reps attending the shows, in a timely fashion, in order to do follow-up emails.

One idea I had was to add a field in SFDC called 'Visited Booth at' and then create a picklist for each show we are registered to exhibit at.  Then, if a lead is already in our database, they would only need to find the contact record in SFDC and select the show attended from the drop down list and then will could set up a smart campaign in Marketo for the follow-up email based on that field.

The one drawback of this would be updating the picklists to add new events and maintaining this over the years.

Any other ideas, comments, suggestions would be appreciated!

[Anonymous]

If you sync the Tradeshow Program in Marketo directy to a SFDC Campaign, you could have the reps change the status in the SFDC campaign to visited booth, which will immediately update the Marketo Program.

[Anonymous]

Lori, I saw a really cool vendor at the last Marketo conference that might be of interest to you:

http://launchpoint.marketo.com/validar-inc/902-universal-lead-capture

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

What I have done for some clients is to setup a "kiosk" page.

Create a LP with just the form you want. Call this form "Trade Show Kiosk Form" and only use it for internal updates to records. the form should include a "Show Status" field that corresponds to the Progressions as Jono suggests.

You should disable auto fill on this form and page.

Then tell the Reps to use this form.

Set a triggered campaign to listen for the form and set the correct statuses based on the Form detail. You could have that campaign (or another) then send an email to the lead.

[Anonymous]

We have done two things. The first is quite similar to what Josh described. But much more indepth. For our biggest german trade show of the year not only did our marketing manager in germany want to provide his sales reps with a way to track & measure, but also to automagically send out any information a prospect was interested in receiving. 

So we created a kiosk portal. As josh mentioned, form NOT to prefill. There were technically two forms on the page. One for contact information, the other for interests. Then from the iPad when a visitor arrived, they put in their information & sent them any literature they had requested.

The other way we do it is to get a list of registrants & then import them into Marketo. Then using the Event App for iPad we check in those who attend. Then you merely have to sync the iPad. 

Charlie's launchpoint suggestion looks neat too.

[Anonymous]

Some really great suggestions!  I'm going to try setting up a Kiosk page like Josh and Adam suggested.  Validar also sounds great - I'll have a look at that too.

Thanks everyone for your input!

[Anonymous]

@Adam, last year Marketo started using a native app on an iPad in kiosk mode, using our lead capture app, see Launchpoint:

https://launchpoint.marketo.com/tapcrowd/1870-lead-capturing-on-tradeshows/

Benefit is this also works offline, and syncs data to Marketo once wifi is available again (during or after the show).